Conversation with Books 2008

BOOK LIST

• Consequencesa British novel by Penelope Lively, Viking, 2007.
• Summer, an early 20th Century American novella by Edith Wharton, Bantam Classics, 1993 (originally published 1917), or Aegypan paperback (October 1, 2006).
• Suffer the Little Children, a contemporary Italian police detective mystery by Donna Leon, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007.
• Get a Life, a contemporary South African novel by Nadine Gordimer, Penguin ed., 2005.
• The Sea Lady, a contemporary British novel by Margaret Drabble, Harcourt, 2006.
• Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee, Knopf, 2007.
• Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Pastby Diane Wilson. Borealis Books, 2006.
• The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl, Harcourt, 2007
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, HarperCollins, 2007.
• To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present; ed., Joyce Sutpen, Thorn Tammaro and Connie Wanek. New Rivers Press, 2006.

NOTE: Books listed by Drabble, Gordimer, Lee, Leon, Lively, and Wharton are available in audio format. Drabble and Gordimer also available in large print.
Other Books Worth Mentioning

Panel Participants:
Catherine Lupori, Professor Emerita of English
Judie Martens Flahavan (English, French) '60
Mary Jo Ryan Richardson (Social Studies) '52
Ruth Brombach (French, German) '60, Executive Director, Alumnae Association

Consequences

The first title, Consequences, by Penelope Lively, covers three generations of women in a British family, spanning the years of 1935 to 2001 and beyond. It’s a family saga of 258 pages that is “not so thick, but full of subtle suggestions” says Judie.

The novel begins with two characters meeting in St. James Park in London – Lorna, who just argued with her mother about money and how to make it – and Matt, who is on the outs with his family over money as well, since he is an artist. They fall in love and marry, launching the plot movement through time.

Judie observes that the theme of consequences is examined on the level of personal choices and historical events. Matt returns to England as a veteran, and he like others, is no longer satisfied with the status quo class system of England. He wants more equality. Their daughter, Molly, a librarian, leads a public discussion of the radical book of the times: Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She bucks the usual tide of events in life as well, which leads to a daughter, Ruth, Lorna and Matt’s granddaughter.

Ruth noticed how Lively was so skillful in announcing what will happen without going into monotonous cluttered detail. A mere flashing red light alerts readers to be prepared for an upcoming funeral.

Mary Jo loved the description of the power of poetry from one of Molly’s librarian readings, where she observes that that “words fly off the page and into people’s heads.”

Catherine looked up and saw that the book had mixed reviews because Lively tends to tell a great deal of information, rather than showing every detail. But Catherine didn’t find this style choice offensive, but rather compelling, in Lively’s skilled hands. She found the description of Lorna and Matt’s ideal marriage to be extremely well developed and compelling, as well as the quirky character of Lucius, who relishes “happenstance” and comments on the “very decent mousetrap” that Lorna and Matt had created.

Summer

Summer, by Edith Wharton In this short novella of 204 pages, examines the consequences of the summer of sexual awakening of Charity Royall, who is a mountain girl, from a family of moonshiners, who is adopted by a town family. With a physical conciseness that disconcerted many readers in 1917, Wharton describes the affair of Charity with the educated city man Lucius Harney.

Like Molly, Charity also spends her days at a library, but she is not the educated librarian, but more the custodial keeper of the keys, who wonders if the man for whom the library is named feels “any deader in his grave than she did in his library.”

The panel noted that there were very good reasons for the “staying power” of this gem of a Wharton novella, which her biographer knicknamed “the hot Ethan Fromme.”

Suffer the Little Children

Suffer the Little Children by Venetian author Dona Leon. This Commassario Guido Brunetti mystery, and like those 15 others that come before it, Brunetti is a compassionate and intelligent inspector following a crime with social consequences and complex moral questions, this time, illegal adoptions and illegal pharmaceutical connections. Leon laces the conversations of her characters with social commentary

Ruth was particularly charmed by the wide-ranging enterprises of the police detective’s administrative assistant, who can do everything from breaking into locked computers to staging a fake visit to a medical office. But as delightful, active, and thought-provoking as Ruth found the novel, she thought “there was one plot too many in this book”, noting the subplot at the end that winds things together.

For other panelists, this last situation and plot seemed logical and necessary, foreshadowed in many ways. They all love Donna Leon as an author, and love reading her books to temporarily live life in Italy and find out what Italians are thinking and EATING, especially in Venice.

All the panelists agreed that they loved the first Leon’s Guido Brunetti mystery Death at La Fenice, which is the famous opera house in Venice. Some reviewers have noted that Leon’s books are getting darker, though not less enjoyable to read. She replied that she feels humanity is getting darker and is doomed, but she’s relentlessly cheerful because her life is really good and she loves her characters. It is this love that is clearly communicated, observed the panelists, and makes readers more involved, providing “the more intense experience.”

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Get a Life

Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life, is also a novel of social commentary played out through the complex interplay between the finely drawn characters and the post-apartheid South African society in which they live. As the panelist’s stated, “everything starts local and turns global.”

The unique situation that starts this story is one man’s cancer treatment, which leaves him radio active and thus quarantined in exile away from his wife and son into his parent’s home. This man, Paul, happens to be a white ecologist working to try to stop development, such as a nuclear power plant and a dam, in the South African bush.

The panelist’s drew attention to the many comparison/contrasts going on, from the younger couple Paul and Benni (who works in business advertising) and their toddler Nicholas, and Paul’s parents, Adrian and Lindsay; the environment and business development; colored and white; mother and son; father and son; work and rest for recovery.

This is a novel “relevant to our time and place,” which Catherine found “engrossing, intensely thought-provoking, like a taste of unfamiliar food,” but like such a taste, it is a challenging, dense read, where one has to ponder phrases and sentences on the tongue for a while before one moves on. For one thing, with her sparse prose, Gordimer does NOT use many commas or question marks, and dashes instead of conversational quotation marks, and therefore one has to really pay attention to when dialog begins and ends.

Mary Jo liked how the book examines the consequences of unexpected, unchosen events, such as cancer and its treatments, or the poisoning of the air and water one breathes, as well as more extended and unintended consequences of one’s choices, tracing the endpoint of the radioactive trash thrown out by Paul (since he had to use throw-away plates and silverware to avoid contaminating his parents dining utensils) to the landfill where poor children pick it up.

Ruth liked how it looked at the process of “restoring” Paul, and explored the question of how people respond to serious illness. She found it a “very discussable book,” with much to chew over, and so many ways to talk about it, whether from the point of view of activists of peace and the environment to the pre-apartheid break-up. It provides insights into how the two races are starting to work together to face its common problems.

“No one comes out unchanged, not even those with the most stable of lives" is the panelists' summation of this novel's consequences.

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The Sea Lady

Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady: A Late Romance starts with childhood summers of the main characters, Humphrey Clarke and Ailsa Kelman, spent on the shore of the small town Ornemouth on the North Sea with her brother Tommy and a local boy Sandy Clegg, exploring ocean life and developing friendships.

In their sixties, both academics, Humphrey and Ailsa remeet unexpectedly at the university in Ornemouth, with Humphrey now a marine biologist and Ailsa, a feminist. Their reminisces to themselves and each other of the time the time long shared and the time in between is the fabric of this novel. Their natures and interests are contrasted metaphorically by how they travel to the university, Humphrey by train and Ailsa by plane, and Humphrey attends his event in very staid proper attire, Ailsa makes her presentation dressed as a mermaid, clearly the Sea Lady of the title.

Judie enjoyed the novel but got a little overwhelmed with the details on seal life; as Ruth put it: “sea squirts were big.”

Mary Jo commented on the interesting use of the 19th century style omniscient narrator for which this British author is known. In this novel, she transforms this narrator into a character, the public orator, which contributes to both the satisfactory ending and the twists of plot.

Ruth loved the rich imagery in the book and found the concept of the spawning salmon returning to the place of its birth apropos, as this couple have an uncommon yearning to go back to the place they spent their summers, and in the return, they find more than they expected. Judie felt it could have been accomplished “with a few fewer fish!”

Despite swimming through schools of fish, Judie admired Drabble’s “generous and unsentimental truthfulness of childhood.”
Catherine said that “Drabble never uses one word if she can use three,” and if you like a novel thick with imagery, you’ll love The Sea Lady.”

Edith Wharton

As for Hermione Lee’s biography Edith Wharton, is one that will last, concludes Catherine. Accessible, enlightening, and meticulously researched with access to previously unpublished letters, the biography is structured into a series of essays on biographical themes, such as travel, gardening, homes, war work, etc. It brings Wharton alive with all her complexities and with some steamy romance in mid life.

Though Wharton never wrote a biography, she drew “used her experiences ruthlessly for her fiction” from her structured formal upbringing to her cold, unsatisfying imprisoning marriage with longings for something more, to her romance. From this biography, one finds the sources of experiential truth that underlay her fiction.

Since it is 800 pages, and a leisurely read, it’s a book “one renews a number of times,” but it’s not overwhelming because of the self-contained essay chapters.

Mary Jo recommended that the audience read her short story, but ten pages long, written when Wharton was in her seventies “Roman Fever”.

Spirit Car

Ruth effused about Diane Wilson’s Spirit Car: A Journey to a Dakota Past, “I absolutely love this book!”

It is memoir mixed with fiction-enhanced family history, in an attempt to put some flesh and bones on the people nearly forgotten who survived the Dakota – American conflict in 1862, which was bloodied with inter-tribal conflict as well, leading to the agonizing march of women, children, and elders over 150 miles from Fort Ridgely to imprisonment in an internment camp at Fort Snelling, where 130 perished. Wilson’s mother, who endured two years of boarding school, had never wanted to talk about their Dakota past, carrying with her imposed shame. Diane recreates the real situations but inhabits them with imagined conversations.

Wilson, though, through her research and storytelling is determined to free them from the burden of this shame and reclaim their heritage for "we are the sum of those who have come before us." She muses "our daily lives are only the tip of the mountain that rises above hundreds of years of generations whose experience, acknowledged or not, has everything to do with the people we become."

Ruth particularly liked the metaphor of the spirit car. Wilson begins this journey in a very practical Toyota Corolla, but at some point she has to exchange this for a spirit car in which all her relatives can fit, along with their voluminous amounts of baggage. They, of course, like any group of relatives, don’t always get along, so it can get pretty rowdy in this car, being so full of life and stories and differing opinions.

Part One of the book is about the “original sin” of Minnesota, the Dakota “uprising” and aftermath, and Part II is about Wilson’s own life and the interrelationships of her mother and aunts, and the gift she gives them in cleaning up the hide garments of their family history so they can wear them with pride.

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The Florist's Daughter

This mixed genre memoir was followed by Patricia Hampl’s more traditional but finely crafted memoir The Florist’s Daughter, about her mother’s death and her relationships with her father and mother.

This book opens as Hampl, in a bedside vigil, begins to choose the words for her mother’s obituary. Years ago, Mary Jo actually noticed this obituary Hampl’s mother, with whom she shared a second cousin, and when she read it, she was so impressed she cut it out and saved it. She found herself “moved and impressed by the book” and she saw similarities to Charity Royal who so desperately wanted to move out of the backwaters into the main streams of city life and the young Patricia who longs for deeper, wider, and more swift moving waters than she found in St. Paul. For Hampl, the university of Minnesota “was my Manhattan.”

Ruth, however, wryly quipped, “I am sorry I was not happy with this book, and that’s gentle for how I feel.” Ruth tired of Hampl’s reference to her mother as Leo the Lion and just didn’t feel there was any redemption for their relationship even at the end. The sour taste that Hampl had for her mother and St. Paul mellowed, and transformed in some ways, but Hampl’s “superior tone” never seemed to leave, in Ruth’s opinion.

Catherine disagreed, reminding Ruth of Hampl’s travels with her mother to Ireland later in her life that revealed new sides of her mother. Catherine liked the “brutal honesty that makes you admire her more, not less, because she is transparent about how she really felt about her mother and St. Paul.” No prettying things up for publication here. And no one could do anything but admire the power of Hampl’s writing. John Updike called her “the best memoirist”.

Hampl wrote of her fellow St. Paulites: “Our lives were small, our weather was big.”
Mary Jo chimed to express her love for Hampl’s poem “St. Paul, Walking.” Everyone agreed that Hampl writes like the poet she is.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver’s (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, is a family memoir, with husband Steve providing the Appalachian farm and sidebars on environment and economics, nine-year old daughter Lily offering home grown chickens and eggs, and daughter Camille offering comments on food and recipes at the ends of chapters. They all worked on the gardens.
The family chose try to live for a year off the land and locally grown foods, and they discovered that the attempt was not depressing, but delicious – they were surprised at how much more flavorable everything tasted. Formerly, they had been vegetarians, and now they became conscientious carnivores.

Judie loved the humor and reality in the book, especially when they described taking a week vacation in June only to come home to find that the weeds had completely taken over. Judie said that Kingsolver could even make the sex lives of her turkeys interesting and funny.

“I’m not going to be doing this,” Judie admitted, “But I will be more of a locovore, buying and eating locally grown foods.”

A celebration, Ruth observed, proved challenging, when they had numerous guests coming to feed, but they managed.

Mary Jo did not want to pick up this book and read it because she was afraid she would walk away guilty and bored, but far from it, she enjoyed the read. Catherine considered it amazingly broadening, a challenge to one’s assumptions about eating and what can and cannot be done. She also liked Kingsolver’s perspectives: “human manners are wildly inconsistent… "the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"

To Sing Along the Way

Time was running out, but the panel urged the audience to pick up To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present which includes poems by numerous alumnae, including Sister Mara Stella (Alice Smith) CSJ '24, Nancy Pattock, Norita Dittberner-Jax '66, and Joanne Velz Hart '49.

The publisher describes the book in this way: "The first historical and contemporary anthology of Minnesota women poets, this anthology is edited by three prize-winning poets. Poems included range from the earliest poetry in Minnesota-oral song-poems of Ojibwe women-through the sounds and rhythms of early-twentieth-century formalism and contemporary free verse.

"Arranged chronologically, these disparate poems are connected by the common thread of universal themes and reflect Minnesota's diversity of women's voices. Among the more than one hundred contributors are Harriet Bishop, Candace Black, Frances Densmore, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Eastman, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, and Patricia Hampl. Contributors' biographies and suggestions for further reading are included."





Old Filth by Jane Gardam, Europa Editions, 2006. Don’t let the title stop you from reading this totally delighteul novel, we talk about this at another Conversation last spring. Everyone we know who read this ahs joined our enthusiastic recommendation. Unforgettable!

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Algonguin, 2006. In case you missed this, give yourself the pleasure -– Jacob in the nursing home is someone you should meet. We guess that many would agree.

The View from Castle Rock: Stories by Alice Muron, Knopf, 2006. Great short story writer Munro based the stories in this collection on matieral about her father’s family that (she writes in the foreword) she had been collecting for a long time. The result is one of her best, we said when we talked about it this spring.

Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk about It by Krista Tippett, Penguin PB, 2007. Though we haven’t read this, we have heart Tippett either on her programs on MPR or when she spoke on campus a couple of years ago. The book, described as ‘spirtual memoir, theological tract, and manifesto (that presents] a new way of speaking about religion that helps avoid common minefields,” sounds like good preparation for Tippett’s appearance on February 17 at the Westminister Presbyterian sponsored by the ecumenical collaboration “WomenSpirit.”

Women of Vision: Their Psychology, Circumstances, and Success, edited by Eileen A. Gavin, Aphrodite Clama, and Mary Anne Siderits, Springer, 2007. We list this for its connection with CSC – Editor Gavin ’53 and three other contributors are alums or current faculty members. Gavin’s essay is on Annette Walters, CSJ, ’31; alum Barbara Boyce Biales ’57 writes on Shirley Chisholm.




Explore the list with books that have musical or St. Paul connections on the book list for the Conversation with Books for the Friends of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. For more...

Conversation with Books 2007 Was Also a Literary Success! Explore the books from 2007....

For Lifelong Learning's Evening Scholar and Other Alumnae Educational Programs, click here....

Also, watch for the companion event in the fall, Booked for the Evening, which provides recommendations of books for youth.