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.
- 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.
Saramago's philosophical page-turner hinges on death taking a holiday. And, Saramago being Saramago, he turns what could be the stuff of late-night stoner debate into a lucid, playful and politically edgy novel of ideas. For reasons initially unclear, people stop dying. There's much debate and discussion on the link between death, resurrection and the church, and while the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill into bordering countries leads to government collusion with the criminal self-styled maphia, death falls in love with a terminally ill cellist. Saramago adds two satisfying cliffhangers—how far can he go with the concept, and will death succumb to human love? The package is profound, resonant and—bonus—entertaining.
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.
- On page 18, Fussell states, “Americans find Knowing Where You Stand harder than do most Europeans.” He thinks because America is (at least on paper) a classless society we are more conscious of which class we belong to, and often have anxiety about fitting into the class of our choice. Do you agreed with his analysis?
- Fussell also asserts that class is not about money, but far more about taste, knowledge, and perceptiveness (presumably about class signals).What are some of the implications of this?
- One of the meatier sections of the book concerns the educational system. The author quotes Paul Blumberg (p. 134) “ ‘The educational system has been effectively appropriated by the upper strata and transformed into an instrument which tends to reproduce the class structure and transit inequality.’ ” True or not true?
- Fussell defines ‘prole drift’ (p. 172) as “the tendency in advanced industrialized societies for everything inexorably to become proletarianized. Prole drift seems an inevitable attendant of mass production, mass selling, mass communication, and mass education, and some of its symptoms are best-seller lists, films that must appeal to virtually everyone (except the intelligent, sensitive, and subtle), shopping malls, and the lemming flight to the intellectual and cultural emptiness of the Sun Belt.” Is culture really going in that direction? Isn’t Fussell’s complaint that of every generation about the generation that comes after it? AND any thoughts about his characterization of the Sun Belt?
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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on April 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.
In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System Paul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark. Class is guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift.
We'll be meeting to discuss this book on April 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.
- The seminal event in Nabokov's adult life was the Russian Revolution. How would you describe the role of the Revolution in his life, and the structure of Speak, Memory?
- In chapter six (pg. 94-95 of the Everyman edition), he draws a parallel between nature and art:
When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural selection’ in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle of life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic sublety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
Do you agree that art a game of enchantment and deception? What about nature?
- Though dedicated to his wife Vera, Speak, Memory seems to an appreciation and exoneration of his father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. How does he represent his father? What about his mother and his brother Sergey?
- In Chapter 13 (pg. 205 in Everyman edition) , Nabokov sees an indirectly proportional relationship between someone's politics and their aesthetic taste:
All cultured and discriminating Russians knew that this astute politician had about as much taste and interest in aesthetic matters as an ordinary Russian bourgeois of the Flaubertian épicier sort,… but Nesbit and his highbrow friends saw in him a kind of sensitive, poetic-minded patron and promoter of the newest trends in art and would smile a superior smile when I tried to explain that the connexion between advance politics and advanced art was purely a verbal one (gleefully exploited by Soviet propaganda), and that the more radical a Russian was in politics, the more conservative he was on the artistic side.
Is this true or not true? The more radical someone's politics the more conservative their taste in art?
- What does anyone know about the writer Sirinwhich Nabokov notes as one of his favorite Russian émigré authors.
I found this old footage of Nabokov and Lionel Trilling on a 1950s TV show. Of course, they are discussing Lolita, but Nabokov's vicious wit is on display. Can you imagine this being on television today:
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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on March 11th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.
We're the 2nd Wednesday Book Club and we've been meeting for more than a decade. Join us for thought provoking discussions of contemporary and classic titles. We read fiction and nonfiction. Take part in the discussion or listen while you lunch. I didn't mention lunch? Feel free to bring a lunch!
We meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month at noon in Conference Room 3 of the Main Library downtown
For more info contact Bryan Jones at 862-5852 or bryan.n.jones@nashville.gov.
