Meeting May 31, 2007

The next meeting will be Thursday, May 31, 2007 at Jasmine's house to discuss Rachelle's book, The Inheritance of Loss. John will present his book selections and I will distribute Melissa's book, The Double Bind.

Melissa's Book Selections

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Ehys

I always wanted to read this book, but never did. If you read Jane Eyre, this is the story of the life Mr. Rochester had with his wife before he brought her from the Caribbean and locked her up in the attic in England. It is only 96 pages, though.... A review:

As a prequel to the classic, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea lives up to the expectation of Bronte's novel. Carefully crafted around the most minute details Bronte used, Jean Rhys constructs a novel that is poetic and figurative in its language to describe the life of the woman in the attic. Rhys changes Bertha Mason's name to Antoinette Cosway as the first step in painting the Caribbean landscape which is carried through most of the novel, until the final part where Bronte's work threads through. Giving a voice to this mysterious character that Bronte chose not to detail sheds enormous light on Rochester's future perspective on relationships. Although short and succint, Rhys novel will surely give Jane Eyre readers a new light through which to analyze the time - honored novel. I recommend reading Jane Eyre first, even though this is considered the prequel. Understanding Jane Eyre will allow Rhy's work to have more depth, especially at the end.

“When night comes, and she has had several drinks and sleeps, it is easy to take the keys. I know now where she keeps them. Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don’t remember, but we lost it.”

Those who have never come across Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre should avoid reading this review, as it reveals most of the plot of the novel. Anyway, I strongly recommend reading Jane Eyre before it’s 20th century “prequel”, Wide Sargasso Sea.Those who have enjoyed Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece probably remember Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife; the mad woman in the attic. Despite the fact that she only appears on rare occasions, her violent outbursts and increasing madness creep on the novel like a dark reminiscence of the gothic. Her role is important, indirectly, because she gives a disquieting ambiance to Thornfield hall, where Jane works as a governess. Bertha Mason accounts for most of Rochester’s fits of temper, and before being the cause of his accident toward the end of the book, she is the impediment to his marriage with the heroine.Despite her importance as a generator of events, she stands as the gothic ghostly element rather than being a real life-like character. This adds to the fact that her Creole origin (note that Bertha Mason is a white Creole; a British woman born in the Caribbean) defines her, in the beliefs of metropolitan 19th century, as “tropicalized by her environments, emotionally high-strung, lazy, and sexually excessive”. Rochester, in an attempt of self-justification to his bride-to-be, depicts his wife (that he had to marry according to paternal prescriptions) as a real monster:

"I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she has tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had – and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, - the true daughter of an infamous mother, - dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bond to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste".

Do you get the picture? Now how do you expect a 20th century feminist writer born in Dominica to react to Jane Eyre’s Victorian and racist views? By rewriting Bertha Mason’s life of course, and from the beginning.Some critics argue that Wide Sargasso Sea stands by itself in the world of literature, however, proceeding my own reading I couldn’t keep Jane Eyre out of my mind, and I think Jean Rhys wanted it that way too. After all, even if Rochester is never called by his name, we perfectly recognize him and as for most of the other characters, she has kept the same names (for instance Grace Poole, Bertha’s keeper).

Wide Sargasso Sea is divided in three parts of unequal lengths: the first part, the heroine’s childhood, is narrated by Bertha herself (or rather Antoinette, Bertha is the name Rochester will choose to call her by, despite her dislike of it).In the second part, the narration is shared between the male character (let’s call him Rochester) and Bertha-Antoinette; we witness the birth and fatal evolution of the relationship between the two protagonist in the Caribbean.The third part, taking place in England, leads to the expected conclusion: it is short but intense. After an introduction by Grace Poole, Bertha, from the attic where she has been locked up, resumes the narration until the dramatic conclusion.

Of course, there’s no surprise in the conduct of the events here, so why read Wide Sargasso sea in addition to Jane Eyre? Simply because it makes a powerful complement to it (I prefer calling it a complement rather than a revision), and enlightens the character of Bertha Mason, as well as Rochester (who still manages to remain sympathetic and victimized):

First of all, Jean Rhys emphasizes the similarities that already exist in Brontë’s novel, between Bertha and Jane Eyre (Jane doesn’t appear but once, almost in a ghostly manner, in Wide Sargasso Sea).

Rhys provides a knowledge of the Caribbean world and its problems derived from colonization, it reveals the discrepancies between British and Caribbean cultures.

Thus, Jean Rhys, dealing with Bertha’s evolution toward madness, brings us back to the initial sense of the word “alienation”. Bertha is alien to Rochester’s metropolitan culture and he strengthens her sense of inadequacy, as we can see in this scene between Bertha and Rochester:

“Is it true” she said, “that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.”“Well” I answered annoyed, “that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.”“But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?“And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?”“More easily”, she said, “much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.”“No, this is unreal and like a dream”, I thought.

Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

Cubicles of Mass Destruction A Review by Yvonne Zipp

In his very funny debut novel, Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris gives us Milton's spiritual heir: Chris Yop, a 40-something ad man who will risk arrest for the sake of "his" office chair.

Set at a Chicago ad agency at the turn of the century, Ferris's novel is for anyone who chuckles over "Dilbert," can recite lines from Office Space, or has an appointment on Thursday nights with The Office. Then We Came to the End is a vicious sendup of cubicle culture that somehow manages not to lose sight of its characters' humanity.

This is especially impressive, since Ferris's narrator is an unnamed worker explaining everything to the reader using the collective "we."

"We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently...."

When it comes to their actual work, Ferris spares readers no pain and insists on demonstrating exactly how mind-numbing it all is. "Our business was advertising," he explains, "and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client's toll-free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter they could go to the website, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day. Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die."

Then the NASDAQ fizzles, and to the collective shock of workers used to growing fat off the "new economy," layoffs hit hard. "What we didn't consider was that in a downturn, we were the mismanaged inventory, and we were about to be dumped like a glut of imported circuit boards."
Every day, those who are left meet to gossip. They gossip about the newly departed, about who swiped the best stuff from the now empty offices, about who is likely to be next. They gossip about the thief who's been stealing personal items from cubicles, about whether the fired Tom Mota really will come back with a gun to blow everyone away, about the personal tragedies their co-workers are grappling with, and about the pranks played on the hated middle manager, Joe Pope.

These range from a sushi roll taped behind his wall to a nasty slur scrawled with a Sharpie. In between gossip sessions, they try to look busy -- no easy feat since the only work left is a pro bono campaign of which no one can make heads or tails.

Ferris breaks narrative point of view only once: Their supervisor, Lynn Mason, who "dressed like a Bloomingdale's model and ate like a Buddhist monk," is rumored to be battling cancer. The night before her rumored surgery (despite the fact that everyone knows everyone else better than their own families do, real information is surprisingly hard to nail down), Ferris leaves the office to follow Lynn home. It's a poignant chapter around which the whole novel pivots.

If Ferris were just being clever and snarky, Then We Came to the End, would buckle in on itself long before the warm-hearted epilogue. But even his most gonzo creation is given a sympathetic aspect that saves him from caricature.

This is not to say that the office is entirely a realistic creation. For example, the law of averages alone should mean you could find at least one happy marriage in an agency that occupied three floors of a skyscraper. (And on a side note, I got very tired of the phrase "walking Spanish down the hall," which Ferris borrows from Tom Waits, although I guess he had to come up with something besides "laid off.")

But Ferris allows enough sunlight to filter in through the fluorescents that a reader is left wishing his characters well as they polish up their résumés, dry-clean their interview suits, and head off to the next chapter in their lives.

The Double Bind: A Novel

Chris Bohjalian

The title of the artfully crafted, terrifying new novel "The Double Bind" comes from an expression coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a reference to his "theory that a particular brand of bad parenting could inadvertently spawn schizophrenia," explains Laurel Estabrook, the main character. "Essentially, it meant consistently offering a child a series of contradictory messages: telling him you loved him while turning away in disgust.... Over a long period of time, Bateson hypothesized, a child would realize that he couldn't possibly win in the real world, and as a coping mechanism would develop an unreal world of his own."

This is a clue in a book full of clues. Indeed, author Chris Bohjalian has, in the course of writing 10 novels in the last 18 years, learned a thing or two about self-deception and the smoke screens we design to avoid connecting the dots. Book by book, he has taken on issues that confront us personally but also socially and culturally. Homelessness is the issue in "The Double Bind" — in particular, the assumption we often make: that street people were born homeless and could not possibly have achieved any kind of success in a life and that therefore it could not possibly happen to us.

The novel's first sentence is "Laurel Estabrook was nearly raped the fall of her sophomore year of college." The traumatic image it evokes creates a protective, sympathetic feeling for Laurel, who goes on to finish college in Burlington, Vt., and take a job as a social worker in a city homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, who is 56 years older than Laurel.

When he dies early in the novel, Laurel's boss gives her a box of professional photographs Crocker claimed to have taken. The first time she shuffles through the photos, she recognizes not only the tony Long Island neighborhood where she grew up (West Egg, the fictional home of Jay Gatsby — the first hint that the author is weaving in places and characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby") but also a shot of the wooded road she was biking on when she was assaulted. (The two men who attacked her have long since been apprehended.) The other photos are of such famous figures as Coretta Scott King, Paul Newman and Bob Dylan.

When her boss asks her to create a fundraising event — a show of Crocker's photographs — Laurel is caught in a maze of mysteries. She becomes obsessed with the photographer's identity, suspecting that hewas the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. (In the Fitzgerald novel, Daisy has an affair with Gatsby and Tom has one with Myrtle Wilson; when Myrtle is run over by a car and left for dead, her husband kills Gatsby and turns the gun on himself.)

Laurel thinks she's being followed by people hired by Crocker's eightysomething-year-old sister, Pamela Buchanan Marshfield, who wants the pictures back. Laurel believes they are proof that the Buchanans' son did not die in a car crash at 16 (the family's story) but was rejected by his wealthy relatives and that it was Daisy, not Gatsby, who killed Myrtle Wilson.

Bohjalian has written a literary thriller. He builds his characters around his story, which means that every so often a reader sees the scaffolding of the story in their skeletons; most of them could not exist independent of the intricate and fast-paced plot. Laurel is an unforgettable, vulnerable, complicated character, as is Crocker. This is because the author has imagined them more fully than the others and because we, as readers, must decide whether we trust them.

Interspersed throughout the book are italicized patient reports written by Kenneth Pierce, the attending psychiatrist at Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury. There are also several photographs given (in real life) to Bohjalian by the director of the Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington. They were taken, he writes in the author's note, by a "once-homeless man who had died in the studio apartment [the] organization had found for him. His name was Bob 'Soupy' Campbell."

The pictures blur the line between reality and fiction, as photos so often do, making reality seem an even more precarious and dizzying height from which to read a work of fiction.

Saving Fish From Drowning
by Amy Tan

A provocative novel from the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter.

On an ill-fated art expedition into the southern Shan state of Burma, eleven Americans leave their Floating Island Resort for a Christmas-morning tour-and disappear. Through twists of fate, curses, and just plain human error, they find themselves deep in the jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting the return of the leader and the mythical book of wisdom that will protect them from the ravages and destruction of the Myanmar military regime.

Saving Fish from Drowning seduces the reader with a fagade of Buddhist illusions, magician's tricks, and light comedy, even as the absurd and picaresque spiral into a gripping morality tale about the consequences of intentions-both good and bad-and about the shared responsibility that individuals must accept for the actions of others.

A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes."


Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

by Lisa See

Snow Flower and The Secret Fan is set in 19th-century China where women are kept secluded and never intermingle with the men. Lily has beautiful feet, once they're broken and bound, which should attract her a desirable husband. To improve her chances of attracting a wealthy man, her matchmaker pairs her with a laotong -- "old sames" -- a girl from a wealthy family named Snow Flower. Old sames are best friends for life and their relationship is closer and more important than their husbands. The secluded women communicate via a secret language, call nu shu, and Lily and Snow Flower write it on a fan they use for correspondence. Nu shu is considered an unimportant language by men, so they never learn it. Lily and Snow Flower grow very close over the years, until Lily misinterprets a letter from Snow Flower, threatening her relationship with her only friend. Lisa See's novel has received positive reviews for its evocative descriptions of a culture long forgotten. The USA Today says, "If there is a sleeper summer hit, it should be this story, which draws you into a time not as ancient as it seems, touching your heart and breaking it at the same time."