PHILIPPE CLAUDEL

BY A SLOW RIVER

The first question I asked my book group was:  which has a greater affect on the characters in this book:  murder or war?

Considering it is December, 1917, and the rumblings of war can be heard everyday in the small unnamed French village that is the setting for this novel, the answer would seem obvious.  This town has suffered through a unique conundrum.  While their men were spared the horrors of the trenches because of their value in the factories that are producing the machinery of war, the town itself is overrun on a daily basis with wounded soldiers.  Now, not unlike the two armed camps that face each other across the barbed wire, the wounded heckle the healthy and the healthy abhor the wounded. 

What has developed is a dichotomy of interests.  This is shown in no greater fashion than in the nature of the local prosecutor, Pierre-Ange Destinat, who argues for the death of criminals in the courtroom and goes home each night to mourn the wife he has lost to illness.  

So when the body of a 10-year-old girl is found strangled on along the river that dissects the town, how should the local constabulary react when a slightly unreliable witness points her finger at the esteemed prosecutor?  If it were up to the unnamed narrator of this novel, the sad policeman who tries valiantly to pursue justice a few miles from the worst injustice of all, he would enter the manor house of the prosecutor and question the man.  For him, it becomes The Case.

But these are strange times.  The local judge, who rules the village like a fiefdom, in allegiance with a military presence, decides to do nothing with this evidence.  Instead, with hawk-like precision, the judge and colonel descend on the least likely suspect with a torturer’s glee.  

Not to be overlooked in the morass of damaged morality is the jump back in time the narrator takes to tell us of the fate of the local school mistress who teach during the war.  But of even great significance is the narrator’s own personal history that he teases us with throughout the book and then delivers like the last shell to land on Armistice Day at the end of this tale. 

In France this novel was published as Les Âmes Grises.  When published in England, it was re-titled The Grey Souls while Americans got By a Slow River.  I have no idea how much this book owes to its English translator, Hoyt Rogers, but as it stand here it is beautifully written.  Claudell introduces multiple characters, major and minor, each with a dense history display for the reader to the point where it feels like you have lived in this village for years.  So, for language, plot, characters, and sense of place this novel is a rich read that should appeal to all book discussion groups.

In 2005 Claudell won the Prix Renaudot award and Sweden’s Martin Beck Award for Les Âmes Grises.  The novel was adapted for film by Epithete Films in 2005 but there does not appear to be an American release available for viewing.  The author’s website is available in French at http://www.philippeclaudel.com. 

For the spring conference of the Wisconsin Association of Public Librarians, I led a book discussion on Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  There is nothing easier than doing a book discussion for librarians who lead book discussions.  When I train, I always talk about the perfect book discussion or what I refer to as the tennis match.  In the perfect discussion, the leader becomes the tennis judge, rotating his or her head back and forth as people discuss the book without much guidance.  This book proved to be one of those titles. 

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965.  His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul.  When the Afghan Foreign Ministry assigned Hosseini’s father to Iran in 1970, the family accompanied him, and they lived in Tehran until 1973.  That year, Afghan king Zahir Shah was overthrown in a bloodless coup, leaving the government unstable and the country vulnerable.  In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris.  They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army.  The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States.  In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose, California.  Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988.  The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993.  He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.  Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001.  In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has since become an international bestseller, published in 38 countries.  Hosseini’s fiction is inspired by his memories of growing up in pre-Soviet-controlled Afghanistan and Iran, and the people who influenced him as a child.  The Kite Runner introduces readers to life in the pre-Soviet Afghanistan of the author’s childhood and honors his memories of Hazara servant Hossein Khan, who worked in the Hosseini household during their years in Tehran and taught the young Hosseini to read and write.

A trip to Kabul in 2003 provided Hosseini with the inspiration for his second novel. As he explained to in Publishers Weekly, he witnessed Afghan women “‘walking down the street, wearing burqa, with five or six children, begging.’” Talking to these women, Hosseini heard stories that both shocked and saddened him.

From his own memories of Afghanistan and the stories he heard, Hosseini fashioned the character of Mairam.  Mariam is the illegitimate product of a union between a successful theater owner and his servant.  Forced away from the city and his legitimate family, Mariam and her disgruntled mother live in a small impoverished village which receives an occasional visit from the father as a token of his responsibility.  To bury his shame, the father negotiates an arranged marriage for Mariam, at age fifteen, to an older, unattractive shoemaker named Rasheed.  Their relationship is never steady, as Rasheed longs to replace the son he lost and Mariam dreams of a love that is romantic as well as true. 

Because the book covers a number of years, we eventually are allowed to see Rasheed replace Mariam with a fourteen year old wife named Laila by bringing her into their home as a second wife.  Laila’s life, though short, has been filled with Soviet soldiers, a love torn from her side, and a rocket attack that leaves her helpless, thus bringing her to Rasheed.  By now Rasheed is a man to be feared by the women and the actions of their keeper will force each of the women to make a choice that proves to be one of the strong themes of the book. 

These two women characters are keys to understanding and enjoying the book.  There inability to counteract the failure of their country to protect them from harm and their need to deal with an oppressive patriarchal society will provide plenty of opportunities to develop questions for the book discussion. 

All of this is set against a curtain of constant conflict as Afghanistan struggles to find a national identity while dealing with the Taliban, the Soviets and eventually the Americans.  Here are more areas where questions can be found.

This is an unrelentingly tragic story.  It should remind everyone who reads a newspaper or watches the nightly news that behind the shifting maps and the body counts, individuals who love, raise families, go to work, sing and dance—they suffer with each bomb and every bullet. 

It should be easy to develop a discussion, but if help is needed, there are discussion questions to be found at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/thousand_splendid_suns.html.  You might also like to visit the author’s website at http://www.khaledhosseini.com/index.html.

The Long Embrace:  Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman (Pantheon, 978-0-375-42351-2)

For book groups looking to discuss a work of non-fiction, this title might work.  The reason why I say might is that I am not sure what weight Raymond Chandler carries in the world anymore.

When I was a young man attending college, I was primarily a science fiction reader.  I spent most of my undergraduate years taking political science courses and relaxing with survey courses in science fiction, fantasy and utopian fiction.  To be honest, I saw them as fun blow-off courses while the English majors were grieving over each word in each book. 

When I ran out of the fun stuff, I took a survey course with some generic name like Mystery and Detective Fiction.  The first book we read was The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.  That novel still resonates with me today and I have re-read it many times including leading a book discussion or two.  I tell anyone who will listen that Raymond Chandler is my favorite dead author. 

My favorite living crime writer is Michael Connelly.  Oddly, Connelly is not shy about mentioning his love of Chandler and acknowledging the debt of gratitude he owes to Chandler for his interest in crime fiction and the use of the Los Angeles area as a base for his writing.

Now that I have spent the last thirty plus years obsessed by crime and mystery fiction, it seems logical to me that there would be an interest in a master craftsman like Raymond Chandler.  Obviously, so did Judith Freeman.  Freeman has written four novels prior to taking on Raymond Chandler.  Her interest in this writer was piqued when she began to read his letters, having polished off his novels in short order.  But what really grabbed her interest was the intriguing relationship that Raymond Chandler had with “Cissy.” 

Pearl Eugenia Hurlburt was born in Perry, Ohio, in 1870.  When she moved to New York City as a young woman, she altered her name to Cecilia, which was shortened to Cissy.  After a brief marriage to a salesman named Leon Brown Porcher, she married a classical pianist named Julian Pascal (alias:  Goodridge Bowen). 

Throughout his entire life, Chandler would claim he saved Cissy from an unhappy marriage.  While some biographers including Freeman cast doubt on that statement, no one has yet proven that Chandler, at the time he married Cissy, had absolutely any idea his wife was eighteen years older than he was.  Even at her passing, Chandler fills out her death certificate with the age of sixty-eight, when Cissy was really eighty-four.

Freeman works with that intriguing nugget and expands it into an analysis of their relationship.  There were a number of things that challenged what most observers said was a happy relationship.  They moved every six months and only bought there first permanent home late in their marriage.  Raymond Chandler was an alcoholic who needed a buzz in order to feel special.  Alcohol also made him randy and he turned occasionally in his life to other women to fulfill his self-image as a gentleman, yet ladies’ man. 

Of course, while this rather prim accountant like person with his older wife was living a nomadic and friendless life, he was writing some of the best hard-boiled fiction ever.  However, his success in America did not bring him the attention he wanted while he could not connect to the European audience who adored him.

Freeman also injects herself into the narrative.  Her attempt to view every home that Chandler shares with Cissy takes her on a crisscross journey across greater Los Angeles, into neighborhoods that resonate for her on a personal level, not just because of Chandler.  But the sense of excitement the reader shares with her when Freeman gains entrance into some of the homes is easily understood to any fan.  

If that does not intrigue a book discussion group, or the group is still dealing with Raymond Chandler as an unknown quantity, perhaps this book could be combined with a discussion of The Big Sleep and/or a viewing of the great Howard Hawks film of the same name.

Here are some suggested questions for a discussion of The Long Embrace:

How would you describe the relationship between Cissy and Chandler?

Did, or did not, Raymond Chandler understand the age difference between Cissy and himself?  Why does he put a false date on her death certificate?

Chandler needed alcohol to be created at periods of his life (The Blue Dahlia / Playback), yet he wrote one of his best novels (The Long Goodbye) sober, while Cissy was dying.  What defined his need for alcohol?

Why would Chandler burn all of Cissy’s letters after her death?

Chandler tried to commit suicide twice in his life?  What do these attempts tell you about the man?

Now that you know about the man, what does it explain about the literature?  How could this man have created Philip Marlowe?  What characteristics of Marlowe does Chandler share, and which does he not?

BRIGHT OF THE SKY by Kay Kenyon 

(Pyr, 2007, 9781591025412)

One of the best things about our monthly staff readers’ advisory training is that we force ourselves to read outside our personal comfort zones.  The second coolest thing is that we spend the major portion of that training having a staff book discussion.  As a young man, I was a science fiction reader and my genre was defined by the ABCs:  Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke.  Once in college, I shifted to crime and mystery fiction and have rarely dipped back into science fiction.  After reading this book, I am wondering why.

This month our staff selection was Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, the first book in her new The Entire and the Rose series.  The series is projected to be a four book series. 

Kay Kenyon (http://www.kaykenyon.com) was born in
Minnesota.  She began her writing career as a television copywriter and also did some acting in television commercials.  Her first book, The Seeds of Time, was published in 1997.  Since, she has published Braided World and Maximum Ice before writing this new series.  She and her attorney husband, Tom Overcast, have three sons.  They live in
Wenatchee, Washington. 

According to Diana Tixier Herald in Strictly Science Fiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, “science fiction can be ‘hard’—probing the ramifications of scientific theories and practical applications of quantum physics, bioengineering, or mathematics.”  In Genreflecting: a Guide to Popular Reading Interests, 6^th ed., Herald says “parallel earths and parallel universes are worlds that exist simultaneously with our Earth, conceived, perhaps, along a spatial fourth dimension.”  She also says, alien “’first contact’ is a situation ripe with possibilities for drama.”  I would say this book is a hard science, alien first contact, parallel world work of science fiction. 

In Bright of the Sky, two worlds exist side by side.  The Rose is our Earth where, when the book opens, we meet a very disgruntled and hermitic loner named Titus Quinn.  Quinn was the pilot of the Vesta, an interstellar transport ship lost in a Kardashev tunnel when the ship exploded.  Titus, his wife Johanna and their daughter Sydney managed to get into an escape pod.  When they awake, they found themselves in another world:  The Entire.

The Entire exists side by side to our world.  Scientists in The Entire can look through the nascence and see our world.  However, they live by three strict laws from their belief in The Radiant Way.  The three vows are withhold the knowledge of The Entire from the non-Entire;  impose the peace of The Entire;  and extend the reach of The Entire. 

All we know at the beginning of book one is that things did not go well for Titus in The Entire but he has managed to return to our universe, physically changed, his memories wiped and without his family.  Left to himself, he would prefer to sit and brood, trying to remember what happened over there.

But Earth cannot leave Titus alone.  By accident, Titus’ employer, the Minerva Company, has discovered a way to replicate Titus’ journey.  The logical person to send back to the alternate world is Titus.

When he goes, we discover (he re-discovers) the wonders that Kenyon has created on the other side of the rift.  A world based on ancient Chinese culture, scary preying mantis overlords, sentient creations to serve the people, an endless war, flying living dirigibles, a bright sky of fire and other wondrous things.

However, this is not all fun and games.  As Titus tries to complete his mission for the company (establish a way to send our ships through their airspace), his memories are slowly coming back.  This helps him try to complete his personal mission:  find his wife and daughter that he left behind. 

As I read this novel, I could not help but think that Titus is not a science fiction hero.  He is the archetypal fictional hero, one who could star in a noir crime novel or a hard-boiled western.  He is a loner, driven to that status when he is cast out from normal society.  He has extraordinary skills that make him valuable.  However, he is also damaged goods which make him both a danger to his enemies and his controllers.  The question becomes:  is he an anti-hero?

Kenyon has done a masterful job of world building.  Her setting is worth reading about.  Her characters are believable.  Her plot is intriguing.  The tone is somber and mean, and there is little that happens in this first book that is redemptive.  Conflict is constant and some of the violence is hard to look at. 

Did I understand all the science?  No.  Was that important to me?  No.  This novel is so accomplished that a reader little interested in the mechanics of the world can still enjoy the universe Kenyon has created. 

Would I read the next book in the series?  You bet!  The next book, A World Too Near (Pyr, 978-1591026426) will be published on March 25, 2008.  The future of the series is projected to be City Without End (February 2009) and Heart of Fire (December 2009).

Here are my suggested questions for a book discussion on Bright of the Sky:

How soon did you know you were reading a “hard” science fiction book?

Kenyon uses the techniques of a suspense novel to slowly reveal the back story of Titus’ first trip to The Entire.  How did that technique improve the story for you?

What qualities does Quinn share with other fictional heroes?  Can you name those he resembles?

The Rose has a BSL (Basic Standard of Living).  What does that accomplish on Earth?  How does it compare to the way the Chalin live in The Entire?  Which system is better?

Why do you think the Tarig molded The Entire around the ancient Chinese culture from Earth?  How did you keep track of all the new wonders of The Entire?

What is the value of a strong bureaucracy for governing?  What are the weaknesses?  What purpose do the Three Vows serve?

Why does this bureaucracy fight an endless war against the Paion? 

Was Anzi’s decision to save Quinn and his family the wrong choice?  Is she to blame for all that has happened in The Rose and The Entire?

How did Quinn betray his family on the first trip to The Entire?  Does he betray his family again on the second trip?

With all the chances that Quinn takes, is he fearless, reckless, driven or dumb?  How do you feel about the death of the Small Girl?

What do you think will happen in book two, three or four?

Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966)

The serendipity of discovering a book never ceases to amaze me.  All my life I have been networked to fans of crime fiction, but recently a man walked into my library who knew I had written Read ‘Em Their Writes.  He handed me this title and told me he thought it was one of the best crime novels he had ever read.

I have to agree.  Even more remarkable, it is Don Carpenter’s first novel. 

Hard Rain Falling is told in five parts.  The first exposition, a very short prologue, details the birth of Jack Levitt in Eastern Oregon.  Jack is born to people with limited parenting skills, ending up an orphan.  In the second part, Jack has moved to Portland and it is 1949.  He is struggling to exist, spending time with small hustles and living out of a pool hall.  When an African-American pool hustler named Billy Lancing comes to Portland, Billy’s story takes over the narrative.  By part three, Jack is in San Francisco, where through a series of unfortunate incidents, he ends up in San Quentin, only to find Billy as his cellmate.  While the two develop their relationship in prison, the novel takes time to show Billy’s path to his incarceration.  Part four is devoted to Jack’s life outside of San Quentin, when he decides to raise a family.  Part five is the coda on the story. 

To say more about the plot is pointless as what carries this book is a relentless debate on the merits of an unimaginable number of human scenarios.  Mostly told through reminiscences, the book allows characters to tell their stories while revealing the conditions that created the conflicts that plague them and the belief systems that led the character to make the choices that they made.  These remarkable revelations reveal the true nature of love, the relationship between men and women, the need for homosexuality, the purpose of incarceration, the yearning for parents and the desire to be one, the causes behind crime and the hopelessness of growing up disenfranchised in America.

Don Carpenter was born in 1931 in Berkeley, California.  His family moved to Portland where he graduated from high school.  After service in the Air Force during the Korean War, he earned a B.S. from Portland State College.  After earning a M.A. from San Francisco State College, he taught English.  For awhile, he was happily married and raised two daughters.  After the publication of his first novel, he moved to Mill Valley, California, and became a full time writer.  But divorce separated him from his family.  He also spent years contributing to various projects in Hollywood with his greatest success being the cult film Payday (1973) starring Rip Torn.  In addition to Hard Rain Falling, he wrote, Blade of Light (1967), The Murder of the Frogs and Other Stories (1969), Getting Off (1971), The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan (1975), A Couple of Comedians (1979), Turnaround (1981), The Class of ‘49 (1985), The Dispossessed (1986), and From A Distant Place (1988). 

Ill, but still writing, he committed suicide by gunshot in 1995.  More can be learned about this remarkable writer at http://www.doncarpenterpage.com.

The words tour de force comes to mind.  It certainly will fit any critic’s definition of noir. 

A book discussion leader would have no problem developing a long list of questions to prompt discussion on this novel.  I guarantee it will promote discussion with little effort on the leader’s part. 

Here is The Big Disappointment: 

Currently, none of Don Carpenter’s novels are in print.  A search of WorldCat reveals only 231 copies available and the American Book Exchange lists only 28 used copies for sale.  Sadly, just like the character of Jack Levitt, this novel has no future, unless someone gets this work back in print. 

What titles would you like to lead a discussion on—only to discover you cannot get enough copies for your group?

 Just a month ago a quiet, shy young woman employee I encounter every Thursday morning at the University Book Store in Seattle was suddenly animated and talkative, with a lot to say. In fact, Jodie Vinson had been waiting to ambush me. The reason: she knew I had read Remembrance of Things Past twice, that I was a devout Proust fanatic, and she had just plunged into Swann’s Way and was in a state of ecstasy.

She needed to talk about it.

So do we all, especially when we’re reading Proust. His multi-volume masterpiece is a novel that changes the very way we think about our lives, not to mention the way we think about fiction. You may not recognize it by name anymore because it’s recently undergone a name change. Its new title is In Search of Lost Time. But more often than not, it’s just called “reading Proust.”

This life-changing, mind-expanding roman-fleuve (“river-novel”) by turn-of-the-century French author Marcel Proust is much, much more than plot and characters, though it definitely has those in spades. It’s a whole different way of perceiving life. No one who finishes reading it ever looks the same at time, memory or other people. Is she faithful? Is she cheating? In Proust, as in life, you never know anything for sure.

Proust believes that life is a constant wading through errors of perception, and so is his novel. Again and again in this 3000-page river of a novel the reader sees incorrectly, interprets the action erroneously, comes to the wrong conclusion, because as readers we’re trapped inside just one point of view – Marcel’s. Out of the people in his own time and social circle Proust manufactured a mythology of larger-than-life characters who are endlessly intriguing because they’re unresolved puzzles, never what they seem, and their social interactions are a labyrinth of misunderstandings.

It’s not always easy going.

So it doesn’t hurt to have a Proust-loving pal nearby to encourage you when you hit a long, difficult passage, to tell you about the real pieces of music that inspired Vinteiul’s sonata, to show you photos of the real Duchess of Guermantes, to tell you that the character of Albertine was based on Proust’s male chauffeur, to introduce you to Stephane Heuet’s brilliant comic book adaptations, or encourage you to watch Raoul Ruiz’s masterpiece film, Time Regained.

Jodie is currently in a Ulysses club, reading that other hefty tome and discussing it bi-weekly over ales with eight others under the guidance of fellow University Book Store employee, Jacob Burd. And because of Jodie’s daily epiphanies and enthusiasm, and since Jacob loves Proust as much as Joyce, the staff of University Book Store have decided to take the challenge as a group. Starting with a public kick-off Proust Party on January 25, Jodie and Jacob in General Books will be helming folks from all over the store and city on a literary adventure that will turn out – for the hearty few who actually have the muscle to finish the journey – to be the most mind-bending intellectual reading experience of their lives.

If you live in the Seattle area, you should take the plunge. You only live once. Make a commitment to a masterpiece, with a support group behind you.