Strachan Book Club
February's Book
The Strachan Book Group will meet on 22 February to discuss
"The Horse Boy" by Rupert Isaacson recommended by Pat James.
The book for March, chosen by Lesley Young, will be
"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid.
Novembers Book
The Strachan Book Group met in November and discussed "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull, which was recommended by Milly Judt.
Jonathan Hull
Amazon.co.uk Review
http://www.jonathanhull.com/
Jonathan Hull has written a lovely debut novel in Losing Julia. It is difficult to portray strong emotions such as grief, love and intense fear without crossing the line into trite overwrought sentimentality, yet Hull manages to pull it off.
Losing Julia is told from the point-of-view of eighty-one year old Patrick Delaney and takes us back through his life as a soldier in the trenches of France in World War I, then ten years later to a chance meeting with his best friend's fiancee, Julia, to the present day.
Losing Julia is an elegantly written book about love, the loss of love and the ravages of war on the individual psyche. Although parts of the book can be horrifying, Hull wisely gives us touches of warm-hearted humor as well. The stereotypical crotchety old man, Patrick is, by turns, poetic and sardonic, but he is always lovable.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Losing Julia might have easily become melodramatic...the stuff of a television daytime soap opera, but Hull's writing is so good, so elegant, so classy, that most readers will find they can't help but share Patrick's thoughts and want to make them their own.
Patrick is certainly no cookie-cutter character. He grows and changes immensely from the time he is a struggling, young poet trying to come to terms with the horrors of war, to the wise, and sometimes witty, older man in the nursing home. He never has all the answers, but he really doesn't feel he needs them. I found Hull, and Patrick, to be so correct about our penchant to let the present slip by when Patrick talks about the tendency to live only in regrets for the past or hopes for the future.
Hull's descriptions of the battle scenes in World War I are filled with detail, although some o f them do border on the purple. His metaphors tend to be those of a world that is slitting its own wrists and bleeding to death. It's elegant writing, sure, and it it, at times, poetic, but I really doubt that men in battle think that way and this is where I think the book fails a little.
This is not a book that describes war in the graphic way that can be found in Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green, nor is it a book that, I think, that will achieve the staying power of Mark Helprin's classic, A Soldier of the Great War. It is, however, a warm and wonderful story of love and friendship, of loss and gain, and, although the ending is a bit unbelievable, the character of Patrick is still so well-drawn that Losing Julia is an enjoyable and very worthwhile novel.
Our next meeting will be in January where we will discuss 2 books "Ignorance" by Milan Kundera chosen for us by Lize Strachan and "Small Island" by Andrea Levy chosen by Isobel McMillan.
Milan Kundera
Amazon.co.uk Review
wwwBypassing the question of whether you can ever go home again, Milan Kundera's Ignorance tackles instead what happens when you actually get there. Ignorance is the story of two Czechs who meet by chance while traveling back to their homeland after 20 years in exile. Irena, who fled the country in 1968 with her now-deceased husband Martin, returns to Prague only to find coldness and indifference on the part of her former friends. Josef, who emigrated after the Russian invasion, is back in Prague to fulfill a wish of his beloved late wife. As fate would have it, the two have met before in their former lives, and the before-skirted passionate encounter is now destined to transpire. However, as in the story of Odysseus, which this novel so deliberately parallels, every homecoming brings with it a conflicting set of emotions so powerful that one has to question whether the voyage is really worth the pain. Expertly tackling the philosophical and emotional themes of nostalgia, memory, love, loss, and endurance, Kundera continues to astound readers with his masterful ability to understand and articulate issues so central to the human condition.
Andrea Levy
Amazon.co.uk Review
http://www.andrealevy.co.uk/
Andrea Levy's award-winning novel, Small Island, deftly brings two bleak families into crisp focus. First a Jamaican family, including the well-intentioned Gilbert, who can never manage to say or do exactly the right thing; Romeo Michael, who leaves a wake of women in his path; and finally, Hortense, whose primness belies her huge ambition to become English in every way possible. The other unhappy family is English, starting with Queenie, who escapes the drudgery of being a butcher's daughter only to marry a dull banker. As the chapters reverse chronology and the two groups collide and finally mesh, the book unfolds through time like a photo album, and Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with a humor and tenderness that is both authentic and bracing. The book is cinematic in the best way--lighting up London's bombed-out houses and wartime existence with clarity and verve while never losing her character's voice or story. --Meg Halverson
October's Books
The Strachan Book Group met in October and discussed "The Return" by Victoria Hislop (a novel about the Spanish Civil War).
Our next meeting is on 23 November where we will be discussing "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull, which was recommended by Milly Judt.
The book after that is "Ignorance" by Milan Kundera and chosen for us by Lize Strachan.
Interested in joining us Call Lesley 850581.
Victoria Hislop
Amazon.co.uk Review
www.victoriahislop.com/I was eagerly looking forward to this book, and, unlike other readers, was not disappointed at all.
The book is based around the Spanish Civil War, and is incredibly well researched. The 'flashback' sections are very revealing, and echo many of the facts that i have read before about this incredibly traumatic time - whatever side of the war you were on. These fit fairly comfortably with the 'modern day' events, which come together to help us to further understand the traumas inflicted by a civil war. (One only has to hear Michael Portillo or any other Spanish family on the subject to know how families were affected)
One or two events in the story are a little 'contrived', and the final twists are anticipated by all but the main characters, which has reduced it to a 4 star book in my opinion; however, I still feel it to be a good read and worthy of the wait.
September's Books
The Strachan Book Group met in September and discussed The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
(one of the books from the list chosen for discussion at Banchory Book Group Day in November).
The book for September was The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.
Octobers' book is "The Return" by Victoria Hislop which will be discussed at our meeting on 26 October.
Sebastian Barry
Amazon.co.uk Review
The acclaim that has greeted Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture is varied and enthusiastic, and it's not hard to see why. When Frank McGuiness praised it for 'raw, rough beauty' and described Sebastian Barry's fiction as 'unique' and 'magnificent', this claim was no hostage to fortune; just a few sentences of the prose here will convince most readers of the justice of those words. As in the best-selling A Long Long Way, Barry is concerned with the imperatives of telling a story, but in a literary form that is rich with both psychological understanding and a skilful conjuring of time and place.
Roseanne McNulty may (or may not) be on the point of nearing her 100th birthday -- but there is little certainty about this fact. In her twilight years, her destiny is uncertain, as the Roscommon Mental Hospital -- her home for so many years of her life -- is on the point of closing. As the fateful hour approaches, Roseanne spends her time of talking to her psychiatrist of many years, Dr Grene. The relationship between the two is strangely interdependent, and the doctor is also attempting to come to terms with the death of his wife. As we learn more about the two principal protagonists, we are presented with a rich and subtle picture of human relationships -- and the (often unintentional) damages that we all do to each other.
The form of the book consists of the separate journals of Roseanne and Dr Grene, and we gradually learn about Roseanne’s family in Sligo in the 1930s. What emergence is a poignant personal history; it is also a subtly ambitious picture of nothing less than the Irish psyche at a particular point in its history. There are echoes here of another great Irish chronicler of the human condition, William Trevor, and The Secret Scripture is no worse for that.
--Barry Forshaw
Chris Cleave
www.chriscleave.comCHRIS CLEAVE is 35. He is a novelist and a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London. He is only 5ft 7ins tall. His debut novel Incendiary won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize, won the United States Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction award 2005 and won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007.
Inspired by his childhood in West Africa and by an accidental visit to a British concentration camp, Chris Cleave’s second novel is entitled The Other Hand in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is entitled Little Bee in the US and Canada.
Chris Cleave has been a barman, a long-distance sailor, a teacher of marine navigation, an internet pioneer and a journalist. He lives in London with his French wife and two mischievous Anglo-French children.
Other Books Reviewed
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