This month's book discussion is part of a San Leandro Library community reading event called "Read the Book — Join the Conversation," modeled on the NEA "Big Read". More information about Brother, I'm Dying including a list of characters and links to further reading, can be found on the NEA website by following this link. Edwidge Danticat's biography can also be found at this site by clicking "About the Author" on the list on the left side of that page or by following this link.
From the NEA website: "In addition to Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat has written several novels, young adult fiction, a collection of short stories, a children's book, and several essays for The New Yorker and The New York Times, among many other publications. Danticat's writing—whether fiction or nonfiction—is united by its dedication to Haitian peoples and culture, drawing heavily on her own experience as an American immigrant from Haiti."
A list of Danticat's articles for The New Yorker can be found at this link.
In the video below, Edwidge Danticat discusses Brother, I'm Dying
For some historical background on the country of Haiti, which Danticat frequently refers to in the book, here is a timeline published by the BBC.
I went looking for some Haitian music to set the mood, and I found everything from jazz-influenced to rap and reggae. The Haitian music I thought most pertinent to this book though, because of the importance of faith to the lives of the two brothers, was Haitian Christian music. The song below is called "Avèk Ou," which is Creole for "With You".
Born 1973 in Bielefeld, Germany, Nina George is a prize-winning and bestselling author (“Das Lavendelzimmer” – “The Little Paris Bookshop”) and freelance journalist since 1992, who has published 26 books (novels, mysteries and non-fiction) as well as over hundred short stories and more than 600 columns. George has worked as a cop reporter, columnist and managing editor for a wide range of publications, including Hamburger Abendblatt, Die Welt, Der Hamburger, “politik und kultur” as well as TV Movie and Federwelt. Georges writes also under three pen-names, for ex “Jean Bagnol”, a double-andronym for provence-based mystery novels.
I would provide the usual YouTube video of Nina George talking about The Little Paris Bookshop, except for the fact that all her interviews are in German with German closed captioning.
Instead, let's take a barge trip from Paris to the Mediterranean:
Your conveyance awaits
Some music for the voyage:
Some stops along the way:
The Seine River in Paris
Melun
Montargis
French tango club
Cuisery (the "village of books")
The Saint Benezet Bridge in Avignon (bonus points if you remember the song from high school French class)
Relevant quote from John Belushi on the luck of the Irish: ... Oh pal. One thing! One thing!!! They love their mothers, boy, oh they love their mothers. It’s momma this, momma that. Oh my Irish mother! Ireland must be heaven, because my mother.. aauugghhh! Aaauugghhh!!!
Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
She is a former RTE television producer. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines including The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and she won the 2004 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award for her short story, 'Honey'. Her short story collection, The Portable Virgin was published in 1991, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two collections of stories, Taking Pictures and Yesterday's Weather were published in 2008.
Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995), shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; What Are You Like? about twins separated at birth who meet when they are 25, winner of the 2001 Encore Award and shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Novel Award; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); The Gathering (2007) about a large Irish family gathering for the funeral of a wayward brother which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; and The Forgotten Waltz (2011). Her most recent novel is The Green Road (2015), which won the Irish Novel of the Year.
Anne Enright has also published a book of humorous essays, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). She lives in Ireland.
Anne Enright Talks about The Green Road
Come in, pull up a chair, but don't break the Belleek
Carl Fredrik Backman is a Swedish novelist and blogger. He was born in 1981 in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 1981, and grew up there. He briefly studied comparative religion in college, but dropped out to become a truck driver. While he was still working as a truck driver, he was contacted by the owner of a free newspaper, Xtra, to write an article for that publication. After that, he wrote that article, he wrote several more for Xtra and then started to write as a freelancer for other publications. He published his first novel, A Man Called Ove, in 2012 in Sweden. Its US release was in 2014. Backman has also written a nonfiction book, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, which was released the same day as Ove in 2012, and two more novels, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (2013), and Britt-Marie Was Here (2014).Source.
Click this link for a brief magazine interview with Backman, and if you read Swedish, click this link to visit Fredrik Backman's blog.
Ove—The Movie
The movie version of A Man Called Ove was released in Sweden in 2015, and an English-subtitled version started touring the US about a month ago. Below is the official trailer.
Ali Smith seems publicity-shy than is normal in the age of social media, so this biography is lifted wholesale from Wikipedia:
Ali Smith was born August 1962 in Inverness, Scotland. She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. Openly gay, she lives in Cambridge with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Fire collection.
Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature.
This is the only YouTube video I could find where Ali Smith talks at all about How to Be Both. It was produced for the 2014 Costa Book Awards for which How to Be Both won in the Novel category.
Ali Smith has written an article in The Guardian, "He looked like the finest man who ever lived," in which she discusses in more depth how Francesco del Cossa's image of March in the frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia served as a jumping-off place for How to Be Both.
The figure of March from the Palazzo Schifanoia
Painting in Fresco
The full March panel from Schifanoia
Painting in Tempera on Wood
Del Cossa's St. Lucy from the National Gallery in London
Musical Accompaniment from Sylvie Vartan
This is the French singer from the 1960s who so intrigued George and H.
Biography of Nell Zink (cribbed wholesale from Wikipedia)
Nell Zink was born in 1964 in California and raised in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A. in Philosophy. In 1993, while living in West Philadelphia, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997 and "featured submissions and interviews with punk musicians about their pets, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp writing about his rabbit Beaton Bunnerius Bun, to Jon Langford, of British punk band The Mekons, discussing his loach fish." Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive, and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. Zink moved to Germany in May 2000, eventually earning a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen. She worked as a contributor for the daily newspaper in Tübingen, Schwäbisches Tagblatt, and later as a translator for Zeitenspiegel agency.
Zink has been married twice. On May 8, 1990, she married Benjamin Alexander Burck in a "very simple civil ceremony" at the Henrico County Courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. She later married the Israeli composer and poet Zohar Eitan.
After fifteen years spent writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen with a "brazen" letter promoting the work of the German ornithologist Martin Schneider-Jacoby. The two writers began a correspondence, and Franzen was surprised to learn that Zink had no published literary work. Zink began to create work for Franzen.
In early 2012, Zink sent Franzen her collected manuscripts. Franzen tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers in her work. It was Franzen's agent who finally negotiated a six-figure publishing deal for Zink's Mislaid. Meanwhile, The Wallcreeper, "about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists" (Keith Gessen), was published independently in the United States in 2014. Her third novel, Nicotine, is due out next month.
In the video below, Nell Zink discusses The Wallcreeper and Mislaid for a French television program. The interview is in English.
Only Tangentially Related
While researching material related to Mislaid for this blog, I heard Nell Zink say she grew up in "Tidewater Virginia." Apparently, this is not a town, but a region (which also includes parts of Maryland and North Carolina). My search also turned up this video of a sales pitch from an older Virginia gentleman, which is highlighted as an example of the Virginia Tidewater accent. I recognize this accent from my high school Home-Ec teacher, who was from Virginia. Note only that the accent is "non-rhotic," which means that r's are pronounced before but not after vowels, as is common for most southern accents, but "ou" is pronounced as "oo" as in some Canadian accents. This is what I remember as being most distinctive about my teacher's accent. Apparently, this accent is dying out. Embedding has been disabled for this video, so you'll have to click on the link if you're curious. Please note that this video is used simply as an example of the Virginia Tidewater accent, and no endorsement of buying swampland is implied.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. His family moved to England in 1960 when his father was invited to be a research fellow at the National Institute of Oceanography. This assignment was only supposed to be for a couple of years but kept getting extended, and Ishiguro didn't return to Japan at all until 30 years later. He attended a grammar school for boys in Surrey, the University of Kent in Canterbury, and a postgraduate creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. While attending university, Ishiguro worked as a social worker in Glasgow, and then after graduating in London. He is married to a social worker, Lorna, and they have a daughter, Naomi.
In 1982, after publication of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro was named one of the "20 Best of Young British Writers" by Granta. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction four times, and his third novel, The Remains of the Day, won that prize for 1989. The Readers Roundtable has featured two of Ishiguro's books, The Remains of the Day in 1997, the second book ever read by the Readers Roundtable, and Never Let Me Go in 2007, one of the first books I read after joining the group. Both of these novels were made into movies.
In a conversation on a talk show from Toronto, Kazuo Ishiguro talks about his latest novel, The Buried Giant, his first novel in ten years.
Part 2 of this interview is also available on YouTube, as is a video interview conducted by The Wall Street Journal. If you have time, follow the links for more info. Of particular interest, in the WSJ interview, Ishiguro talks about the spare English dialect that he came up with for the characters in The Buried Giant.
Themes and Questions
I was going to do a lot of research about the post-Arthurian setting of the novel, as well as the themes and questions raised in The Buried Giant, but the more I read the more questions I had, so I'm just going to highlight some of the major topics we might want to talk about.
Memory and Forgetting
Modern research has indicated that forgetting is a necessary part of remembering, getting rid of conflicting memories in order to organize old memories and form new ones. It is even suggested that you can intentionally dump unhappy memories. But should you? How can you dump unhappy memories without destroying associated good memories? How can you learn from your mistakes if you're always erasing them from memory?
How does this work in a marriage or a family? Among your family and friends, do you ever find yourself saying, like Beatrice, "If that's how you've remembered it, (insert name), let it be the way it was." How does it work in a community? Are the residents of Axl and Beatrice's community really forgetful, or do they just have different memory priorities than Axl and Beatrice? Is it possible that humans have done things so horrible that even God wants to forget about them?
What does Querig, the dragon, represent? By the end of the book, do you believe that it was the mist from her that was really causing the widespread forgetfulness? Who wanted to kill her and who wanted to keep her alive and why? Do you find the use of mythical creatures as an explanation for real-world phenomena jarring or does it fit in with the spirit of the age it represents?
The Legend of King Arthur
The first thing you find out when researching "the real King Arthur," is that there very likely was no such person. No mention of him is found in any historical chronicle until a single line in a history from 830 A.D. The legend doesn't appear in anything resembling its current form until 200 years after that, and it has been told and retold and reworked constantly from that time, its form depending on the sensibilities of the people doing the retelling. In some of the Arthur stories, Sir Gawain appears as the oldest male relative (nephew) of Arthur and therefore his heir-apparent. What is Sir Gawain heir to in The Buried Giant? How well does he uphold the tradition of Camelot?
The story of King Arthur's court, as it first appears in the middle ages, has become a story of distinctly medieval character and contains many anachronisms, in particular the code of chivalry, which didn't exist in the time that the story of Arthur purports to represent. By the time the tradition reached the current era, though, a medieval person would have a hard time recognizing their own era as it had been transformed through the retelling over the ages. In a BBC series available on YouTube, Terry Jones of Monty Python, a Medieval History major at Oxford before his Python incarnation, explains what are the myths about the middle ages and what is the historical reality.
Critical Opinions
I don't read reviews of books until after I've finished the book, in order to avoid spoilers, so if you feel the same way, avoid reading these until after you've finished The Buried Giant.
