Our next book is Exiles by Ron Hansen

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on June 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about Death with Interruptions

- Did the government make the right decision in choosing to deal with the maphia?

- Why does Saramago make the formal choice not to capitalize names?

- Why does Saramago have death fall in love with a musician? Is there any significance to this?

- Why make death fall in the love at all? Saramago’s intention in the first half of the book is pretty obvious; i.e. to show what would happen if people stopped dying. Second half is more mysterious and far more poetic. Does anyone have any hunches as to what Saramago’s intention with the second half of the book was?

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Here's a link to his Nobel Lecture.

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on May 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.