Wow.!.!.! This is the first time in a number of years
that I would agree with whatever committee gave this book a National Book Award
prize [actually the author was only awarded a “finalist” designation; God only
knows what book beat him out in the finals.
In my opinion,
this is the best book club read I’ve ever encountered {albeit not a Sonoma
County Library selection}. Being second
tier is something I got used to while living in Europe. The concept is anathema to most Americans,
but we have AAA baseball. Those
sub-strata of teams relegated to second-tier are like our Library book groups:
not as much funding, and not the all-star players. And yet, the Library Foundation has its conservative
rules – no new books, established acclaim, literary east-coast prizes – within which
this book might eventually fit, as a contender, albeit in three years. The problem we at Guerneville Library have
experienced is that in 2017, this book may not have the same topicality as now.
So, this is the style of writing
that violates all the rules, and thus is brilliant because of that
violation. I’m now finished my first
read of this book – there weren’t any chapters to help set a pace, but it’s one
of those reads that’s hard to put down, so I used toilet paper as marker
stop-points. The book uses a declarative
first person protagonist (which I just complained about in another recent book
commentary), and yet the author has captured me, my thoughts, and my actions in
detail, so how can I complain. I love this
style – because the protagonist is me.
She’s a woman, with full feminine attributes and capabilities – and a
woman I could love – and yet she easily fits within the minds of men, in all
their disgusting habits: farting, swearing, disrespecting women, killing other
people with guns, and in all sorts of ways, being stupid.
To our reading group, the heroine is “of an age”, our age. Done with a gazillion and one things, that have
bothered us between birth and 65. What
she’s left with, as we might agree, is a love of the written word, specifically
literature. Our protagonist, probably
unlike us, has devoted her life to translating “the great works of literature”,
in her opinion, into Arabic. Was this book
like “The Housekeeper and the Professor” or other stories,
which place a heroine in harm’s way and then tie up the loose ends. Quite often, these books develop their
stories in the Middle or Far East.
This month will
be my first, in a long while, at a non-library-based book club. In the past, my experience with most reading
and writing groups has been that they are predominately feminine. This new “Meet-Up” group limits itself,
wisely, to sixteen people per event, but allocates 2 hours instead of only one. I hope this means that each participant will
have 4-5 minutes to put forward their ideas on the book. I can only hope that, over time, there will
be a gender balance in these Meet-Up groups.
My library book
this month was a memoir that cited 300 book titles. I hated that book and loved this one, and had
to ask myself, why?. Was I being
inconsistent? The difference I found was
that whereas the Beiruti author’s protagonist was a hermit-style, solitary
reader and writer, the Will Schwalbe memoir was a gregarious
journalist/publisher for whom books were his career bread and butter. He didn’t really like them, reading or
writing. Books were Aaliya’s Life. They were her only and true friends. I compiled a list of Aaliya’s 37 best
friends, which is documented on the next four pages.
I normally
resist the temptation to quote passages from the current book, but with a
supposed few extra minutes I will cite page 54 after a self-proclaimed bucolic
passage
“I sway a
little, lean on the wine-red and urine yellow abomination of a breakfast table
that my husband brought with him when we were married and left when he
left. I shake the loose folds of my robe
de chamber. Dust motes hang thick in the
air. The kitchen has two windows on
adjacent walls. A spider with shockingly
long front legs busies herself with prey caught in her web. All that remains is a wisp of gossamer with
striated veins.. The spider chose the
wrong window; her home will be washed away with the first rains.”
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