“The Mothers” by Brit Bennett (September 1, 2021)

 We’re back in lockdown again so that means we’re back on Zoom.

While I didn’t mind book, for one of the first times I wasn’t able to finish it due to pressing work commitments. I got about halfway through. It didn’t help that we’d gone into lockdown again and the book is a challenging read, the protagonist has an abortion and her mother commits suicide before we’re twenty pages in.

Matt made a very good point that really challenged the consistency of the book’s world: the protagonist’s boyfriend who has got the young woman pregnant borrows the money from her parents for the abortion. He found that very difficult to imagine and I tend to agree.

Without having finished the book it doesn’t seem fair to write much more.

We have a slightly longer book next month, J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. Hopefully we’ll be back at The All Nations but I suspect it will probably be Zoom again, see you on October 6 in any case.

“Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murate (August 4, 2021)

 Our book, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev was apparently something of an upheaval in Russian writing but I found it very hard going to read. I didn’t care for the characters in the book much, they seemed pompous and brimming with entitlement and disdain for other people not of their class. The only character that seemed to have any sense of humanity was Madame Odintsova but even the interactions between her and the wooden and remote main characters never seemed to mesh, something that I’m sure the author was fully aware of.

Our book for next month is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. I’m not sure quite how we wound up landing on this book but there was another of those long sessions as we bandied around all sorts of options and possibilities. See you at the All Nations on August 4.

“Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev (June 2, ,2021)

I was surprised at how lively the discussion was of our last book, The Outsider by Albert Camus, which I found difficult to put down once I’d gotten into the flow of the story. The book is written with a staccato phrasing which bought to mind what I imagine the Algerian sun must feel like.

The protagonist, Meursault, seems to lead this strange disconnected life where he just drifts along without much direction or care and through one of the other tenants where he lives winds up getting on the wrong side of a group of Arabs. This comes to an unsettling climax on the beach where Meursault winds up shooting an Arab in an unprovoked attack. Camus's writing is magnificent, I really felt the character’s confusion from too much booze early in the morning, wandering sunstruck on the beach and the ill-considered decision to use the gun that he had on him.

The book then drifts along exploring Meursault’s indifference to his fate as he’s imprisoned awaiting trial and then gradual realisation that things aren’t looking good, at all … His trial is almost a farce as his friends stand up to testify and do nothing to help him with his case.

After sentencing there is a powerful scene where a priest having tried several times to get him to repent his crime is confronted by Meursault. He shows a commitment and determination that he will not repent even though he could help his case by doing so, and after having spent so much of the earlier part of the story being so aloof to his fortunes.

I thought it was a great book, really giving me an insight into another person. We wondered whether these days Meursault might have some sort of diagnosis attached to his nature, perhaps some kind of autism.

When we studied the book while I was at school, the teacher talked about an experiment that was held during the French revolution where a person who was destined for the guillotine did a test to see how long someone stayed conscious after the blade has fallen. They picked up the head and watched how long they kept blinking, I seem to recall it was about 30-40s.

Our next book was proposed by Edward, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. See you at the All Nations on June 2!

“The Outsider” by Albert Camus (May 5, 2021)

 There was a good turnout for dinner at The All Nations before book group started. It was nice to have a bit of extra time to talk and socialise, though really that’s a lot of what happens during an ordinary book group meeting.

There wasn’t a lot of love for Witi Ihimaera's Whale Rider. To me it just seemed run through a checklist of topics where the protagonist was shown to be woke, meeting his cousins in Kings Cross and seeing them in drag and while it worried his companion it was fine with him, seeing the racial prejudice directed against him and others by the family he stayed with in New Guinea, the environmental issues, it just all seemed a bit pat. Tom noticed that none of the characters developed through the story – they were all the same with the exception of the grandfather who came to see that instead of holding his granddaughter in disdain because she was a girl, she had worthy character traits.

I liked the use of the Maori language throughout and the strength of the family connections between the characters in the book was really interesting but perhaps a bit didactic.

We had the feeling that it might be a book that was really aimed at children and that it wasn’t really aimed at an adult audience, though I also wondered if coming after Toni Morrison’s Beloved if anything wasn’t going to be a disappointment.

For our next book we’re reading another Nobel prize winner’s book, The Outsider by Albert Camus. See you at the All Nations on May 5.

“Whale Rider” - Witi Ihimaera (Mar 3, 2021)

[I’m writing this some time after the meeting]

What a book! Toni Morrison’ s Beloved is an amazing excursion into another world, filled with nuance, horror and oppression. The discussion in book group was really energetic with people picking out one part of the book after another.

There were parts of the book that really stuck in my mind: the scene where the slaves were locked in their shallow pits in the soil all chained together while the rain teemed down until the walls started collapsing. Have to pull themselves out all together knowing that if one were to die, they would all perish because of the chain. Tugging and pulling on the chain to communicate and using the chain itself to pull out those who couldn’t get out themselves. There’s an amazing metaphor for using the instrument of oppression to set them free.

Myself and others had trouble through the book in keeping track of which character was which. I wonder whether Morrison had done that deliberately, a way of breaking these peoples’ identities so that they were less like individuals and more like objects, just possessions.

I was also shocked that the characters in the book had become so broken that they unleashed acts on each other that were like their masters’. They became their own enemies.

There was agreement that Morrison had been awarded a Nobel prize with good reason, I haven’t read any of her other work but I thought this book was a masterpiece. Beautifully written, deeply challenging.

After some to-ing and fro-ing at the end of the meeting, the first candidate was put aside because people felt it was too new and would be hard to find. We settled instead on Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, a NZ author.

Next meeting is at The All Nations on Mar 3, 2021!