"The country he had broken out of was all unknown to them. Even in full sunlight it was impenetrably dark"
I am in a brilliant book club with some wonderful ladies (I love the word ladies and think it should be used a tad more...) We call ourselves Mrs Booker and the Tea Ladies and we read a wide variety of books. The talk is complex, the food finger-like and the tea always tasty!
Remembering Babylon is the latest book we will be discussing. I have just finished it and was very taken with its themes and beautiful evocations of this strange country we live and what it can and does bring out in our humanity (or lack of it).
It reminds me of one of my favorite movie - Dogville. and also reminds me of some of the themes in The House of Sand and Fog.
6 comments:
What else has your group read?
As another tea-lady, I feel equipped to answer byron's question:
Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". I loved it and may have been mainly alone in that...
Peter Carey's "The True History of the Kelly Gang"
Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"
and i've probably forgotten lots of other really life-changing novels because my adjectival soccer matches always prevent me from getting to the meetings!!!
The English Patient by far my favourite so far...
Yeah, lots and lots of time for Ondaatje: How's this from "In the Skin of A Lion" about Caravaggio the thief:
“He was anonymous, with never a stillness in his life like this woman’s. He stood on the roof outside, an outline of a bear in her subconscious, and she quarried past it to another secret, one of her own, articulated wet and black on the page. The houses in Toronto he had helped build or paint or break into were unmarked. He would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those who have a fury or a sadness of only being described by someone else. A tarrer of roads, a house-builder, a thief – yet he was invisible to all around him.”
Ah, Ondaatje's English Patient - I found it so ironic that a novel so thoughtfully critical of Western imperialism could have been so thoroughly imperialised and turned into a soppy Hollywood love story by the film!
Man o man, Byron, do I ever agree with you about that!
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