Conversation with Books 2010

In 1965, Catherine Lupori was teaching in the English Department, Ruth Haag Brombach was the editor of SCAN, and Sr. Marie Ursule Sanschagrin was director of the Alumnae Association. To keep St. Catherine graduates as engaged with literature as they were when they were students, Lupori developed this alumnae event to discuss selected recent books with a panel of devoted readers. The rest is literary and alumnae history!

The enthusiasm for this event has never flagged, and this year we celebrated 45 years of alumnae loving books. The 2010 panelists were the same as in the past, as seen below:

Mary Jo Ryan Richardson '52 (who could not attend but sent in her comments from Florida this year!); Catherine Lupori, honorary alumna and Professor Emerita of English; Ruth Haag Brombach '60, Executive Director of SCU Alumnae Association; Judie Martens Flahavan '60.

Book List

The list of books discussed in order of presentation: The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean, Harper Perennial, 2006. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008. The Floor of the Sky by Pamela Carter Joern, University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Olive Kitteridge: Fiction by Elizabeth Strout, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008. Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by Stacy Cordery, Viking, Penguin Group, 2007. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch, Little, Brown and Company, 2009. The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2008. The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, Coffee House Press, 2008. Humming the Blues:Inspired by Nin-Me-Sar-Ra, Enheduanna's Song to Inanna by Cass Dalglish, CALYX Books, 2008.

Translator and Interpreter of Humming the Blues Reads from Her Work Topping the evening, author/translator Cass Dalglish appeared and read an excerpt from Humming the Blues. Nin-Me-Sar-Ra -- a woman and the first person everknown to have signed a poem -- wrote a ballad in cuneiform of Enheduanna, a powerful Sumerian princess in 2350 BCE who begs the goddess Inanna (who entered the underworld and returned) for help overcoming a usurper. Adopting a jazz aesthetic, Dalglish improvises on her translations from the cuneiform, re-examining the Sumerian poem through feminist lenses. Giving fresh interpretations to the originals, these poems form jazz-like riffs to carry the reader back to the lands of ancient Iraq during the time when gods were women, as in this excerpt: And when you squat with your weaving twisting and untwisting the threads of life, you harvest spirit, you reap breath, you cradle souls at your breast, you let the flaws unravel. Your hands speak in metaphor, they reach, they tell stories, they reach again, they want it all, and there you are, counting, counting to seven, counting all there is; hours, days, every moment squeezed in your fist, chained to your wrist bones, the universe tied by silky cords to your mask. Cass Dalglish is a poet and novelist who holds a Ph.D. from Union Institute and is associate professor of English and chair of women's studies at Augsburg College. She was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award for her novel Sweetgrass (Lone Oak Press) and is the author of Nin (Spinsters Ink).

Our Panelists' Perceptions

Catherine Lupori opened the event by congratulating the many attendees who had been devoted attending readers through the 45 years. The room brimmed with fans.

As usual, and just as unexpectedly, a theme had emerged among the many books: the significance of place.


The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

First-time novelist Dean weaves a two-fold story in The Madonnas of Leningrad, as main character Marina vacillates in Alzheimer bouts of memory loss between her granddaughter's wedding in Seattle in the present and a Bomb Shelter #2 outside Leningrad during World War II. Prior to the war, Marina had been a docent at the Hermitage Art Museum where she learned from another docent how to stare at a work of art and memorize it, making a space for it in the hermitage of her mind. She and the other art caretakers ultimately had to take down the paintings and evacuate them to safety, but they left the frames hanging to keep places them on the walls in the hopes the artwork could be returned someday to fill them. Marina's memory takes her to this hermitage and to the bomb hideaway with its strategies for surviving the war that even her husband did not share. Through the novel, the granddaughter learns engrossing and significant details of Marina's life unrevealed before her illness.

Lupori was struck by the author's skillful portrayal of the losses (and some gains) of Alzheimer's -- how Marina's husband notices that the disease does not steal Marina away in a single painful separation, as in death or as in their war parting, but in a wrenching succession of small separations in which she goes to places he can't follow. The most inspiring element for Lupori was how Marina learned to construct "memory palaces" where the works of art could reside safely, and how they sustained her through her time in Bomb Shelter #2 and then in her Alzheimer's period. These memory palaces also offered some glimpses of understanding for those Marina was leaving behind. Lupori observed how as Marina was "losing her memory", she was simultaneously drawing on it again for sustenance.

All the panelists agreed that the book was a worthwhile read and an intriguing interpretation of "place" and how people can use memory for survival. It also explored how family members of people with Alzheimer's make their own journeys trying to follow those they love to places they haven't been.



Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

This novel, which won the 2006 Bellweather Prize for a literary first novel about a social justice issue, is mudbound with a vengeance in the Mississippi Delta. Six characters take turns telling their perspectives: three white, three black. Laura McAllan, a Memphis schoolteacher marries Henry, a Delta landowner, and together move to a shack on the farm the family once inhabited, along with their two children and his mean, misogynist, racist father. The story revolves around Laura's trying to raise her two children amid this harsh environment in 1946, right after the war. Her soldier brother returns, harassed by nightmares and dissolved by drinking -- while the son of the "feisty" black sharecropping family next door also returns, unwilling to go from being a soldier man to a black "boy."

Lupori found the book "an absorbing read", with a sense of impending doom propelling the characters to a "stunning" climax and an "only maybe possible ending." Nasty Pappy is the only character who does not get his "say" in the story, which in some ways, the panelists agreed, might have been a weakness in the novel, as readers don't get to figure out where he comes from. But Ruth noted that that often happens in life as well with wrathful characters.

Judie explained (courtesy of an author interview in the back of her book) that Jordan had intended to have Pappy describe his own funeral to give him a voice, but Barbara Kingsolver and Jordan's editor convinced her not to. "I think Hillary Jordan didn't feel strong enough as a first time novelist [and the winner of Kingsolver's prize] to fight Kingsolver and her editor on this point, " said Judie. "And maybe she didn't know how to make a character that hateful come to life." Jordan, though, had drawn from some personal experience in writing this book, as own family came from Arkansas, where she learned from their stories about life at a muddy bottom.

Mary Jo Richardson so disliked Pappy she didn't want to even send notes back on the book. Ruth found it "absolutely shocking" how much evil was in this book: "the massive lies -- you knew that the end was going to be horrible, and it was. ... It made me wonder, why would you want to write about this? But we'll never forget it, will we?" Pappy's a man you love to hate, Ruth stated, and Mary Jo admitted Mudbound would make an "awfully good book club book."


The Floor of the Sky by Pamela Carter Joern

"Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the earth; but here the earth was the floor of the sky" is the quote from Willa Cather that provides the title for this novel about the bluestemmed prairie land of Nebraska and its people. Secrets are as central as the land in this story about the 72-year-old widow Toby (Gertrude), who is determined to try to retain her land and pass it along intact to someone, despite the efforts of the town's villain banker, who, of course, wants to slate the land for development. Toby and her sister live alone until Lila arrives. Lila's a studded and pierced sixteen-year-old, the pregnant child of Toby's estranged adopted daughter, who herself is a flighty flight attendant. With her brash attitude and revulsion for farm life, Lila has a harsh adjustment period, wrenched from the city to the ranch and two old ladies. The cemetery and its history, though, proves fertile ground for Lila in seeking out what lies underneath the confused relations and unspoken tensions. As one reviewer stated, "quiet heroics, tenacity, and courage" are part of the earthen truths unveiled. Varied perspectives narrate this stern but engrossing tale in short, swift chapters. "That's why it's effective to have the story told from multiple points of view, because you don't know who knows what," observed Ruth, getting laughs when she added: "but there were almost too many parallels -- I have baby, you have a baby. I have a secret, you have a secret...." The "evil" banker even plays the villain in the town's vaudeville melodrama and gets his just desserts.

Summing up the panelists' thoughts, Judie quoted a reviewer who stated "we are the wiser for having read it."


Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Ruth introduced this Pulitzer Prize winner by saying "I read it and reread it and thought 'What the heck is she saying here?' So I reread it again.. .. The fault was not in the book, but me." This tale of an acerbic 7th grade teacher, wife, mother, and mother-in-law along with her neighbors and family members is told through thirteen stories -- again from different characters' perspectives. Sometimes Olive takes center stage and sometimes she is but a footnote to someone else's drama. Yet as the Publisher's Weekly reviewer stated: "the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout."

A small town on the Maine coast backgrounds the sweep of Olive's life, where she knows everyone in town, having taught most of them. She bridles her extroverted pharmacist husband, drives her son Christopher into depression, alienates his two wives in succession, and tosses toxic verbal waste wherever she feels, attending to her own wounds. Ruth considered her "the bad side in all of us." There are, however, moments of awakening as Olive, aging, meets an acquaintance on the beach who falls, worrying about dying, and she realizes that she "can't squander her days anymore." Ruth said, "the characters were so well described that I talked to them, telling them 'don't do that!' They, of course, didn't pay a bit of attention to me." In doing so, though, they certainly proved that they were real.

Judie enjoyed Olive's exuberant in-your-face nonconformity: "Olive does what most people would like to do, but never would . . . like serving guests she didn't like baked beans out of a can." It's a book that people seem to either love or hate, as exemplified by some of the contrasting blogs about it on the NPR web pages: "In a world of political correctness and people reluctant to speak the truth," wrote a retired English teacher, "Olive is so refreshingly real. Everyone needs a friend like her: someone to strip away the falseness ... I am a usually a serial reader but with Olive I had to stop for days-weeks- to reflect on the lives and the meaning of the characters, not wanting to have any other characters interfere!" Following this perspective came: "I found Olive to be the most unsympathetic, disagreeable character that I’ve encountered in a long time. I felt sorry for her when she lost her husband to a stroke, but I still couldn’t overcome my feelings of antipathy. The other people in the book led lives of such quiet desperation that it made me feel very lucky! My life hasn’t been all sweetness and light but in contrast to most of the people in this book, it’s been a piece of cake!!" As the panelists concluded, clearly this is another very discussable book club pick.

Catherine found the author interview at the book's back "the most enjoyable I've ever read." Stout claimed that she told the story as an episodic novel from different points of view because Olive was "such a force to contend with that readers might need a break from her." At that, Olive, the character herself spoke up to Lupori's delight, making the addendum as interesting as the novel. The panelists concurred that Olive Kitteridge punches the reader with "a cumulative emotional wallop" and "if you have not met her yet, be sure you do."



Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by Stacy Cordery

Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said that her father, Teddy Roosevelt, "liked to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral." Perhaps he could only be shown up by his daughter, Alice, dubbed "Princess Alice," who inherited his propensity for living large and stealing the limelight -- especially the political limelight. Alice Roosevelt Longworth bathed in such brilliance till her death at the age of 97, entrancing and manipulating the press, holding political court in her home salon, arranging personal and political affairs, and delighting those around her with her biting intellectual wit. This expansive and detailed (sometimes too detailed, according to the panelists) biography offered new insights into a previously foggy period of American history. As Ruth noted, "I could go swimmingly through the Civil War and then I hit a huge blank after 1900." Alice filled that blank to overflowing , describing the inner workings of American internal power squabbles and international foreign relations, including those with Cuba, England, China and Japan. The sense of place that rooted Alice Roosevelt was Washington, D.C., her hometown and seat for viewing the universe.

Judie observed that it took Teddy a while to capitalize on his daughter's magnetic presence, but once he did, he set her free on the world stage to take it by storm. Alice became the press's and the nation's darling and then that of Congressman Nick Longworth, her senior by more than ten years.

Their wedding shifted Alice's allegiance from supporting her father's progressive political allies to Nick's Republicans, a painful move. Ruth liked the sweep of personal and national history portrayed by the careful researcher Cordery, but was annoyed at times by the author's sometimes overuse of conjecture and presumptions to supply the personal feelings of the real-life characters -- "Perhaps Nick was bothered, perhaps Alice felt....". "What right do we have to judge?" asked Ruth. But she then added, "I was troubled by this but not so much that I didn't love the book."

Catherine found the relationship between the first cousins Alice and Eleanor Roosevelt fascinating. "Alice took after her cousin when Eleanor dared to campaign for a candidate who ran against Alice's brother Teddy." Catherine also sighed ruefully that as a person living through some of the history she recalled hearing plenty about Alice's scandalous affair and ensuing pregnancy with Senator Blair, but nothing of Nick Longworth's copious philandering.

All the panelists loved Alice's voracious reading habits, finding books her best companions and staying up till 3 am to read from a wide variety of genres and fields. Her "America first" politics in the face of Hitler's movements were less popular, but still interesting. Catherine also found it admirable how Roosevelt Longworth dedicated herself day after day to congressional hearings, she was so compelled by politics. Who couldn't love Cordery's unveiling of Alice's vivacity, ruthless intellectual honesty, and overflowing verbal banter? Judie loved the needle-pointed pillow given to Alice that summed the style of her political salon: "If you can't say something good about someone, come sit here by me.'



Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch

Catherine, of course, hardly came to this biography unacquainted with O'Connor's life, but she still found the book illuminating because it included excerpts from Flannery's unpublished letters. O'Connor died at the age of 39 in 1964, and originally, her friend and sister-in-law Sally Fitzgerald had planned on publishing Flannery's letters, but Sally died before she could do so, leaving Gooch fresh material to mine. Gooch also interviewed many who knew O'Connor, using their memories to set scenes with novelistic details. Contrary to many myths of her being a recluse, Gooch portrays in detail Flannery's extensive social network and her many travels until she was confined by lupus. (Catherine chuckled at the irony that O'Connor's biographer would have a last name as funny as one of her characters.)

Judie liked how readable the biography was and how Gooch showed O'Connor as a product of rural Georgia. O'Connor's family "didn't consider themselves 'country folk' but they were surrounded by them and she wrote about them." A neighbor of O'Connor's noted that Flannery was probably a lovely person but she didn't want to get too close to her or she might end up in one of her stories.

Mary Jo remembered how O'Connor's mentor, Kentucky-born author Caroline Gordon -- a Catholic convert, author of numerous novels and short stories, and winner of the O'Henry and Guggenheim prizes for writing -- spoke at St. Catherine's in the 1950s. In her speech, Gordon praised this new writer she had discovered, Flannery O'Connor.

Catherine was struck by how convinced O'Connor was from a young age in the value of her own writing, sure that she would be remembered and read 100 years after her death, which made her all the more dedicated. O'Connor is certainly well on her way toward this 100 year achievement, considering, as Catherine did from reading the biography's acknowledgments, that even unusual people can be found loving O'Connor, such as Conan O'Brien, who did his thesis on her, calling her America's darkest and funniest writer.


The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper

"I loved it!" said Ruth, "It made very real to me the country of Liberia and the wonderfully successful person Helene Cooper is."Liberia was the first independent country in Africa, and Helene Cooper grew up in one of Liberia's educated dynasty families, descendants of the first tough U.S. emigrated settlers to Liberia in 1820. Cooper's childhood is happy and lavish, until her father decides to build the family an isolated mansion on Sugar Beach. Lonely and frightened of the sounds of the African bush, Cooper whimpers at being alone in her new bedroom so her family brings in a "country" girl --Eunice -- to be her companion (an accepted custom). Unhappy, Eunice runs away twice, but her mother drags her back because of the unprecedented opportunity of living with the wealthy Coopers, part of the Liberian elite, or "Congos." Eunice is adopted as Helene's sister, but not treated exactly the same, not receiving the same education or becoming a "little Liberian princess" as Helene was.

When Cooper is 14, a hellish civil war breaks out, with dire consequences to her family and other Liberian elites. The Coopers flee to America, leaving Eunice behind. After reading "All the President's Men" and following Watergate, Cooper decides to become a journalist, graduating from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and scrapping her way up through local newspapers to two of the nation's top newspapers -- the Wall Street Journaland then the New York Times as a foreign correspondent. She nearly loses her life covering the war in Iraq, which leads her to the realization that there is a story within her own life that needs covering -- that of her homeplace in Liberia and the fate of her adopted sister Eunice.

It's another tale of the "haves" and "have nots," stated Judie, as Eunice was clearly part of the left behind, literally and figuratively, and she was not impressed by the actions of her "Congo" family. The difference between Eunice's and Helene's lives cannot be more stark. Through interviews, Helene had discovered that Eunice had asked to stay behind to be with her mother and finish her senior year in high school, but that did not assuage all the questions or guilt Helene confronts and struggles with.

Catherine found it an astonishing story of a courageous woman -- "persuasive, memorable, and unflinchingly honest, without a touch of sentimentality."

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, Coffee House Press, 2008.

Mary Jo discovered this book after it won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Reviewers emphasized the grace, beauty, and significance of this writing by Kao Kalia Yang, which chronicles the lives of her Hmong family in their flight from their mountain rainforest home in Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to their immigrant resettlement in California and St. Paul, Minnesota. Yang's grandmother emerges as a unifying force. Orphaned early in life, Yang's grandmother places her life's energies into keeping the family together, advocating the strength of many sons holding hands to keep the web of the family tightly woven through travels and travails. Yang herself was born in the Thailand refugee camp and only learned of her family's history through its traditions of storytelling, as the Hmong people had no written language.

Yang felt safe in the refugee camp surrounded by her extended family, but with its disbanding, her family ended up split between the West Coast and Midwest of the United States, and Yang and her family had to adjust to cold winters, a predominantly Christian culture, working numerous urban jobs, and attaining an education in English.

Since the Hmong had assisted the United States military in the Vietnam war, they were considered traitors and collaborators in their country of origin and could never return, so they came St. Paul not only looking for an economic livelihood, but for a new home country. As they are not the first people to establish themselves in such a way, they saw themselves as the latehomecomer.

Reading this memoir, it hit Ruth how human beings, even in the direst circumstances, long to act out normal rituals, as demonstrated by how Yang's parents were married in the jungle while in danger and fleeing the army troops.

The panelists all concluded that this memoir movingly articulated the universal story of immigrants but also a very poignant particular tale of the unique struggles and strengths of the Hmong in St. Paul. This memoir is particularly timely and pertinent for a St. Catherine's crowd as SCU has more Hmong students than from any other minority group. It's a literary journey that will not disappoint.


Additional Books Worth Noting

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008. If you missed this thoroughly delightful surprise, run, do not walk, to the nearest library—a book to make you glad you are a reader. Recommended by all of us.

The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James, HarperCollins, 2009. Mary Jo tells us this fictional account “makes Charlotte and her sisters come alive…[and] gives readers a new insight into the experiences that led to…the writings of the three Bronte sisters.” We other three plan to follow her recommendation.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, HarperCollins, 2009. Published too late to make this year’s list, this hefty novel, which combines history with absorbing fiction, is being enthusiastically recommended by CL.

The Habit of Being: Letters Edited and with an Introduction by Sally Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979. The perfect complement to the Gooch biography, these letters give you O’Connor alive.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, Viking, 2009. Catherine, who liked this novel a lot, fully agrees with one reviewer’s comment: “Toibin’s prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable. As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where it really is, Brooklyn has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of [its protagonist’s] struggle.”

My Bird by Fariba Vafi, translated from the Persian by Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell, Syracuse University Press, 2009. This novel, by an award-winning Iranian novelist, will be good to read as an accompaniment for the upcoming exhibit in the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery on campus of “Women Artists from the Islamic World.” Translator Nasrin Jewell is Professor of Economics at SCU.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zasak, Knopf, 2005. If you, like us, missed this much-awarded, uniquely presented novel of the Holocaust, it is certainly another reason to use library resources. Originally published as young people’s fiction, this soon extended its readership. Catherine Lupoir found it unforgettable.


Good reading to you!

Ruth Brombach, Judie Flahavan, Catherine Lupori, Mary Jo Richardson


For more picks, Catherine Lupori recommends BookWomen Magazine from Women's Press. The Floor of the Sky was a discovery from this publication.