“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!