Bigger Thomas - a criminal at heart or a victim of environment? This is one of the questions we're forced to ponder while reading Richard Wright's groundbreaking Native Son, but even more, Bigger Thomas's story shines a harsh light on the social, economic and racial disparities present in the 1930s in Chicago, making modern readers question how far we've truly come. Excited to be able to help his impoverished family earn some money, 20-year-old Bigger begins a job as a chauffeur for the upper-class, white, Dalton family, a family that has made its riches dealing real estate in poor black neighborhoods. Despite boastful plans with his friends to rob a white-owned store, Bigger finds himself shy, afraid and, ultimately, angry in the presence the kind and gracious Dalton family. When their daughter Mary grills Bigger on his allegiance to unions and calls her father a capitalist, his nervousness increases and he realizes how much his own silence will help him.
It is Mary's outspokenness that will be Bigger's undoing. After driving Mary and her boyfriend Jan through the city, joining them and their friends at dinner despite his unease and partaking in a bottle of rum, Bigger finds himself in Mary's bedroom, both scared and lustful. Though Mrs. Dalton is blind, Bigger panics when she enters her daughter's room to check on her and struggles to keep Mary quiet by holding a pillow over her face. Confronted with Mary's lifeless body, Bigger must devise a plan to preserve the appearance of his innocence - a plan that will, unfortunately, go horribly awry when the public and the press decide his guilt even before he is caught and tried. Furthermore, the search for Bigger as he tries to escape his crime gives the white authorities an excuse to plunder and terrorize the South Side black neighborhoods. It is calamity that is clearly reflective of the social unrest of 1930s Chicago.
Native Son was an immediate best-seller when it was published in 1940 and made Richard Wright the wealthiest black writer of his time. Wright was also the first black American writer to have a publication chosen for the Book-of-the-Month club. It was during Wright's stay in Chicago that he joined the Communist Party and after he moved to New York he published reviews and political essays Communist publications. He remained a member through the 40s before leaving over ideological issues. Wright's Communist affiliations are apparent throughout the third book of Native Son, where much of the dialogue is spent on the Communist oratories of Bigger's lawyer who also argues that while Bigger is responsible for his crime, he is also a product of his fearful, desperate environment. In an essay on the creation of his most well-known protagonist, Wright explained that Bigger was a combination of men he had known during his childhood in Mississippi, men confronted by racism and oppression, resulting in antisocial and violent behavior. While in Chicago, Wright saw that this was not strictly a black phenomenon and came to believe that the structure of American society was at the root of this suffering. Bigger Thomas's story in Native Son serves as Wright's warning that without social and economic change, the oppressed masses will soon rise up violently against those in power.
- Veronica Bond |
News Thu Aug 07 2008
The Gapers Block Book Club is named as one of the "100 Places to Connect with Other Bibliophiles Online." You can find us in the blogs category, but be sure to visit some of the other great resources listed.
You can connect with us online here anytime, but remember you can also connect with us in-person this Monday, August 11, when we meet at The Book Cellar to talk about our current book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Hope to see you there.
- Alice Maggio |
Below are some of the questions we'll use to discuss L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz next week. I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone thought about the book and how childhood familiarity with the story or sole familiarity with the movie affected your readings. It's a fast read, so if you haven't picked it up yet, you still have plenty of time to get through it and join us for discussion.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been called the first American fairy tale and Baum's intentions were to write a fairy tale that differed from the older, European ones. How is this story different from other fairy tales you've read or are familiar with? Would you call Oz particularly American?
- Baum is said to have disliked the way traditional fairy tales taught morals and values. Does Oz express any particulary values or moral lessons? How does Baum communicate them in the story?
- Is this story accessible to a modern audience? Is there anything dated about it? Do you think it will continue to appeal to children in future generations?
- The Scarecrow yearns for a brain, but he's actually the most intelligent and logical person in the group. Is this irony present elsewhere in the story? What purpose does it serve?
- Why does the Wizard behave the way he does? Is his behavior excusable or not? He describes himself as a good man but a bad wizard - do you agree?
- Do money and capitalism play any roles in Oz? What is valued in the land of Oz compared to what is valued in the real world?
- In his Preface to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum says that he aimed to create a tale in which "wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out." Do you think he succeeded? Do you think that this type of optimism and pure entertainment are valuable?
- What are the power dynamics in Oz? How does one get and lose power in Oz?
- Baum's mother-in-law was a feminist and a suffragette. Do you think the ideals of feminism influenced Baum's writing of Oz? In particular, how would you view Dorothy and the witches in a feminist context?
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is by Morris Markey, writing about Chicago for McCall's magazine in March 1932:
"The thing was explosive in its effect upon the eye—more the fabulous projection of a city than a city itself. New York and London, Paris and Berlin and Vienna suddenly became old-fashioned in the memory. This was like a monstrous theatrical spectacle, when the curtain first goes up and you are a little dazed and you say, 'But heavens! It's more stunning than the real thing!' I felt as if the fireworks would commence at any instant, with rockets soaring and terrible detonations shaking the air, and that a flaming screen a mile high would begin to spell in red and white and blue: 'Chicago—World's Greatest City.'"
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our August Book Club selection, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum:
"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole."
- Alice Maggio
Come join us this month as we take a trip down the Yellow Brick Road to a place that many of us are already familiar with and love - the wonderful world of Oz. While most of us are well acquainted with the movie The Wizard of Oz, fewer people have been introduced to the book that originally inspired Judy Garland's famous performance. Written by L. Frank Baum in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz broke sales records and was made into a play and the famous musical, all of which turned the author into a celebrity. After the success of this first book, Baum went on to write fourteen other books in the series as well as over 35 other non-Oz books, none of which were ever as successful as the original Oz book and its immediate successor, The Marvelous Land of Oz.
Set in Kansas, the orphan Dorothy lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and dog Toto on a small farm that is one day hit by a horrible cyclone. Dorothy and Toto are carried away to a strange land where they are greeted by the Good Witch of the North and the Munchkins, the inhabitants of the land. Soon after landing, Dorothy is told that her house has killed the Wicked Witch of the East and only her silver shoes (not red!) remain. After imploring the Good Witch for directions on how to get home, she gives Dorothy a protective kiss on her forehead and sends her on her way, down the Yellow Brick Road, to find the Wizard in the Emerald City of Oz. It is along this way that she meets three characters she will never forget: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.
It is a great example of Baum's wit that the very characteristics Dorothy's friends most desire are also the ones they most exemplify. The Scarecrow yearns for a brain, yet he is the one who constantly provides well-thought, logical solutions for the obstacles the group faces on the way to Oz. The Tin Man wants nothing more than a heart, but it is his great empathy for all living things that makes him noble and virtuous. The Cowardly Lion may believe his fear warrants him his name, but it is his ability to carry forth in the face of his fears that makes him truly courageous. Just as Dorothy was always able to find her way home, the story holds up the notion that everything you need is already inside you.
Born in New York, Baum moved to Chicago after the birth of his third son where he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, a salesman and editor of a magazine for window decorators. He began publishing children's stories at the encouragement of his mother-in-law and first collaborated with Chicago illustrator W.W. Denslow in 1898. Denslow served as the original illustrator of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum never intended to write more than one Oz book, however financial difficulties later in his life prompted him to continue the series. A dispute with Denslow over the first book's royalties resulted in John R. Neill serving as the illustrator for all the subsequent books. The Oz books have since become the subject of much critical analyses, from political, gender, commercialism, exchange theory and more.
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright:
"We do not choose the style. No. Style is what is coming now and it will be what we are in all this. A thrilling moment in any architect's experience. He is about to see the countenance of something he is invoking with intense concentration. Out of this inner sense of order and love of the beauty of life something is to be born — maybe to live long as a message of hope and be a joy or a curse to his kind. His message he feels. None the less it will be "theirs," and rather more. And it is out of love and understanding that any building is born to bless or curse those it is built to serve. Bless them if they will see, understand and aid. Curse them as it will be cursed by them if either they or the architect fail to understand each other. This is the faith and the fear in the architect as he makes ready — to draw his design."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago by Lealan Jones and Lloyd Newman. The authors were 13 years old when they conducted two award-winning National Public Radio documentaries in 1993 and 1995 about their experiences growing up in Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes. This book is comprised of unused material from those broadcasts.
"Our neighborhood is a fun neighborhood if you know what you're doing. If you act like a little kid in this neighborhood, you're not gonna last too long. 'Cause if you play childish games in the ghetto, you're going to find a childish bullet in your childish brain. If you live in the ghetto, when you're ten you know everything you're not supposed to know. When I was ten I knew where drugs came from. I knew about every different kind of gun. I knew about sex. I was a kid in age, but my mind had the reality of a grown-up, 'cause I seen these things every day!
"Like when I was eight years old, my cousin Willy had a friend named Baby Tony and another friend, Little Cecil. They used to hang out—watch TV, go to the park and hoop, sell drugs. They all went to jail. When Baby Tony acme out he was walking through the park when a boy lit him up and blew his face off. His face was entirely blown off. And then a couple of days later Little Cecil sold somebody a dummy bag of plaster from off the walls, so the man who was using it came back and asked for his money back. Little Cecil took off running and the man shot him. And Cecil was dead. That was both of my cousin's friends that died in one week!"
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu:
"Over here is nothing like the strips downtown, where folks march fast as legs move them—fast and slow all at once. Those people are headed where they don't want to be without any other choice in life but going there. Marching lines straight and ordered. Northbound against the curbside, southbound against the buildings, marching and hustling in their own way, to some bosses' time.
But 79th Street's sidewalks are too narrow for such downtown order. Our blocks were built for Jews and Germans and Polish long ago, those tiny, straight-line folk. Now just one jive soul heads east, walking directly toward another headed west. Folk dip and limp and slide their way through just in time, some imagined time. When the sidewalk becomes too clogged, the hustlers walk out in the middle of the street and force the cars to limp and slide on by."
- Alice Maggio
Free Burning, the second novel by local author Bayo Ojikutu, is the July 2008 selection of the Gapers Block Book Club. It was first published in 2006 and takes place on Chicago's South Side in the fictional Four Corners neighborhood, which roughly translates to the South Shore area. Four Corners is beleaguered by poverty, gangs and drugs, among a host of other social and economic problems.
The protagonist is Tommie Simms, who, as the book's jacket copy declares, "was supposed to be the community's hope, the young man from the neighborhood who made good." Simms went to college and graduated from Southern Illinois University. He landed a corporate job with Global Mutual IndemCorp, a downtown insurance firm, with an office on the 32nd floor. But Simms is laid off from his job after 9/11, and he becomes desperate for a way to support his wife, Tarsha, and their baby daughter. He turns to his drug-dealing cousin Remi and begins selling pot to help pay the bills and make ends meet. The novel focuses on his quick descent into Chicago's underworld, as Simms finds himself on the wrong side of a crooked cop and crosses paths with loan sharks, rival drug dealers and others looking to get a piece of him. Ojikutu reveals how easy it is for a good man to fall on hard times, and how difficult it is to escape and climb back out of the hole.
Library Journal said, "Ojikutu's harsh and often violent depiction of the street life, where everyone has developed his or her own hustle to get by, is riveting." And Kirkus gave Free Burning a starred review, calling the story gritty, lyrical and intense, and describing Ojikutu's writing style as "a cross between James Baldwin's soulful song and the nightmare poetry of Louis-Ferdinand Cline." And in Black Issues Book Review, Denolyn Carroll summed up the novel as "a powerful work of urban fiction."
About the Author
Bayo Ojikutu was born in 1971 and is a Chicago native, born and raised. His father, Owolabi, is from Nigeria, and his mother originally hails from Louisiana. Ojikutu attended the University of Illinois, and earned his master's at DePaul University. He still lives in the city and teaches in the English department at DePaul. His first novel, 47th Street Black, published in 2003, was a winner of the Washington Prize for Fiction and the great American Book Contest. Ojikutu is definitely a local author to watch, as his star continues to rise.
Additional Resources
Read an interview with Ojikutu from the Fall 2006 books issue of the Chicago Reader.
~*~
Read the book, and then join us on Monday, July 14, at The Book Cellar, beginning at 7:30pm for our discussion. New members are always welcome.
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Sweetheart Is In by S.L. Wisenberg:
"Ruthie imagines sex without pain. She imagines it the way she tried to reconstruct dreams, really reconstruct. Or builds an image while she is praying. She imagines a blue castle somewhere on high, many steps, a private room, fur rug, long mattress, white stucco walls, tiny windows. She imagines leaving her body. It frightens her. If she leaves her body, leaves it cavorting on the bed/fur rug/kitchen table (all is possible when there is sex without pain), she may not get it back. Her body may just get up and walk away, without her, wash itself, apply blusher mascara lipstick, draw up her clothes around it, take her purse and go out to dinner. Big Ruthie herself will be left on the ceiling, staring down at the indentations on the mattress and rug, wishing she could reach down and take a book from a shelf."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention
by Frank Kusch:
"At issue was the belief that anyone donning counterculture dress was a threat. There were no more 'innocent flower children.' Former cop Norm Nelson, for example, viewed the Yippies as what the hippies had become, having now abandoned all pretense of flower power and peace. Nelson had read about them in the local papers. 'We knew who they were—they had metamorphosed into the real thing. Yippie was the myth. It was the coming of war; from ’67 on it was a battle, and they were showing their true colors in the weeks and months leading up to the convention in our city.…Let’s put it this way, we were ready for those SOBs.'”
- Alice Maggio
Below are some questions we'll use to discuss David Sedaris's Naked at our meeting next week. I can't wait to hear everyone's opinions on this unique form of memoir.
- How would you describe Sedaris's style? How does it compare to other memoirs you've read?
- Do you trust Sedaris as the narrator of his own story? Do you question the veracity of any of his stories?
- How are the essays in the book linked together? Did they flow together well or did you feel they were distinct and separate?
- Is Sedaris's portrayal of his family fair? Does it seem honest to you or do you think some of their characteristics were embellished?
- How does Sedaris deal with his sexuality in these essays? Do you find it an important element or do you think it could have been omitted or toned down?
- Do you find Sedaris as the narrator a sympathetic "character"?
- Do you think Sedaris is trying to elicit a certain response from his readers? Has the book changed or enhanced your view of the author?
- Sedaris uses a comic tone to deal with several sensitive topics. Does this tone take away from these issues?
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, Naked by David Sedaris:
"Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the worst things you could say about a person was that he or she had a family member at Dix Hill, the common name for Dorothea Dix Sanitarium, the local state mental hospital. Designed by the same people who brought you Dreary Orphanage for Forsaken Children and Gabled House Haunted by Ghost of Hatchet Murderer, Dorothea Dix was a bleak colony of Gothic buildings perched upon a hilltop near the outskirts of town. In the winter its surrounding tree limbs resembled palsied fingers of mad scientists tapping against the windows in search of fresh brains. Come summer these same trees, green and leafy, served to hide something unspeakably sinister. Whenever we passed by the place, my sister and I would stick our heads out the car window, expecting to hear a hysterical voice cackling, 'I'm mad, I tell you, MAD!'"
- Alice Maggio
David Sedaris has gained much popularity from his witty personal essays, many of which have been published in magazines and read on NPR's "This American Life" before being collected into books for publication. Naked, his second books of essays, does not focus on any one particular period of time in the author's life, but flits through a variety of ages. From the peculiar tics he was prisoner to as a child to the birth of his younger brother – the family's sixth and final child – to the time he spent picking apples in Oregon to the impending death of his mother from cancer, Sedaris manages to capture a wide range of his experiences viewed through the lens of seemingly trite occurrences. This ability to take what we would merely see as bizarre or funny and extract a profound sense of value and significance – not only for himself but also for his readers – is perhaps Sedaris's greatest gift and the reason behind his incredible success.
The title of the book comes from its final essay, "Naked," which recounts the week Sedaris spent at a nudist colony. Apprehensive about appearing completely nude in public, Sedaris at first confines his nudity to his trailer, commenting on how accustomed to clothes he is: "I realize that it has long been my habit to stretch my T-shirt over my knees while sitting alone at a table. I'm also used to pulling my pants above my navel and tightening my belt to diminish my gut. Jangling the keys in my pocket, thoughtlessly gnawing at the collars of my shirts: these things are lost to me now. It feels dangerous to drink a cup of hot coffee, and twice in the last hour I’ve hopped up to brush glowing cigarette ash off what I once considered to be my private parts." Instead of freeing or exciting, Sedaris learns that seeing everyone naked is much more of a burden - even when he returns to clothed society he can't help imagining what everyone looks like underneath, something akin to a superpower gone bad.
The essays become longer and more involved as the book progresses, changing from simple memories to poignant ruminations on the universals of life. "I Like Guys" describes the moment when Sedaris knew he was gay. Stuck in Greece at a summer camp just before high school, a sexually-charged friendship with a campmate leads Sedaris to realize how, in insulting and ridiculing each other to appear part of the rest of the group, they only ended up further alienating themselves. "The Women's Open" is a sweet and sympathetic chance to explore his sister's feeling on the day she got her period and, later, how she must have felt upon delving into their mother's last gift, a tape of movies she recorded just before she died. "The Incomplete Quad" focuses on the cross-country hitchhiking trip Sedaris took with a college friend suffering from muscular dystrophy. Using her illness to mooch off innocent travelers, the two learn that it's not what you can take from others that's important, but what others are willing to give. Part autobiography, part comedic tale, Naked is fast, but absorbing and entertaining and can serve as the perfect light read while offering so much more.
* * *
David Sedaris was born in New York, was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and earned a degree at the School of the Art Institute. His other books include
Barrel Fever,
Holidays on Ice,
Me Talk Pretty One Day,
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and the upcoming
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, scheduled for release on June 3. You can listen to Sedaris read some of his pieces on the
NPR website.
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum:
"Why hasn't anybody seen a mermaid and lived?" asked Trot again.
"'Cause mermaids is fairies, an' ain't meant to be seen by us mortal folk," replied Cap'n Bill.
"But if anyone happens to see 'em, what then, Cap'n?"
"Then," he answered, slowly wagging his head, "the mermaids give 'em a smile an' a wink, an' they dive into the water an' gets drownded."
"S'pose they knew how to swim, Cap'n Bill?"
"That don't make any diff'rence, Trot. The mermaids live deep down, an' the poor mortals never come up again."
- Alice Maggio
Here are just a few sample discussion questions for our upcoming meeting to talk about The Grass Dancer by Susan Power.
1. Why is the book titled The Grass Dancer? Who is the true grass dancer in this book?
2. What role does Pumpkin play in Harley's life?
3. How does Margaret Many Wounds' idea of walking on the moon differ from NASA's?
4. Is Anna/Mercury Thunder a villain or a heroine?
5. Susan Power dedicates the book to her grandmothers, who gave her the "keys to two cities." How do the characters in the novel live between these two cities—one Native American and the other white?
6. What role does the modern world play in the novel?
7. How does Power's choice of using multiple points of view affect the story?
8. Why does Power tell this story in the order she does? How does the reverse chronological order influence the story?
9. A lot of this novel deals with memory. What happens when we forget the past?
10. Is The Grass Dancer a work of "magic realism"? Why or why not?
Remember our May meeting is this Monday, May 19 at The Book Cellar, starting at 7:30pm. Hope to see you there.
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Libby Hill:
Humans ventured into the Chicagoland area approximately 12,000 years ago as the glacier receded and the climate became more inviting to plants and animals. Their successive cultures adapted to the changes in the landscape as the lakes ancestral to Lake Michigan varied in size.
If man or animal lived here before the Wisconsin glacial episode, all evidence was removed by the action of the ice. Huge animals came in as soon after the glaciers as the area was habitable for them. It is hard to imagine the immense woolly mammoth, a beast with long shaggy hair and huge curved tusks, grazing here in the meadow, while its smaller but still enormous reddish cousin, the mastodon, browsed on trees and in the grasslands, perhaps in the neighborhood of your own backyard. Both animals, relatives of the elephant, were probably common, and both were ideally suited to the cold climates that followed in the wake of the glaciers.
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club pick, The Grass Dancer by Susan Power:
Frank Pipe would never forget the sound of glass exploding in the dark room. Something had burst through the window behind him, and he was lucky for a hanging quilt, which stopped most of the spinning glass that flew through the air like shrapnel. In the sudden moonlight, Frank identified the creature as the largest coyote he had ever seen, tall as a pony. It lunged for one of the participants, and though hands stretched to hold him, the man was carried off like a bone, his head cracking against the window frame as the coyote leapt into the night with its victim. Leo Mitchell's body was found the next day at the foot of Angry Butte, punctured by incisors thick as pencils.
Herod said: "The spirits weren't satisfied with just identifying the person who did those terrible things. They wanted justice."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from the autobiography American Daughter by Era Bell Thompson, which was first published in 1946:
Cranks, philanthropists, or plain, everyday Americans, I like them all. For every bad one, there are twenty good ones. We can't always find jobs for them, we aren't always successful at getting them to take the jobs we find, but we can give them a kind and sympathetic audience. It is surprising to know how many people in the world are hungry for kindness, to have someone believe in them. And I do believe in them.
When a forelady in a box factory asks, "Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where you can sit down and tell your troubles to someone and have them listen?"
- Alice Maggio
The May 2008 selection of the Gapers Block Book Club is The Grass Dancer by Susan Power, her magical debut novel that was first published in 1994, won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction for that year, and was also named an American Library Association notable book in 1995.
The Grass Dancer is a collection of interwoven stories about the residents of a Sioux reservation in North Dakota, but while each chapter can stand apart as a separate story, together the stories create a complex portrait of Native American history and culture. The stories move seamlessly back and forth through time beginning in 1981 and reaching back to 1864 before returning full-circle to 1982.
Pumpkin is the title character, an 18-year-old Menominee woman from Chicago who wants to spend her summer dancing in as many powwows as she can. She is a talented grass dancer, a role traditionally performed by men. She meets the troubled 17-year-old Harley Wind Soldier at an inter-tribal powwow in North Dakota, and the two quickly fall in love. But Pumpkin's tragic fate early in the story sets the rest of the novel into motion as we gradually discover the intertwined lives, dreams and histories which led to the present events. The Grass Dancer is a vivid and magical novel in which spirits from the past continue to exert powerful influence over the present.
About the Author
Susan Power was born in Chicago in 1961 and is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Her mother founded Chicago's American Indian Center, which is still located on Wilson Ave. in the Ravenswood neighborhood. When she was 17, Power was named Miss Indian Chicago, but then she left the city to attend Radcliffe College and Harvard University Law School, where she earned her J.D. Power only practiced law a short time, however, before she decided to pursue writing and returned to school to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop. In addition to The Grass Dancer, Susan Power is also the author of the novel Strong Heart Society and Roofwalker, a collection of short stories and essays.
Further Reading
Find out more about Susan Power at the Voices from the Gaps website, which includes a short biography and a 2000 interview with the writer.
See and hear Susan Power in a 36-minute webcast from her appearance at the National Book Festival in 2003 at the Library of Congress website. [Requires RealPlayer to view.]
~*~
Read The Grass Dancer and then join us on Monday, May 19, at 7:30pm at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square to discuss the book. No RSVP is required, and new members are always welcome.
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. April is National Poetry Month, so this week's quotable is Carl Sandburg's poem "At a Window" from Chicago Poems.
At a Window
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
- Alice Maggio
Quotable Friday is back! every Friday on the book club blog we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides:
"The most famous hermaphrodite in history? Me? It felt good to write that, but I've got a long way to go. I'm closeted at work, revealing myself only to a few friends. At cocktail receptions, when I find myself standing next to the former ambassador (also a native of Detroit), we talk about the Tigers. Only a few people here in Berlin know my secret. I tell more people than I used to, but I'm not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I've just met. In other cases I keep silent forever."
- Alice Maggio
First, a note: next week's meeting marks the third anniversary of the GB Book Club and we hope to celebrate it with all who come with some tasty treats and drinks on us! Whether you're only able to follow us online or whether you've become one of our regular meeting attendees, we're very glad to have had you along for this literary ride.
Below are the questions we'll use to discuss Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, in which I hope you're all thoroughly and wonderfully engrossed. Feel free to post answers, thoughts or additional questions in the comments. Remember - spoilers are allowed.
- Do you trust Cal as a narrator? How you feel about the parts where he was narrating his grandparents’ and his parents’ pasts? Were these truthful?
- Do you feel the author wrote Callie as a woman well? Were her thoughts and actions believable?
- What role does fate play in the story? How do people either depend on it or challenge it?
- What is Dr. Luce’s role in the story? Did you find him villainous or merely someone doing their job? What reaction did you have to Luce’s theories as influenced by current beliefs about gender?
- Why did Callie feel the need to run away after reading Dr. Luce’s report? Do you think Milton and Tessie would have accepted her decision not to have the surgery? Would Callie have been able to transform into Cal within her family or was it necessary for her to go out on her own?
- Is Cal being exploited during his time in San Francisco? What allows him to put his body on display when all of his life he’s made efforts to hide it?
- Both Cal and his grandparents are strangers in a strange land. How does Cal’s shift in gender compare to his grandparents’ shift in space? Are they similar experiences of immigration or are they different? How does Cal compare his own changes to that of his grandparents’?
- How does history shape the lives of these characters? How do the burning of Smyrna, the rise of Islam, the Detroit riots, etc., force the characters to go through their own transformations?
- What does America represent for these characters – for Desdemona and Lefty, for Milton and Tessie, and for Cal and his brother? Do their visions of America differ based on their status as first-, second- and third-generation immigrants?
- What do you think of Cal’s current relationship with Julie? How do you think the author wants us to believe it ends?
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Lake Effect, a memoir by Rich Cohen:
In the autumn of 1972, my family moved to Glencoe from Libertyville, a farming town in northern Illinois. We were the only Jewish family in Libertyville. When I asked my father if he had met with much anti-Semitism, he smiled and said, "Are you kidding? When we moved in, the neighbors shook my hand and said, 'Thank God, we were afraid they would sell to Catholics.' They hadn't even worked their way down to us yet."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller:
"As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, 'Oh, Daddy, it's John. John's dead.' Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she'd been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.
"'What do you mean?' John was Eva's husband, the girls' stepfather. Theo's father.
"'He's dead, Daddy.' Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. 'He got hit…by a car. A car hit him.'
"Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then—his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he didn't believe it."
- Alice Maggio
“My genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me,” writes 40-something Cal Stephanides as he looks back on his life. The same might be said for all of us. From the way we walk, talk, think and construct our identities, gender plays an immeasurable role in shaping our social beings. For many of us the meddling hand of gender may appear only in the background, but for Cal, born Calliope Helen, daughter to Milton and Tessie Stephanides, the role of gender is unmistakable in its ability to shape every aspect of a life.
Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex is much more than the story of a fictional pseudo-hermaphrodite. It is also a sweeping epic of three generations of the Stephanides family as they move from their Grecian homeland to settle in a deteriorating Detroit. To escape the Turkish invasion, Desdemona and Eleutherios (Lefty) Stephanides sail to the United States to live with their cousin Sourmelina and her husband Jimmy in Detroit. It is here that Lefty embarks on a brief stint as a Ford autoworker, defies prohibition by running alcohol across the Canadian border, and eventually sets up his business running a speakeasy called the Zebra Room from his family’s basement. It is also during this time that Desdemona becomes pregnant with Milton, always fearful that the choices she’s made in her life will prove harmful to her children. Fate, however, does not show its head here, as both Milton and his younger sister prove to be healthy children. Fate reserves itself for the next generation
Throughout the narrative, Cal is very conscious of the role fate played in his creation. Were it not for the fact that both his parents carried the same mutation on the same chromosome, his life would have differed greatly. Perhaps, if it were not also for his parents’ attempts to cheat God by timing their sexual encounter to conceive a girl – however scientifically valid their attempts may be, their intention stands firm – Cal’s life may have also been very different. But fate reveals itself on a summer day when a run-in with a tractor lands Calliope in the emergency room: blood tests reveal the presence of an XY chromosomal pairing. From the start of the book, Cal makes clear that he is not sexually androgynous - what he has is an inability to produce dihydrotestosterone (DHT) called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome and it is DHT that plays a crucial part in the development of male genitalia. Thus, while Cal possesses all the secondary sex characteristics of a man, his underdeveloped genitals allowed his gender identity to go unknown for fourteen years. Whether this genetic abnormality is merely a confluence of random events or a matter of fate is something Cal ponders for much of his adult life.
The world of sexual ambiguity is perhaps so fascinating because for many of us it is simply unfamiliar and new. It would be easy for Cal’s story of a man raised as a girl to be conflated into tabloid fodder, but Eugenides’s attention to detail, his ability to capture what it means to feel different and draw us completely into Cal’s head makes this so much more. This is a story as much about history, place, family, secrets and love as it is about one person’s unusual life. Far from a sensational account of Cal’s abnormalities, Middlesex serves as a beautiful and grand (fictional) autobiography of a person on a search for something that captivates us all: identity.
* * *
Jeffrey Eugenides is also the author of The Virgin Suicides, which was made into a film by Sophia Coppola. It was not for another nine years that Middlesex, his second book, would be published and win the Pulitzer Prize. Though Eugenides shares many traits with Cal – right down to the Musketeer-style mustache – he has made clear that he does not possess Cal’s hormone deficiency. He is currently living in Chicago.
For more information on 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, click here.
You can also read more on Eugenides and Middlesex on Oprah’s website.
- Veronica Bond |
These are just a few sample questions for our discussion of Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky.
1. How would you describe V.I. Warshawski?
2. How would you describe her methods as an investigator?
3. How effective was the way the story was structured? Are there any elements of the story or plot twists that surprised you?
4. How believable is the plot of Fire Sale? Did you find the mystery plausible?
5. How do you feel about Paretsky's portrayals of South Chicago and Barrington? Do you think the portrayals are accurate?
6. How is Fire Sale a "political" novel?
7. Have you read any of the other books in the series? How does this book compare to other mysteries you have read?
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Book of Ralph by John McNally:
"Ralph ran a hand up and over his head, flattening his hair before some freak combination of wind and static electricity blew it straight up and into a real-life fright wig.
"We were standing at the far edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. It was 1978, the year we started eighth grade, though Ralph would have been in high school already if he hadn't failed both the third and fifth grades. He was nearly a foot taller than the rest of us, and every few weeks new sprigs of whiskers popped up along his cheeks and chin, scaring the girls and prompting the principal, Mr. Santoro, to drop into our homeroom unexpectedly and deliver speeches about personal hygiene.
"'Boys,' Mr. Santoro would say. 'Some of you are starting to look like hoodlums.' Though he addressed his insult to all the boys, everyone knew he meant Ralph."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 by Adam Green:
"When asked in 1955 to account for the successes of Black Chicago's music, guitarist Bill Broonzy remarked that it was 'just born in us to sing and play the blues.' Naturalizing genius in this way remains the signature of most accounts of African-American music in the Windy City. Black music, by most lights, signifies the staying power of blackness itself: LeRoi Jones once described it as 'the one vector out of African culture impossible to eradicate.' Given Chicago's historic representation as the site of change and even destabilization for its black inhabitants old and new, such promises of enduring nature held special attractions. Little wonder then that accounts of Black Chicago so often present musical culture and community as synonyms for one another, reminding us of Jones's further variation on Bill Broonzy's theme: 'the song and the people is the same.'"
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky:
"I hadn't expected the fire—I hadn't expected anything when I came here. It was only some prickling of unease—dis-ease—that sent me back to Fly the Flag on my way home. I'd actually made the turn onto Route 41 when I decided to check on the factory. I'd made a U-turn onto Escanaba and zigzagged across the broken streets to South Chicago Avenue. It was six o'clock then, already dark, but I could see a handful of cars in Fly the Flag's yard when I drove by. There weren't any pedestians out, not that there are ever many down here; only a few cars straggled past, beaters, people leaving the few standing factories to head for bars or even home."
- Alice Maggio
Earlier this month, one of the the Book List book groups read Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, our own Book Club selection back in August of last year. Like most of us, the group loved it and offered some interesting opinions on the characters, the idea of family in the story and how the narrative itself was arranged like a three-ring circus. Most interesting was the moderator's thoughts on the group after someone confided they didn't feel smart enough to join in the discussion: "Yes, I am impressed by the intelligence and the thoughtfulness of many of the readers in the group," she admits. "But it's about so much more...it's about bringing your whole self to the reading of the book and sharing with the group...a book group should be like a circus - it should be a place where we can all be different and all fit in." My thoughts exactly.
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Public Dance Halls of Chicago by Louise de Koven Bowen, an investigation into and condemnation of Chicago's dance halls, circa 1910. You may read the complete text online at the Library of Congress website. It is part of the online exhibit, "An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca.1490-1920"
:
"All the investigators report that up to about eleven p.m., generally speaking, the dances are well conducted; the crowd then begins to show the effect of too much liquor. Men and women become intoxicated and dance indecently such dances as 'Walkin' the Dog,' 'On the Puppy's Tail,' 'Shaking the Shimmy,' 'The Dip,' 'The Stationary Wiggle,' etc, In some instances, little children—of whom there are often large numbers present—are given liquor and become intoxicated, much to the amusement of their elders. Many of them are forgotten by their parents in the excitement of the dance, and play upon the filthy floor, witnesses of all kinds of degradation.
"At most halls the crowds begin drinking their liquor from glasses, then later they take, it from bottles and toward the close of the evening it is brought in by cases. One investigator counted one hundred empty cases of beer bottles and a large number of empty cases of wine bottles in one room at a recent North Side dance."
- Alice Maggio
For our March meeting we are reading Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky, the twelfth novel in her bestselling V.I. Warshawski mystery series.
For those who have never read any of the Warshawski novels, Fire Sale is a great introduction to the character. Readers learn a lot about her background in this story as she returns to the South Chicago neighborhood where she grew up in order to help an old friend who has been stricken with cancer. Warshawski agrees to coach the girls' basketball team at her former high school, Bertha Palmer High, but she finds the facilities are dilapidated and the girls are struggling with poverty, gangs and single motherhood. Undaunted by the challenge, the tough private investigator approaches the owner of By-Smart, the local megastore and largest employer in the neighborhood, in the hopes of securing some much-needed funding for the beleaguered team. Instead, Warshawski becomes involved in an elaborate mystery involving corporate sabotage, murder and the disappearance of the teenaged grandson of By-Smart's founder. Paretsky deftly combines social criticism and mystery in Fire Sale to reveal a portrait of a crumbling community still reeling from the loss of Chicago's steel industry and struggling to survive on minimum wages.
Warshawski is one of the best-known and strongest female detectives in the genre, and the books in the series have been translated into more than twenty languages. The character was introduced in Indemnity Only, first published in 1982. Indemnity Only was also the basis of the V.I. Warshawski film released in 1991 starring Kathleen Turner in the title role.
Sara Paretsky is an award-winning writer whose recent memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, is currently a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. She is also the founder of Sisters in Crime, an organization dedicated to fostering support for women mystery writers. She lives in Chicago.
Additional Resources
Visit Sara Paretsky's homepage at http://www.saraparetsky.com/.
She also writes for the excellent Outfit Collective blog. The Outfit Collective is a group of local mystery and crime writers including Paretsky, Barbara D'Amato, Libby Hellman, Kevin Guilfoile, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Marcus Sakey and Sean Chercover.
~*~
Read Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky, and then join us on Monday, March 10 at 7:30pm at The Book Cellar to discuss the book. No RSVP required, and new members are always welcome. Hope to see you there.
- Alice Maggio
This month's Book Club author recently did an interview with the BBC's World Book Club. It is well worth listening to -- she discusses Chicago, as well as her desire to create a female private eye. Here's a link to the mp3.
- Brian Sobolak |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Seven Moves by Carol Anshaw:
"Chris and Taylor hope to eventually join the ranks of the renovators, but have had the house only a few months and so far have been able to afford only the most meager and necessary improvements. This is the first house either of them has ever owned, and it makes them feel as though they've moved to America. After years of apartments with stairwells full of peculiar cooking smells, ceilings throbbing with other people's stereos, discouraging connections with the flooding bathrooms and stray roaches of strangers, they are now blessed with autonomy and silent nights, and a backyard for grilling and letting the dog out in the morning, for planning a garden. They no longer have to lug everything long blocks from parking spaces in their former, high-density neighborhood."
- Alice Maggio
Time for another Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from "Puzzle Man" by Asa Baber:
"I'm not crazy, no matter what people say. I have valid reasons for everything I did, and I am at peace. My complete story will never be told, but when my heart is stopped by Uncle Sam's pharmaceuticals, my spirit will ascend like a white balloon over the Wabash River and fly up to heaven. God will welcome me into his house, saying, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant. You followed your beliefs and acted on them. You have been a steadfast patriot to your cause, and I hereby place you at my right hand.'"
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs by Brian Costello. Narrator Shaquille Callahan tells us how it felt to play for The Enchanters:
"The practices were played like shows in front of thousands of people, and the shows were played like practices where it was just us. There was no difference. We were always fully in the moment, and the songs never got old because we played them differently each time, always caught up on that thin line between creation and falling on your face. Me and that red sparkly drum set exploded and reformed continually, my head swimming in the wine and cough syrup torpor. Donald leapt around and smashed the guitar into his head and smiled, and Mickey stared at the floor in dextrapamorphanic ecstasy. It was the best."
- Alice Maggio
The February book for the Gapers Block Book Club is The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs, the debut novel by Brian Costello. And, when it was released at the end of 2005, Enchanters was also the first book published by local press Featherproof Books.
The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs tells the story of Shaquille Callahan, a twenty-something musician living in the fictional Florida suburb of Sprawlburg Springs. One summer he becomes the new drummer for a local garage band, The Enchanters. The first time he meets his new band mates is when he plays at a local party with them attended by a dozen teens. Shaquille doesn't know his band mates — or the songs, but with The Enchanters none of that matters.
Shaquille falls for Renee, the flamboyant lead singer of the band, and the novel charts their relationship and the meteoric rise — and inevitable fall — of The Enchanters over that one magical summer. When not rehearsing, getting high on cough syrup or drinking cheap red wine, the band members work minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. Shaquille cuts squid at Cleveland Steamerz Good Time Bar and Grille World while Renee sells shampoo at a shop at the Perimeter Square Circle Centre Mall. They all dream of making enough money over the summer to move to Brooklyn and take the New York City music scene by storm. Their dreams are nearly realized when The Enchanters land a gig at the Latent Republican Hipster Music Club, but the concert turns out to be the beginning of the end for the band that dared challenge the middle-class sensibility of Sprawlburg Springs.
The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs is a free-spirited novel with a punk attitude, and it comes as no surprise that writer Costello counts Lester Bang and Hunter S. Thompson among his influences. Enchanters especially evokes Thompson in the novel's Ralph Steadman-inspired illustrations by Mark Dunihue McKenzie.
Brian Costello grew up in Orlando, and Sprawlburg Springs certainly reflects his own suburban Florida adolescence (two of the characters are named Mickey and Donald — get it?), even while the town is depicted as a kind of suburban American anywhere. Costello moved to Chicago in 1997 and currently teaches at Columbia College Chicago. He also plays drums for the Functional Blackouts, and his obvious passion for and knowledge of music give the story its authentic punch.
But the most fitting review of the novel comes from punknews.org, in which the reviewer enthusiastically writes that the book "made me want to bore a hole through 174 of its 193 pages and just have sex with it." (emphasis his) If you can identify with that sentiment, then Enchanters is just the book for you.
So, read The Enchanters Vs. Sprawlburg Springs, and then join us on Monday, February 11 at The Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln Ave.) at 7:30pm to talk about the book. New members are always welcome.
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Hunting for Frogs on Elston by Jerry Sullivan, a collection of nature essays Sullivan wrote for the Chicago Reader during the 1980s and '90s. I pick this paasage this week because orientation for the Chicago Wilderness Calling Frog Survey starts next week, and volunteer frog monitors are still needed. Visit the website to find out how to get involved.
"We didn't hear another frog until the last stop on our itinerary, a former forest preserve north of Oakton Street along the North Branch of the Chicago River. These were chorus frogs again, and we sat along the roadside to enjoy the music. Our presence attracted the police, but after Laurel offered the sensible explanation that we were counting frogs, the policeman drove off, his expression suggesting that we were nuts, but probably harmless nuts."
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from And Then They All Sang by Studs Terkel, as he writes about Mahalia Jackson:
"On Sunday mornings, I visit the Greater Salem Baptist church. It is on the city's West Side. There are intimations of rubble arouns and about. urban renewal is just getting under way. here are parishoners, bone-weary after a week of unsung work, for a wage not worth singing about; here they are, listening to song, such as I, whose work is so much easier and whose wage is so much better, have never heard. It is at such time and circumstance that I become aware of my own arrogance. For a stupid moment, I had thought I discovered Mahalia Jackson. On occasion, I run into somebody who obtusely insists it is so. Most disheartening are those quite gifted singers of gospel music in this city who, God help us all, attribute Mahalia's 'success' to me. It is cause for tears as well as laughter. The people of Greater Salem know better."
- Alice Maggio
On Monday, January 14, the GB Book Club will be kicking off a new year with our discussion of Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz. Join us at The Book Cellar (4736-8 N. Lincoln Ave.) at 7:30pm to participate. Below are some questions, co-written by Brian Sobolak and Alice Maggio, that we will use to start talking about the book.
1. Who is the audience for this book? Or, how would you categorize this book?
2. Is this a fair and accurate portrait of Chicago?
3. Is the format of the book a good one for telling the story as compared to one with a more linear time line?
4. Who is better placed to write a portrait of a place: someone who was born there and has a native connection to the place, or an outsider who has a different perspective?
5. Kotlowitz lives in Oak Park. Was it fair to exclude the suburbs from his story, esp. considering most people that consider themselves "Chicagoans" now actually live outside the city?
6. "This city is the story of newcomers, the Irish, Poles, Croats and Serbs, Mexicans, and more recently, Asians and Africans, but in the end it's defined by race, by a history that is by turn ugly and celebratory, from the 1919 race riots to the 1983 election of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington." Did he
get it right — is Chicago defined by race?
7. Kotlowitz quotes sociologist Marco d'Eramo saying, "Chicago expresses the truth about the United States." What do you think he means by that?
8. Which was your favorite story? Why?
9. What themes tie the stories together?
10. Why doesn't Kotlowitz include photos? Would they help readers understand the book better or are the words enough?
11. Do you think this book, like other books about Chicago we've read, will stand the test of time?
Add your questions or thoughts about the book in the comments!
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from "The Cold War", just one of the stories collected in Trouble by Patrick Somerville:
"When he woke up Saturday morning, Dr. Richard Eaves took a shower, dressed, found his red hat, and went out to the driveway to shovel. It had snowed overnight. Freezing wind and gray, dead grass had mutated into a pleasant landscape of quilted houses and frozen lawns. He sometimes wondered whether the winters were really getting warmer, whether corroded layers of gases were allowing more insidious gases into the planet. It sounded unlikely, and political, but he didn't know. He didn't have the information. He had once cared about science, and intellectual honesty, and empirical data, but his love for these things had slowly faded over the years, and now he cared mainly about shoveling."
- Alice Maggio
This month the Gapers Block Book Club is reading Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz. Book club staffer Brian Sobolak writes the introduction below. Read Never a City So Real, and then join us on Monday, Janury 14 at The Book Cellar at 7:30pm for our first meeting of 2008.
Introduction
Who is best qualified to lead you on a tour of a place: a native-born resident or someone who's shown up later, someone who's seen something of the world and decided to stay?
Alex Kotlowitz explains in his introduction to the short and delightful Never A City So Real that he only planned to stay in Chicago for a year or two and instead stayed for twenty. And in this series of vignettes highlighting different corners of Chicago, Kotlowitz shows us the city he has come to know and love.
The city presented in Never A City So Real is very different from Kotlowitz's first draft on Chicago, the powerful There Are No Children Here, a book that followed a family in Chicago's squalid public housing. For many, it was a detailed portrait of a Chicago seen but not heard.
Never A City So Real employs the same techniques. Kotlowitz introduces us to Chicagoans who operate well outside of the traditional picture of a Cubs fan drinking beer or tourists taking pictures of the Bean. Piecing together many stories—a labor historian from the South Side, a diner owner in Albany Park, a muralist who paints panthers in living rooms, an artist who works in dive bars—Kotlowitz begins to explain the city in a way that the Not For Tourist's guide to Chicago
couldn't.
Along the way Kotlowitz drops hints that slowly reveal the character of the city and its history. "There's much history here," he writes. "The Pilgrim Baptist Church, formerly a synagogue (in this city of ever-changing neighborhoods, churches adorned with stars of David are a common sight), was designed by Dankmar Adler, whose father was the synagogue's rabbi, and Louis Sullivan, with a helping hand from a young Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked for Adler and Sullivan's firm at the same time." [1]
That's a lot to pack in to a single sentence. But these breadcrumbs of history along the way show us where the city came from without forcing us to use it to define the present. Kotlowitz often reminds us of where the city came from without a nostalgia for a previous, better Chicago; it's a refreshing view and different from too many other published works about our city.
This casual blending of past and present, showing a city by revealing its characters, works well. A faithful portrait of Chicago emerges, and Kotlowitz's command of all sides of the city and his engaging prose make for a very readable portrait.
My only criticism of the book is perhaps one of the items that makes it engaging: it's short. The quick portraits of Chicagoans might not work in a longer book, but I did wish for a few more stories, or more of a meditation on some aspects of the city. (By way of comparison, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City was a length that worked.)
Did he get it right? That was what I felt myself wondering as I read through the book. While no work of a scant 150 pages can attempt to cover the lives and history of 3 million people, Kotlowitz got it about as right as you can get. It's a book certainly worth reading.
Note: I happen to live two blocks from the subject of one of the chapters, GT's Diner. For the book club, I'll bring some pictures of what this area looks like and an update on the story he writes about.
[1] An aside: The grandeur of this church is no longer, as it burned down in 2006 and awaits restoration.
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from our current book club selection, Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz. In this excerpt, Kotlowitz relates his first meeting with one of the Chicagoans profiled in the book, artist Milton Reed:
"I first met Reed in 1999, while visiting a woman in the Stateway Gardens Public Housing complex, which was then a collection of eight seventeen-story high-rises. He was in the living room of my hostess, where he was painting a gold-trimmed black panther on the cinderblock wall. He had a forty-ounce bottle of Colt 45 beside him, and he was so completely engaged in his work that he didn't say a word. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the rendering, though it was clear that Reed had taken great care with it. He had first sketched the outlines of the panther in pencil, using a ruler and right angle, and then had gone to work with oil-based house paint. Because of its permanence, there was little room for error. I assumed at the time that the panther was meant to conjure up more radical days. I later learned, however, that a number of years before a woman had asked Reed to paint a black panther with gold trim on her kitchen wall to match her black and gold furniture, a common color pairing among public-housing residents. ('They all follow that same tradition,' Reed told me.) word quickly spread, and soon Reed had a reputation. Public-housing residents came to know him as 'Mr. Artist — as in 'Mr. Artist, how much you charge for one them murals?'"
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Common Lot by Robert Herrick (1863-1938). Herrick was an English professor at the University of Chicago who wrote more than a dozen novels, most written in the tradition of social realism. The Common Lot was first published in 1904.
"Business was war, he said to himself again and again, and in this war only the little fellows had to be strictly honest. The big ones, those that governed the world, stole, lied, cheated their fellows openly in the market. The Bushfields took their rake-off; the Rainbows were the financial pimps, who fattened on the vices of the great industrial leaders. Colonel Raymond might discharge a man on his road who stole fifty cents or was seen to enter a bucket shop, but in the reorganization of the Michigan Northern ten years previously, he and his friends had pocketed several millions of dollars, and had won the lawsuits brought against them by the defrauded stockholders.
"It was a world of graft, the architect judged cynically. Old Powers Jackson, it was said in Chicago, would cheat the glass eye out of his best friend in a deal. He, too, would follow in the path of the strong, and take what was within his reach. He would climb hardily to the top, and then who cared? That gospel of strenuous effort, which our statesmen and orators are so fond of shouting forth, has its followers in the little Jackson Harts. Only, in putting forth their strong right arms, they often thrust them into their neighbors' pockets. And the irresponsible great ones, who have emerged beyond the reign of law, have their disciples in all the strata of society,—down, down to the boy who plays the races with the cash in his employer's till."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City by Robert P. Swierenga:
"The lives of Chicago Dutch Calvinists revolved around their churches. The church stood at the center of the community and defined the religious culture that differentiated the Dutch from other groups. While mannerisms, dress, lace curtains, and a miniature windmill on the front lawn might betray their Dutchness, it was in the religious realm that it came to fullest expression. The church was the one institution brought from the motherland that they could preserve. The Dutch language almost immediately gave way to English in the streets and workplace, as did American style dress and demeanor. But within the ethnic community and its many societies, services, and extended families, one could live from the cradle to the grave among fellow believers and enjoy a measure of security not available to those outside the pale."
- Alice Maggio
Every other Tuesday (er, Wednesday?) we ask a new lit-inspired question in Ink.
Since the holiday season is upon us, this time I'd like to know: What is your favorite book that you received as a gift? Tell us above in Ink.
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow:
"The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times, suspiring from the vacated soil, to remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died here. And that night the windows were wide open and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens."
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Pit: A Story of Chicago by Frank Norris, which was first published in 1903.
"But when at last Laura entered upon possession of the North Avenue house, she was not—after the first enthusiasm and excitement over its magnificance had died down—altogether pleased with it, though she told herself the contrary. Outwardly it was all that she could desire. It fronted Lincoln park, and from all the windows upon that side the most delightful outlooks were obtainable—green woods, open lawns, the parade ground, the Lincoln monument, dells, bushes, smooth drives, flower beds, and fountains. From the great bay window of Laura's own sitting-room she could see far out over Lake Michigan and watch the procession of great lake steamers from Milwaukee, far-distant Duluth, and the Sault Sainte Marie—the famous "Soo"—defiling magestically past, making for the mouth of the river, laden to the water's edge with whole harvests of wheat. At night, when the windows were open in the warm weather, she could hear the mournful wash and lapping of the water on the embankments."
- Alice Maggio
Every other Tuesday we ask a new lit-inspired question in INK.
I want to know what book or books you've been recommending lately. I need something good to read!
Post your response above in INK.
- Alice Maggio
News Fri Nov 09 2007
The Critical Mass blog has two offerings from this week related to our current book club author. First, find out which five books J.M. Coetzee believes every book reviewer should own. Then, read a review of Inner Workings, a new collection of essays of Coetzee's work from the New York Review of Books.
- Alice Maggio |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee:
"Spring ended abruptly. A hot, moist air mass moved up from the Gulf of Mexico across the plains and into Chicago, smothering the city and turning the night into a furnace, the brick buildings radiating the heat collected from the sun during the day. Life in the ghetto moved outside, onto the door steps of the houses, into the air-conditioned bars and the cinemas that sold cool air and Doris Day dreams. On the South Side there was Washington Park, and families moved at night into its cool greenness, sleeping on blankets under the stars until the first rays of the sun, returning to their stifling rooms to snatch a few more minutes of sleep before meeting the hot, humid day. Beer, watermelon, ice cream, anything cool, but there was no way to leave the engulfing heat. The city lay gasping like a big beast, tempers shortened, and the ghetto lay like a bomb waiting to explode."
- Alice Maggio
Below are the questions we'll use to discuss Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee. Feel free to post any responses in the comments - spoilers are allowed and exist below - or share your thoughts with us at our meeting on November 13 at the Book Cellar. It's a complex story that doesn't have the happiest of outlooks, so I'm looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts on it.
- Can David’s affair with Melanie be considered abuse? How do you read her character? Does Coetzee give us enough of her character to be able to make an informed decision?
- Why do you think David immediately relinquishes his teaching position upon hearing that charges are being brought against him? Why does he accept all responsibility without even hearing what those charges are?
- Why do you think David chooses to have an affair with Bev Shaw? How is it different from his previous affairs as they’re described in the book?
- Do you think Petrus had anything to do with the attacks? Does he believe that Lucy and David, being white, owe a debt to the society in which they live?
- Does Lucy’s homosexuality affect David’s perceptions of her decisions? Why do you think she’s so bent on staying in her house?
- Why does Lucy take Petrus up on his offer of marriage? Is this a rational decision? Are we meant to understand her reasons?
- How do David’s views of women change throughout the book? Think of his interactions with different women – Soraya, Melanie, Bev, and Lucy. How does his opening thought of having solved the problem of sex prove troublesome for him?
- What does David’s visit to the Isaacs’s house accomplish, if anything? What is he hoping to accomplish by visiting Melanie’s family?
- Is it possible to sympathize with David? Does Coetzee write him as a sympathetic character or are we supposed to feel something else toward him?
- How is David affected by his work in the animal hospital, taking it upon himself to put the deceased dogs in the incinerator? Why does Coetzee choose to end the book on this note? Did you find it a satisfying ending or were you looking for more?
- By the end of the book, what do you think is meant by the word “disgrace”? Who experiences the greatest disgrace in the book – David, Lucy, Bev, Melanie or anyone else?
- Is there a purpose in any of the suffering David has endured? Has he changed at all by the story’s end?
- Could this story have taken place in the US?
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Peel My Love Like an Onion by Ana Castillo, our September 2007 Book Club selection:
"For some reason looking Mexican means you can't be America. And my cousins tell me, the ones who've gone to Mexico but who were born on this side like me, that over there they're definitely not Mexican. Because you were born on this side pocha is what you're called there, by your unkind relatives and strangers on the street and even waiters in restaurants when they overhear your whispered English and wince at your bad Spanish. Still, you try at least. You try like no one else on earth tries to be in two places at once. Being pocha means you try here and there, this way and that, and still you don't fit. Not here and not there."
- Alice Maggio
We received many excellent suggestions for our 2008 book list (thank you!), but from the dozens and dozens of titles on our list of potential selections, we had to whittle it down to just 11 books. This task gets harder every year as more great new books get published, and we keep discovering classic titles that shouldn't be overlooked. But, decisions had to be made, and without further ado, here is the complete reading list for the 2008 Gapers Block Book Club.
January
Never a City so Real by Alex Kotlowitz (Crown, 2004)
Explore Chicago in this collection of essays in which Kotlowitz profiles of some of the city's uncelebrated citizens.
February
The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs by Brian Costello (Featherproof, 2006)
Costello's debut novel is a comic story about a garage band called The Enchanters and their fictional suburb of Sprawlburg Springs.
March
Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky (Signet, 2006)
In the 13th book of Paretsky's celebrated V.I. Warshawski mystery series, the detective finds herself coaching basketball at her former South Chicago high school and investigating sabotage at a local factory.
April
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)
This coming-of-age story about a hermaphrodite growing up in Michigan in the mid-20th century won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
May
The Grass Dancer by Susan Power (Berkley, 1997)
Power weaves a unforgettable portrait of the Dakota Sioux Indians in this collection of inter-related stories that draw from contemporary life on the reservation and Dakota Sioux legends. This book won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1995 and was named an ALA Notable Book.
June
Naked by David Sedaris
A collection of autobiographical essays from one of this country's most well-known humorists.
July
Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu (Three Rivers, 2006)
This powerful second novel from Ojikutu continues the story of Tommie Simms. When Simms loses his job at an insurance firm, he begins selling pot to make ends meet and quickly spirals downward into Chicago's dark underbelly.
August
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Scholastic, 2001)
Harmless children's fantasy or dark political allegory? Let's discuss.
September
Native Son by Richard Wright (Harper Perennial, 2005)
First published in 1940, Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young African-American man living on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s who becomes swept up by forces of fear, violence, racism and hopelessness after he accidentally kills a white woman.
October
Dirty Sugar Cookies by Ayun Halliday (Seal, 2006)
A light-hearted culinary memoir from a self-described "anti-foodie."
November
Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott (Random House, 2007)
The true story of Ada and Minna Everleigh, the two sisters who ran the infamous Everleigh Club brothel on Chicago's Near South Side at the beginning of the 20th century.
- Alice Maggio |
Every other Tuesday we ask a new lit-inspired question in Ink.
Reading and writing go hand in hand (here at the book club, we should know). So, there have got to be some budding and aspiring novelists among our ranks. National Novel Writing Month begins November 1. Has anyone here participated? Let us know above in Ink.
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair, our August 2006 book club selection. The narrator, Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, is a young woman growing up on Chicago's South Side in the mid-1960s in this coming-of-age tale.
"I still thought breasts might be more trouble than they were worth. Growing up reminded me a little bit of Hide and Go Seek. When it was your time to grow up, Nature said, 'Here I come, ready or not.' And Nature could always find you."
- Alice Maggio
Could a story like Disgrace have taken place in the United States? One thinks immediately of the ongoing social-economic and racial strife that plagues our nation and is tempted to say yes. In a story that focuses on the disparities between black and white and male and female, America would be the perfect backdrop to explore social inequalities. After all, who among us has not had first hand experience with at least one form of social injustice? But there is something else fueling the story of David and Lucy Lurie that is unique to their environment. Author J.M. Coetzee is famed for his focus on the change in social relations in post-apartheid South Africa and, as such, it is important to take in a bit of South Africa’s history to better understand the perils of Coetzee’s characters.
* * *
“It was history speaking through them. A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.” – David Lurie to Lucy
* * *
South Africa has held a long history of racial segregation, far before apartheid became an official government policy. Though whites have always been the minority -- with nonwhites making up the majority of South Africa’s population -- parliamentary membership was limited to whites in the early 20th century and black land ownership was restricted to a small percentage of South Africa’s total area. In 1948, the National Party introduced apartheid as a part of their campaign and, with their win, apartheid became the governing political policy for South Africa. The word itself means “separateness” in Afrikaans and with its implementation, laws were introduced to classify citizens into three major racial groups – white, black, or colored/mixed descent. These laws determined where members of each race could live, what level of education they could receive and what jobs they could hold, going so far as to limit most interracial social contact. Nonwhites were denied any form of representation in the national government and people who openly opposed apartheid were considered communists. These policies would be in effect through the end of the 20th century.
The African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912 to fight unjust and segregationist government policies. As a nonviolent civil rights organization, the ANC worked to promote the interests of black South Africans through the use of delegations, petitions and peaceful protests. In the 1940s, younger and more outspoken citizens joined the group and the ANC Youth League was formed by new members Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela. The ANC actively opposed apartheid and in 1955 issued its Freedom Charter, stating that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Those ANC members who believed that South Africa belonged only to black Africans formed a rival organization called the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). In an effort to overthrow the ANC, the PAC led mass demonstrations that resulted in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, during which police opened fire on black protestors, some of whom were burning the identity papers they were forced to carry. Sixty-nine people were killed and many more were injured. As a response to the massacre, the South African government declared a state of emergency and banned all black political organizations. In the following years Oliver Tambo left South Africa to create an external faction of the ANC; Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela were sentenced to life in prison.
* * *
“In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus. In the old days one could have had it out to the extent of losing one’s temper and sending him packing and hiring someone in his place. But though Petrus is paid a wage, Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking, hired help…Petrus is a neighbor who at present happens to sell his labour, because that is what suits him. He sells his labour under contract, unwritten contract, and that contract makes no provisions for dismissal on grounds of suspicion. It is a new world they live in, [David] and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and [David] knows it, and Petrus know that he knows it."
* * *
The ANC continued operating in secret while Mandela and other leaders were in prison. It was during this time that Mandela wrote much of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. A 1976 revolt outside Johannesburg led to the reemergence of black politics and renewed the fight against apartheid. In 1984 the South African constitution opened up parliament to Asians, who were then classified as the fourth major racial group, and coloreds, but despite making up 75% of the population, blacks continued to be excluded. It wasn’t until 1990 that, in response to international and domestic pressure and under the leadership of new president F.W. de Klerk, the South African government officially lifted the ban against black political groups, released Mandela from prison, and formally ended apartheid. Four years later, millions of South Africans of all races participated in their first democratic elections and Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president.
* * *
“What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?” – Lucy Lurie to David.
* * *
The effects of apartheid can still be felt in South Africa today and Coetzee makes this clear in the interactions between the white David and Lucy and the black Petrus, a man who helps on Lucy’s farm, and the three men who attacked them. It is David’s belief that they are not responsible for any feelings of animosity between the races, that they should not be made to pay for what history has done, but Lucy takes a more sensitive approach, conceding that this is something with which she must deal to live in the country of her choosing. Coetzee does not provide an answer as to whether these black attackers came to claim a debt or were simply acting out of random violence, or whether David and Lucy, as white South Africans, owe black citizens a form of payment, but these questions are pervasive throughout Disgrace. For his American readers, for whom race relations continue to be in a state of upheaval hundreds of years after the abolition of slavery, Coetzee forces us to wonder if there are any answers at all.
References:
"African National Congress," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
"Apartheid," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
"Nelson Mandela," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
"Sharpeville Massacre," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
"South Africa," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2007
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
- Veronica Bond |
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg, our May 2007 Book Club selection. Betta tries to deal with her husband's terminal cancer in this excerpt:
"Near the end, I started looking for signs that the inevitable would not be inevitable. I watched the few leaves hat refused to give up their green to the demands of the season. I took comfort in the way the sun shone brightly on a day they predicted rain—not a cloud in the sky! I even tried to formulate messages of hope in the arrangements of coins on the dresser top—look how they all landed heads up, what were the odds?"
- Alice Maggio
Just a reminder: We're at the end of our 2007 Book Club picks and we're still in the process of selecting what we'd like to read for next year. That means this is the perfect time for you to tell us what you want to read. Whether it's something you've read and loved and want to share with others, or something you've heard about and are interested in reading, send us your book club requests and recommendations at bookclub[at]gapersblock[dot]com. The only requirement is that the books be somehow related to Chicago (and if you're not sure how your book relates, send us the title anyway and we'll do a little research to see if we can make it work). We're definitely looking forward to another year of great reads.
- Veronica Bond |
Every other Tuesday we post a new literary discussion question in Ink. This time I'd like to know if you have a favorite place to read. Do you read in bed? Have a special reading chair? Prefer to head out to a particular café or coffeehouse? Where do you like to read? Tell us above in Ink.
- Alice Maggio
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from The Chicago Produce Market by Edwin Griswold Nourse (Houghton Mifflin, 1918). This passage describes the great produce market that used to exist right along the south side of the Chicago River downtown:
"South Water Street is a short east-and-west street, which
lies between the downtown business district ("the Loop")
on the south and the Chicago River on the north. The
portion used for produce-market purposes is a scant half-
mile in length — from State Street west to the turn of the
river. Since the re-numbering of the city a few years ago,
this has become officially West South Water Street, but,
in common usage, little or no attention is paid to this distinction. In fact, to those most concerned it is — and probably will always remain — simply "the Street." Generally
speaking, fruit and vegetable dealers are located in the
eastern part of the district, while the western end contains
the establishments which specialize in meat, poultry,
and dairy products. Likewise, the initiated observe a distinction
between the north and the south sides of the
street, the latter being known as the "busy side." It has
the obvious advantages in summer of being the shady side,
and stores on this side of the street run back to an alley,
which is convenient for handling goods, whereas those on
the other side, besides being quite shallow in depth, back
up to the Chicago River, from which no goods are received.
Both sides of the street are lined with low brick stores,
none of them new and many of them dating back to the
days just following the great fire of '71."
- Alice Maggio
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
(Penguin Books, 1999)
A man who brings his own shame upon himself; a woman who must live with the indignities forced upon her – these are the fates of the characters in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Though set in a world unknown to most of us, Coetzee’s David Lurie and his daughter Lucy engage in a universal exploration of what it means to be a man and a woman, a father and a daughter. Their story is one of opposing ideas – learning, outrage, indignity, tolerance, disbelief – at discovering the cruel nature of the world in which they live.
For David Lurie, a communications professor who teaches at Cape Technical University in South Africa, disgrace happens when his affair with a student is found out and he does nothing to save himself from the worst fate possible. It’s never clear who leaked the information about the affair and whether the girl in question truly wants him punished, but Lurie refuses to make excuses for his behavior when tried by his peers and is subsequently fired from his teaching position. With little more to keep Lurie going than the his suppressed love of Romantic literature and his work on a book about Lord Byron, he leaves Cape Town to spend some time with his daughter on her farm in the Eastern Cape. It is here that Lurie undergoes an event that forces him to examine what disgrace and punishment really are.
Lurie is a man dissatisfied with his place in life. He’s been married and divorced twice, his passion for literature has been whittled down to a single class he’s allowed to teach at the university and he uses women for sex while never once offering them love. “Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes – all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes,” he thinks, pondering the type of man he sees himself becoming. His affair with his student has nothing to do with love, but rather is a product of how seducing and exploiting a young girl - both physically and, as he would like to believe, intellectually - makes him feel. Little does Lurie know that his move to rural South Africa will teach him more about what it means to have the passion for subjugation dominate one’s life.
A product of Lurie’s first marriage, Lucy lives, by Lurie’s own comparison, a more-small minded and simpler life. She walks barefoot to greet him, keeps dogs in a kennel on her farm, and maintains friendships with people who are unattractive to him. This simplicity is part of reason he chooses to spend time with her following his hearing, hoping that he’ll be able to complete his Byron book, but it is also something he tries to change in her. “And this? Is this what you want in life?” he asks Lucy, gesturing toward her house. “It will do,” she replies. When the two are later confronted by a group of men who not only rob them of their possessions, but also rob them of their dignity and, for Lurie, social power, they find themselves dealing with the calamity in very different ways. While Lucy’s method of coping is one of quiet acceptance, Lurie is outraged that such things can happen with little recourse for justice. This is the first time he truly knows what it means to be used and exploited and to be left in a state of disgrace.
Though the novel’s outlook and central story may be grim, Coetzee’s sparing and exacting prose wonderfully complicate an otherwise depressing tale. Disgrace could easily be read as little more than a depiction of political unrest in post-Apartheid South Africa, but the trials undergone and perspectives gained by the father and daughter make their plight universally recognizable. Disgrace was awarded the Booker Prize in 1999 and was named as the “greatest novel of the last 25 years” written in English outside the United States by The Observer. A film starring John Malkovich as David Lurie is currently in post-production and is scheduled to be released this year.
* * *
John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa where he received degrees in both Mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town. He has worked in London as a programmer for IBM, received his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin and served as a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Coetzee won his first Booker Prize for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, making him the first author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice. In 2003 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Currently he maintains Australian citizenship.
- Veronica Bond |
