Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, December 7, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

Synopsis: Richard is a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.

Photo by Nina Subin

Jenny Erpenbeck: World-Acclaimed Author and Former Opera Director

This biography is lifted wholesale from the unimpeachable source of all knowledge.

Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.

From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles), she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's “Erwartung,” Bartók's “Duke Bluebeard's Castle” and a world premiere of her own piece, “Cats Have Seven Lives.” As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's “L'Orfeo” in Aachen, “Acis and Galatea” at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Zaide” in Nuremberg/Erlangen.

In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2015 the English translation of her novel The End Of Days (Aller Tage Abend) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son and with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic.

I was only able to find a couple of YouTube videos of Jenny Erpenbeck talking about Go, Went, Gone. This one of a reading and discussion at Harvard University, in my opinion, had the best sound quality. As you will notice, it's an hour and 45 minutes long. She is very soft-spoken and has (of course) a heavy German accent. Enjoy.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, November 2, 2019, 2:00 PM San Leandro Main Library

One Station Away by Olaf Olafsson

Synopsis: The story of a New York neurologist and the three women who change his life: An overlooked pianist who finally receives fraught success after decades of disappointment; an elusive dancer whose untimely death her fiancé is desperate to untangle; a mysterious patient who is comatose after a violent accident. Magnus, a New York neurologist—son to one, lover to another, and doctor to a third—is the thread that binds these women’s stories together as he navigates relationships defined by compromise and misunderstanding, guilt and forgiveness, and, most of all, by an obsessive attempt to communicate—to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved.



Tracking the Elusive Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson

Photo by Annelisa Leinbach

Compared to other authors we have read, there is very little to be found about the man himself on the internet. The biographical information is pretty much limited to his official bio everywhere you look:

Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of three previous novels, The Journey Home, Absolution and Walking Into the Night, and a story collection, Valentines. His books have been published to critical acclaim in more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of the O. Henry Award and the Icelandic Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and has twice been nominated for the IMPAC Award. He is the Executive Vice President of Time Warner and he lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

As I was putting this post together, I found an article in Bookpage where Olafsson talks about One Station Away and a little bit about his personal life. Among the interesting tidbits: His father, Olafur Sigurdsson, was an award-winning Icelandic author. You should probably click on the link and read the whole article as this is the longest discussion of the book by the author that I was able to find in any one article. I did find a slide show in the New York Times about his cozy little New York pied-à-terre.

It is easier to find information about his non-literary career. From the fount of all knowledge, I learned that Olafsson had worked for Sony, founding Sony Computer Entertainment at the time that the PlayStation was under development. He has worked on and off for Time Warner but left after the acquisition by AT&T. I was unable to find any in-depth reviews of One Station Away by any of the large periodicals. There are no interviews posted on YouTube either, so instead, I am posting a brief video of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." If you listen closely, it sounds just like Margaret Bergs.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, October 5, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Synopsis: Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

Introducing Tayari Jones

photo: Nina Subin

Tayari Jones was born November 30, 1970, in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She was an A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University and is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University.

Bibliography
Leaving Atlanta (2002)
The Untelling (2005)
Silver Sparrow (2011)
An American Marriage (2018)

Honors and Awards
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction
Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
United States Artist Fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship[
Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship
Silver Sparrow added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.
Member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers

In February of 2018, Oprah Winfrey announced that her latest book club pick was Jones’ novel, An American Marriage. Winfrey said, “It's one of those books I could not put down. And as soon as I did, I called up the author, and said, 'I've got to talk to you about this story.'"

On June 5th, An American Marriage was announced as the winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.

In the video clip below, Tayari Jones discusses An American Marriage on "CBS This Morning" with Gayle King, who obviously hasn't read the book.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, September 7, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

Scene from Camperforce in Coffeyville, Kansas

Who is Jessica Bruder?

(Sources: Official Biography and Wikipedia): Jessica Bruder was born in Clifton, New Jersey. She graduated from Amherst College in 2000, majoring in English and French, and received a master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2005. She has worked as a Starbucks barista, a snowboarder, an "electric guitar nerd," a music store clerk, a junior camp counselor and a waitress.

She now teaches narrative storytelling at Columbia University. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian. She was a staff reporter at The Oregonian. Her photography appears in Nomadland and her first book, Burning Book, and has been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine. She is currently writing about trust in the age of surveillance.

"For her book Nomadland, she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving — from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award."

In the video below, Jessica Bruder discusses Nomadland with Chris Hedges.

In addition to writing Nomadland, Jessica Bruder was also executive producer on a film about "CamperForce," a documentary about retirees working for Amazon.

Footage from "CamperForce" was also used on segment of John Oliver's HBO news commentary/comedy show, "Last Week Tonight." (warning swears and raunchy humor).

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Earthship home under construction

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, August 3, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Harlequin Great Dane

Synopsis: When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. She comes dangerously close to unraveling, but while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Meet Sigrid Nunez

As usual, our biographical sources are the unimpeachable source of all knowledge:

Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975). After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez is currently writer in residence at Boston University and has taught at several other schools including Amherst College, Columbia University, the New School, Princeton University, and Smith College. She lives in Manhattan.

The author's official biography:

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories has been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez’s work has been translated into nine languages and is in the process of being translated into fourteen more.

Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Beginning in fall, 2019, she will be writer in residence at Boston University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.

Interview:



Theme Music:

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, July 6, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Synopsis: A novel in three sections: 1) the story of a May-December romance; 2) the story of an Iraqi-American detained at Heathrow Airport; and 3) a third section which may or may not tie the two unrelated stories together. 

Meet Lisa Halliday

Though Lisa Halliday is in her early 40's, Asymmetry is her first novel. She is so new that, although Asymmetry rates its own Wikipedia page, Halliday does not have a Wiki page of her own. What biography I was able to construct for her comes from an article in the Guardian about the "new faces of fiction for 2018" (Halliday appears about halfway down on the page) and from the official website for the Whiting Award, as Lisa Halliday received a Whiting Award for Fiction for 2017.

The following long quotation is from the Guardian:

...Lisa Halliday, Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress and went on to found a pest control business, Halliday was a bookish child, who would sit on the steps of the local library waiting for it to open. She graduated from a local school to Harvard, an achievement she attributes to the good fortune of growing up in a town with an outstanding record in public education.

But, though she had always been praised for her writing, she lacked confidence, and says “it was meeting real writers and observing their work ethic and their concerns about their work that made me think I could do this – that all it requires is persistence and perhaps I should give it a go.”

She stayed with the Wylie agency for eight years, working in both their US and UK offices, and punctiliously recording in her journal the wit and wisdom of the authors she encountered along the way, before leaving to embark on own writing career. But only now that she is 41, and living in Milan with the distraction of a small baby, is she is publishing her first novel. ...

Her early attempts at writing her own fiction attracted “encouraging rejections”, one of which described her work as “Babar written by EM Forster” – which she took to mean she had talent but had yet to find a story. It was such useful feedback that she has dropped it into the novel.

Gradually, her work began to find its mark, and she started to publish short stories and author interviews in the Paris Review. When her English husband landed a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, and the couple moved to Milan, the pieces of Asymmetry began to fall into place.

The “lightbulb moment” came when she had the idea of pairing the stories of two young people who happened to be living at the same historical moment, during the Iraq war. At first she tried to force their stories to intersect, but gradually she understood that to do so was a mark of immaturity as a writer. “Sometimes,” as Ezra says, “you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist.”...

 Most of the buzz surrounding Asymmetry arises from Halliday's May-December romance with Philip Roth at the time she worked for the Wylie agency in New York City (Wylie were Roth's agents at the time). Roth is widely assumed to be the model for Ezra Blazer in the novel. She touches briefly on this in the video below, along with other themes of the book.



Desert Island Discs

There really is a show on BBC Radio 4 called "Desert Island Discs." If you click on this link right here, you can go to the website and subscribe to the podcast and browse the archives to find out what eight tracks, one book, and a luxury your favorite celebrities would take to a desert island with them.

Of course, since Ezra Blazer is not a real person, his selections won't be in there, so I looked them all up for you.

• How Are Things in Glocca Morra?
• Somehow
• Dvorak: Cello Concerto
• Fauré: Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Minor
• How About You?
• Debussy: Afternoon of a Faun
• Strauss: Four Last Songs (Im Abendrot)
• Albéniz : Iberia : Book 1 - II El puerto

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Synopsis

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. ‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She becomes the first female diver. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

Meet Jennifer Egan

Egan was born in Chicago in 1962 but grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Lowell High School, she majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, Egan spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award where she earned an MA

Egan came to New York in 1987 and worked a strange array of jobs while learning to write, such as catering at the World Trade Center. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001 and starring Cameron Diaz. She has published one short story collection and four novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

She currently lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. As of February 28, 2018, she is the President of the PEN America Center.

Partial Bibliography

Novels

• The Invisible Circus (1995)
• Look at Me (2001)
• The Keep (2006)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
• Manhattan Beach (2017)

Short fiction

• Emerald City (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996)
• "Black Box" (short story; 2012, US; released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)

There were shorter videos available of Jennifer Egan talking about Manhattan Beach, but this video at the Brooklyn Historical Society is full of detail about all the research she put into writing this book. There are a few time when she points to slides being displayed over head which are not visible from the camera angle, which I admit is kind of frustrating, but I still found this video more informative than the others I watched.



New York City during the World War II Era

As Jennifer Egan mentions in the above video, Manhattan Beach was a beach-side resort community during the period in which the book was set. I found a page with 16 picture postcards from the Manhattan Beach of that era.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Here's a video on how to properly deploy an underwater diving suit. Unfortunately it's kind of long, but it helps reinforce the description from the book.



In the book, Anna's father is a bag-man making connections between the Longshormen's Union and the mob. This was a notorious concern at that time, as explained in this article about the link between those two organizations.

The Cadillac 62 Series, the last model off the production line until after the war.
(Dexter Styles car)

The Bay Area's Own Shipbuilding and Repair World War II History

The San Francisco Bay Area had its own prominent role to play in wartime shipping, and you can find monuments to those days if you care to take a short day trip.. The Mare Island shipyards were featured in the book, and you can find a historic park and museum in Vallejo.

Better known is the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, where you can still sometimes meet women who actually lived the kind of life story as portrayed in the book.