First Femiliterate for 2010!
We’ve been a bit slow getting started this year but better late than never!
To refresh your memories, we finished last year on the dark and brooding note of Dracula…a creepy classic where we found interesting insights into Victorian notions of masculinity and femininity (remember wonderful Madam Mina? She has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart!)
Moving into 2010, and without further ado! Our first meeting for this year will be on:
- Thursday the 15th July, 7:30pm
- At Kylie’s new lush pad! Her address is 3/42 Flinton st, Paddington
- BYO drinks and book
Below are options for the next book club catch up (you may recognise some as being on previous voting lists) You have till THIS COMING MONDAY (31st May) to vote for your choice and you only have one (1) vote. Get to it!
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
We’ve talked about Kevin; now we need to talk about Lionel. The Post-Birthday World is the author’s eighth novel and, I suspect, her most autobiographical. Its heroine, Irina, is of Russian descent, so she speaks the language Shriver studied at university; she likes to cook with lots of chillies, as does Shriver; they both shop at Oxfam and find the tips of their fingers get chilly because of Reynaud’s disease.
More tellingly, they are both Americans in London who ended secure, long-term relationships with fellow intellectuals because they fell for more creative types – in Shriver’s case a jazz drummer, in Irina’s a world-class snooker player. But there’s one big difference: Shriver only got one life, the one she chose when she left her partner. Irina gets two, which run alongside each other in parallel chapters.
The point at which Irina’s lives diverge comes at a charged moment late at night over the green baize, when the snooker player, Ramsey, leans in behind her to adjust the angle of her cue. Does she advance and kiss him, or does she retreat to the bathroom and the safety of her relationship with Lawrence, her acerbic, committed, un-fun partner?
As it turns out, life really does turn on a throw of the dice: the Irina who inhabits the book’s even-numbered chapters (call her Bad Irina for short) puckers up, and subsequently struggles at home to keep up the fiction that all is well with Lawrence.
The odd-numbered one (Good Irina) makes her excuses and trundles home, smug in the awareness that temptation has been conquered and her moral probity will be rewarded with a long, rich, secure emotional life. Or will it? It’s not until later – much, much later, a humiliatingly long time later – that she begins to suspect there’s something she hasn’t been told.
Good Irina, then, lives the peaceful life, the dull life, the “right” life – but a life that is founded on illusion. Bad Irina makes a hurtful decision and suffers accordingly, but she also gets the rollercoaster highs, the rush of adrenaline and bliss. Ramsey may lack the intellectual nous of Lawrence but Irina finds his sexual pull irresistible, and she falls deeply in love with him despite their squabbles.
Their relationship careers along wildly, adorned by perhaps more extended snooker-related metaphors than are strictly necessary. (“The term referenced a configuration whereby an obstruction you don’t want to hit – cannot hit, by the rules – stands between you and your object. Accordingly, Irina as well had snookered herself.”) Good Irina continues to cook with chillies and occasionally wonder what might have been.
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
The Lieutenant follows Grenville’s earlier historical novel,The Secret River, which fictionalises the life of her convict ancestor and his days in the colony of New South Wales.
Like The Secret River, The Lieutenant also suggests that lack of understanding between two cultures fed fear and led to what we have today – a largely white Australia sorely wounded still by its fumbling 18th century beginnings when whites killed blacks and blacks killed whites.
The Lieutenant was inspired by the First Fleet notebooks of Williams Dawes, an astronomer.
Dawes’ fictional character, Daniel Rooke, settles away from the main camp at Sydney Cove, all in the supposed name of having a clear view of the night sky. Here he discovers a kind of peace and freedom he hadn’t previously known in class-ridden, duty-bound England.
Aborigines visit him and he befriends them.
But his peace is short-lived when duty calls him to join a hunting party.
Without giving away the story altogether it’s enough to know that, in reality, the character upon which Rooke is based, William Dawes, was sent from the colony back to Britain. Dawes spent the rest of his life working to abolish slavery and died in Antigua, where he had established schools for former slaves, in 1836.
This easy-to-read book set this reader thinking about the attitudes of many of our earliest settlers towards Aborigines.
Grenville creates an opening for imagining what might have eventuated if only Australia was settled by men with Daniel Rooke’s sensibilities. Or what might happen if only we could practise those sensibilities now.
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who’d been living in Indonesia when they met.
Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous horrific divorces. Enough said.)
But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which—after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing—gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.
Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is.
Told with Gilbert’s trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to “turn on all the lights” when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities.
Gilbert’s memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller
What part of our selves do we hide away in order to have a stable, prosperous life?
Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides that they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place.
She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage–years of neglect and rebellion, wild transgressions and powerful defiance.
“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” (now also a recently released film) is the study of a brave, curious, multilayered woman–an acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name.
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