I am enjoying our new book very much!!!!!!
Hope all is well with you both.
I am enjoying the cooler Autumn weather, it is great for curling up with a good book.
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by Sue, “This epic retelling of the Flood and Noah's Ark defies any easy description. It is at times humorous, dark, and tragic; fill...
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Anne Tyler has been called "the most impressive novelist of her generation". She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and four of...
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I think we are really getting the hang of this!!! My copy of Unless is due in at the library next week so I will have some summer reading t...
I've finished,
ReplyDeletehow is everyone else going??????
Hello Ladies
ReplyDeleteAs your weather gets cooler, Nancy, we are having a glorious spring here. Indeed we go to the Lake District tomorrow, and as I've finished reading, too, I'm posting early. I keep doing this, and apologise. However, I fear potential technological problems if I try to make a contribution in a strange place.
And as if to show I can't handle technology anywhere, I managed to post before I'd even got started! If you haven't finished the book, Katie, don't read any further.
ReplyDeleteI have to say I rather feel my responses to this book say more about me than they do about the book.
Initially, it was difficult to follow and I found the author’s refusal to name characters, other than as they related to the narrator, made reading hard work. I wasn’t sure the extra effort was worth it.
And then, as one persevered, there was this constant tension between what actually happened and what various characters thought had happened. I realize life is like that: the same situation is open to different perceptions and different truths. But given that at least one of the characters was regarded as not having a firm grasp of reality anyway, reality became more elusive than I like it to be in a novel. First grandmother is beaten to within an inch of her life, then she’s made to marry someone she doesn’t love, then we discover the family would have placed her in a good care home had she not married. So what was the family like? I needed to know: the different clues were not helpful to someone as literal minded as myself. (I did say my responses said a lot about me.)
I would rather have had the story of Signora Lia - named, thank goodness – in more detail. Now, is she named because we are to accept as fact what happened to her? And is that why I wanted more of that? Or is she named because she’s not a member of the narrator’s immediate family?
The ending, of course, totally upset me. So where did the narrator’s father’s musical talent come from? The narrator’s grandmother’s artistic talent showing itself through a different medium? Just a coincidence the Veteran played the piano? Or was that made up, too? And therefore the narrator’s father’s embryo did lack “the principal thing”. Or perhaps it didn’t, and grandmother and grandfather really were in love, because there are many different kinds of love? Though it has to be said that it seems likely there wasn’t much difference between sex with the Veteran and sex with grandfather. Just that grandmother’s attitude to the men was different?
Some lovely descriptions, for example of the spa and the Veteran, but even here I wondered whether the writer or the translator was responsible.
So, a learning experience for me – I need to let go a little. Not everything has to be grounded in reality, to be solidly defined and accessible. However, whilst that may be true, it’s not something I’m happy to live with.
Hello ladies,
DeleteThanks for the suggestion Katie.
Like you Sue I found the ending bothersome,it challenged all my feelings towards the story.
Was there really an affair with the Veteran at all?
Did Grandfather really love Grandmother and it was her lack of love for Grandfather that tainted her view of him?
Was that brothel menu for real???????
Was none of it real and the author fictionised all????
{I don't think that is a real word Ha ha}
Up until the end I enjoyed the book quite a lot, it was very much like watching a foreign film on the multicultural channel, you know, when you don't really get it but it is entertaining nevertheless.
The lack of names didn't really bother me as it felt very much like reading a diary so I was OK with that.
So while I believe the story was a little strange, and beyond my experience culturally,I also found similarities. Life in a small town with all its peculiarities, gossiping and saving face {even if it means marrying your daughter off to someone she does not love} seems to bridge the barriers of culture as well as time.The closest town to my home has a population of 3000!!! I know of what I speak!!
Now I have an apology and a question for you both.
I have already purchased my copy of "The Slap" one of my picks coming up in a couple of months. It is HUGE,570 pages!!!!! I did not realise this. Sooooo, what would you like to do?
We could take 2 months to read it with an update in between or
We could just go for it
or
We could forget about it and I will choose another smaller book.
Please share your thoughts and I will take appropriate action, so sorry .
Hello again
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the comments on small towns, Nancy, thank you - and I should have had the wit to relate the whole thing to Brunei, where we lived for six years. The similarities in attitudes are remarkable - and indicate the novel is a lot more universal in its outlook than I gave it credit for. Indeed, here in the Lake District village where we are on holiday I was told a a really sad story about a lady with dementia not getting the support she needs from the community because people are afraid. "Very insular," said the person telling us the story of the people in the community.
With regard to "The Slap", we retired people are happy to read it in a month, but will be guided entirely by those who have other commitments.
We are having a heatwave here in the U.K. We ate dinner in the garden at 7.00 pm this evening. Sadly, i packed only two Tee-shirts. Forecasters say I will be glad of all my woollens by Thursday, but in the meantime it's very hot. Typical Brit - small-minded obsession with the weather!
Good to talk to you, ladies.
I’m so sorry ladies for the delay in my response.Work has been insane the past few weeks.I’m actually writing this while eating dinner at 10:30 at night. Haha. Anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading this book, coworkers seeing me reading would ask “how is it?”To which I would reply, “Peculiar.”I actually read the book twice in fear that I had missed something because I found the story slightly confusing with the change of ending.The author kept changing the story as it progressed.For example, the author originally refers to Signora Lia as a widow and then later you find she was never married.I reread it to confirm various discrepancies.
There are several quotes in the novel that I really love.One of which is on page 80: “...Since her whole life she had been told that she was like someone from the land of the moon, it seemed to her that she
had finally met someone from her own land, and that was the principle thing in life...” I love how the author incorporates the title of the novel into the story.Society does not understand Grandmother.So they label her as so different as to be from another planet.And despite the truth we learn in the end,Grandmother views the Veteran as a kindred spirit.The quote makes me think of how awkward many of us feel in our lives until someone comes along who seems to be on the same page as us.Someone who understands all our crazy moments, someone who “gets you”, it’s something that many of us search for.On page 55 the veteran tells grandmother that, “she wasn’t mad, she was a creature made at a moment when God simply had no wish for the usual mass-produced women and, being in a poetic vein had created her. “Here she finally finds someone who doesn’t view her as crazy person to pity.She finally gains that element that she has labeled “the principle thing”.
I think Grandfather loved Grandmother and she him.I think Grandfather was limited by how society decided a husband should behave toward a wife.Certainly there wasn’t any love at first.How can one just love another person they know nothing about at the first meeting? And to be wedded under such circumstances? No, I think love came later.And while Grandmother may never have been able to admit it, I think her love for him grew later too.It may not have been true love on either of their parts, but it’s a love that comes from small acts of kindness over years of marriage.Grandfather nurses Grandmother back to health when she gets sick from malaria.Grandmother takes care of Grandfather’s physical needs when she learns how much he enjoys his pipe. Sue, I agree, there are different kinds of love.I think this proof of that.By the way Nancy, all I can say for the brothel menu is EW!
I love what you said Sue.“But given that at least one of the characters was regarded as not having a firm grasp on reality anyway, reality becomes more elusive…”It truly makes you wonder how much of the story, we’re told, happened.Is it safe to say that everything that happened in the lives of the narrator’s parents, and her maternal grandmother was truth?Or do we question their lives as well since the narrator doesn’t mind telling us half-truths and fictions produced by her grandmother?
There is one other portion of the novel that I really enjoyed.(Then I will stop talking your ears off haha)It’s the bulk of the first paragraph of chapter 18.Mamma tells our narrator that “In every family there’s someone who pays tribute, so that the balance between order and disorder is maintained and the world doesn’t come to a halt.” The mother believed that all the good in their lives was because Grandmother took all the bad onto herself first.I love this theory. I would just hate to be the family member who has shoulder this type of burden.
Nancy, I think we can keep the schedule and just see how it goes. Half way through the month we can all do a check in to see how far along we are to see if we need to split the book into two months.Honestly if a book catches my attention it doesn’t matter the length.I’ve read the Harry Potter books in two days. On the other hand a short book that bores me can take forever; The Brothers Karamazov took me 3 years. But whatever you ladies would like to do is fine with me.
ReplyDeleteGood to hear from you Katie, sorry work is consuming so much of your time. Also good to know you're a Potter fan!!
ReplyDeleteWhile reading your comment on Grandmother and the Veteran both being "From The Land Of The Moon" I started thinking about the author's parents and thought how lucky for them they also seemed to be on the same page.
Then....I began to focus more on the father a his similarities to Grandmother, with his musical and her artistic talents,with their creative souls and their selfish obsessions with their own wants.
I began to wonder how life would have been for Grandmother if she had in reality found and married her true love, if her artistic talent had been nurtured by her parents as she nurtured her son's. Her sacrifice of taking a lowly job to buy his piano, by indulging his need for silence while he practised and for encouraging him as I imagine most parents do of a particularly gifted child.
I wonder if Grandmother were born a male [we are talking
postwar Italy hear] if her families support would have differed and her idiosyncrasies tolerated. I think so.
Do you feel by stifling her creative soul she was forced to invent her world of stories and fantasies and in fact induced episodes of self-harm?
One can only imagine the chaos that would have evolved and considering Father's selfish devotion to his music, what a tortured soul he may have become if instead of a wife and mother who always understood and supported him he was only to have his music as a hobby and forced to conform as his mother was.
Any thoughts?
Nancy that is a very interesting theory. I do think that all of Grandmother’s eccentricities would have been over looked much more easily had she been a boy. It seems that in the past, eccentric behaviors were more acceptable in men than in women. I can only guess that the reasoning was that a man does not need to be “normal” to produce heirs. But how could an odd woman raise children or do all the other expected wifely duties? Maybe as a male, Grandmother would have had more options in her marriage and not the first willing individual to come along. The love letters she wrote to her suitors would probably not have met the same back-lash from her mother.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that the episodes of self harm came from her family’s inability to nurture her. I think that came solely from whatever ailment our society would diagnose her as having today. I can, however, agree that her fantasies and delusions could have come out of her unmet needs. Surprisingly our narrator does not experience similar needs for fantasy after hearing of her seemingly neglectful parents. Father particularly does not seem to have any interest in the narrator. And Mother seems too obsessed with Father to care either. It’s kind of sad that she only had a “crazy” grandmother to care for her.
Yes indeed - had Grandmother been a man she would have been regarded as a venerable artist and great lover and thus been thoroughly indulged. As it is, Freud would have had a wonderful time with her. Self harm is often associated with lack of self esteem and it's difficult to see from where Grandmother could have derived any self esteem until she met the Veteran. Then she seems to have channelled everything into her son. Is it too much of a stretch to think of her son as a masculine version of herself? Supported and tolerated all his life? And therefore achieving fame and fulfilment?
ReplyDeleteI'm probably overstating the case: nevertheless, a case could be made. The suffragette lady in "Falling Angels" would make it much better than me (I've already forgotten her name - the one who died.)
Hope work is less hectic, Katie. Thank you for recommending the novel - I look forward to the next one. And thanks to both of you for broadening the interpretations of this book.