I know we tried this before...but would anyone be interested in another "book club" attempt?
I have two ideas off the top of my head -- one book I'd like to reread, and one that I'd like to read (Nick and I just saw and liked the movie version).
Like to reread:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Here's an excerpt for the NYT Book Review (excerpted because I felt the end of the review told a bit too much about the end of the book):
A HINDU, a Muslim and a Christian are trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days with a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It sounds suspiciously like the setup of a joke, something you might hear at a tavern from the guy who's been downing gimlets all night. But "Life of Pi," the Canadian writer Yann Martel's extraordinary novel based on this very premise, is hardly your average barroom gag. Granted, it may not qualify as "a story that will make you believe in God," as one character describes it. But it could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life -- although sticklers for literal realism, poor souls, will find much to carp at.
For one thing, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian are all the same person -- Pi Patel, an amiable Indian teenager who sees no reason why he can't practice three religions at once. He's also something of an expert on animal behavior. As the son of a zoo owner in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, he grew up on familiar terms with howler monkeys, one-wattled cassowaries and American bison. As a result, he's attuned to the intricacies of interspecies cohabitation. "A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence," he explains. "Exactly where an animal says to us, 'Stay out!' with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, 'Stay in!' with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other."
This zoological savvy proves indispensable to Pi when he and his family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move -- lock, stock and menagerie -- to Canada. Like latter-day Noahs, they load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail for the New World. But "midway to Midway," something inexplicable happens. For reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker.
They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone on the 26-foot craft. But thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general bewilderment of two traumatized and seasick creatures, the obvious does not immediately occur. Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach an important insight about his boatmate: "I had to tame him," he realizes. "It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat." As paradoxical as it may seem, Pi understands that his own survival depends on keeping his ferocious opponent alive and well -- "because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker."
Although "Life of Pi" works remarkably well on the pure adrenaline-and-testosterone level of a high-seas adventure tale, it's apparent that Martel is not interested in simply retelling the classic lifeboat-survival story (with a Bengal tiger playing the prickly Tallulah Bankhead role). Pi, after all, is a practitioner of three major religions who also happens to have a strong background in science; with such a broad résumé, his story inevitably takes on the quality of a parable. In fact, although the book reverberates with echoes from sources as disparate as "Robinson Crusoe" and Aesop's fables, the work it most strongly recalls is Ernest Hemingway's own foray into existentialist parable, "The Old Man and the Sea." But while Hemingway depicted the defining struggle of his archetypal man as one of sheer endurance and determination, Pi's battle is more subtle. The boy must finesse his demon, not overcome it, and do so by means of a kind of psychological jujitsu. He comes to realize that survival involves knowing when to assert himself and when to hold back, when to take the upper hand and when to yield to a power greater than himself. He discovers, in other words, that living with a tiger ultimately requires acts of both will and faith.
I liked this book a lot, even though reading summaries of it make you think that it's just some bizarre title.
I'd like to read:
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Again, NYT review (again excerpted, this time for brevity :-P):
Not since Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange" has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio. But if Burgess's hero was an enraged, disaffected English youth bottom-feeding off the detritus of Soviet culture, Foer's narrator is an actual Russian (or more accurately, a Ukrainian) who could hardly be more affable, more engaged or more enchanted by everything American, from Michael Jackson and "the greatest of all documentary movies, 'The Making of "Thriller," ' " to the career of the porn star John Holmes to the "many good schools for accounting," one of which Alex dreams of attending. Alex speaks English like someone who has taught himself by painstakingly translating a really abysmal novel with the help of a badly outdated dictionary. In his idiosyncratic and persuasively consistent lingo, to sleep is to "manufacture Z's," to have sex is "be carnal," good is "premium," nearby is "proximal," difficult is "rigid," and a certain downtown Manhattan neighborhood is, logically, "Greenwich Shtetl."
No matter. Alex is "fluid" enough to be dragooned into working as a translator for Heritage Touring, the travel agency at which his abusive father arranges trips for American Jews "who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and the Ukraine . . . where their families once existed." Specifically, Alex's assignment is to accompany a tourist referred to, alternately, as "the hero" and the "spoiled Jew," and whose real name is, as it happens, Jonathan Safran Foer. "The hero" has come to Ukraine to look for a woman named Augustine, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and whose photograph he carries as a kind of magic talisman. After a first encounter that could hardly be funnier or more unpromising, Alex and "Jon-fen" set out across the "totally awesome former Soviet republic," together with Alex's grandfather (who, despite a case of psychosomatic blindness, has been enlisted as their driver) and along with their overly amorous and malodorous dog, named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., after the grandfather's favorite singer. (After the old man learns, with horror, that the "Negro of the Rat Pack" was a convert to Judaism, he calls his pet Dean Martin Jr.)
The story of their trip is told in retrospect by Alex, who is writing chapters (or, as he calls them, "divisions") and sending them to Jonathan, who, as we learn from letters that Alex writes (and that accompany his "divisions") is editing and correcting Alex's account. Jonathan's emendations are partly concerned with factual accuracy and proper English usage. "I did not utilize the word 'spleen' with such habituality, because I could perceive that it made you on nerves by the sentence in your letter when you said, 'Stop using the word "spleen." It's getting on my nerves.' " More important, the things Jonathan wants altered have to do with preserving each man's touchingly shaky self-regard. "As you commanded, I removed the sentence, 'He was severely short,' and inserted in its place, 'Like me, he was not tall.' " Meanwhile, Alex gets his own chance to play editor and critic, since Jonathan is also sending him chapters of a novel he is writing, a sort of Jewish magic realist epic fable that covers several centuries in the life of a town called Trachimbrod, which is, as it also happens, the name of the town Jonathan is seeking in his quest for the heroic, beautiful Augustine. The Trachimbrod novel is, as Jonathan calls his fiction, very much an "apprentice piece," one that is alternately and sometimes simultaneously sublime and ridiculous, and that, though enchanting, often makes us grateful when Alex reappears to voice questions and doubts we may have entertained on our own. In any case, the Trachimbrod book gives the (real and fictional) Jonathan Safran Foer a chance to display a gift for invention, lyricism and eloquence beyond the reach of the linguistically challenged Alex.
Any attempt to explain the complex narrative strategy of "Everything Is Illuminated" makes it sound more complicated than it is. Actually, it's not difficult to follow, since the structure reveals itself slowly, in stages, and each one of these small revelations is a source of surprise and pleasure. Indeed, one of the book's attractions is its writer's unusually high degree of faith in the reader's intelligence. Sections of the novel refer to other sections in ways that you have to think about in order to make the connections that, once you think about them, are perfectly obvious. The humor ranges from jokes that are, alas, too dirty to be quoted here to the loftiest literary allusions; Foer has so much energy that he doesn't care if we get all the jokes, whether we know that he is paraphrasing Heinrich von Kleist or if we pause to follow the zany logic of a rabbi's bawdy sermon comparing the glass partition separating his male and female congregants to the division between heaven and hell.
In fact, he's got his sights on higher -- much higher -- things than mere laughs, on a whole series of themes so weighty that any one of them would be enough to give considerable heft to an ordinary novel. A partial list of the book's concerns includes: the importance of myths and names, the frailty of memory, the necessity of remembrance, the nature of love, the dangers of secrecy, the legacy of the Holocaust, the value of friendship, what it means to be loyal and good and to practice what Jonathan has taught Alex to call "common decencies." And I'm not even mentioning a whole host of subthemes, including the confusions and collisions between American and post-Soviet culture. Perhaps the most beautifully orchestrated comic set piece in the book involves the Russians' appalled response to "the hero's" vegetarianism -- and a dropped potato.
Such scenes are so virtuosic, so appealing -- and, finally, just so much fun -- that you hardly care when big chunks of the book start to crumble in the last 50 pages or so. The Trachimbrod novel spins out into the ozone, and Alex's story teeters on the edge of implausibility as it strains to illuminate everything. By then, the novel has provided so much enjoyment and accumulated such a store of admiration and good will that such lapses barely matter.
At one point, Jonathan Safran Foer tells Alex that he feels he was born to be a writer. As Alex would say, the reader will harmonize completely. "Everything Is Illuminated" is endearing, accomplished -- and (to quote Alex one last time) definitely premium.
Okay, no more lengthy quoting, I promise. But let me know what you think. I'm also looking at an online book group that reads international stuff, but it might be nice to talk about stuff with people I know already :-)
