"The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes ****

• Book Club Selection for March 2014
• Originally published 2011
• Booker Prize winner
• English author
• Review:   Memory, history, accumulation of character, assumptions formed and shifted. Julian Barnes tells a story of the outcome of youthful choices, a deceptively simple tale. Barnes' writing took me from chuckling at youthful foolishness to remembering youthful follies, to sympathizing with the arrogant all knowing attitude of young adulthood and then smack dab into middle age and the examination of our past given new perspective. Above all, this story is about remorse, and the desire, born of life experience, to change what cannot be undone. I found the novel to be poignant and true.  Excellent! 

"The Obscene Bird of Night" by Jose Donoso *****

• Summer Read with Beth     
• Chilean author     
• Originally published in 1970
• Epigraph:  "Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged.  The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."...Henry James Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William
• Vocabulary:
• immured:  to enclose within walls; seclude; confine
• usufruct:  the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured.
• Quotes:
• p.20...."...the act of wrapping, and not what's inside the wrappings , is the important thing?" ...somewhat surprising thought
• p.49...."Servants accumulate the privileges of misery,.  The demonstrations of pity, the ridicule, the handouts, the token help, the humiliations they put up with make them powerful...they save up the instruments of vengeance...."
• p.81..."H also sighed because of the other thing, because of the incurable longing that showed in his pained look and was beginning to be my own as well.  My father sighed because of the pain of the unattainable, of a fantastic idea, of the sorrow caused by what's beyond one's reach and by the humiliation that comes with the knowledge that one's incapable of attaining it."...what we all sigh about
• p.121..."You think they 're only disguised as what they appear to be.  Take off their disguises and they're reduced to people like me, without faces or features, who have to to rummaging in trash cans and forgotten attic trunks and picking up the castoffs of others in the streets in order to put together one disguise on day, another disguise the next, in order to give themselves an identity, if only for a few moments."
• p.145..."Why explain to Ines that a person's only as great as that which he sacrifices of his own free will, only as powerful as that which he's capable of keeping immured within him?"
• p.181..."Old women like Peta Ponce have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bend those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs."....exactly what the author did with this story
• p.191..."There was only one requirement:  Boy must never suspect the existence of pain and pleasure, of happiness and misfortune, of what the four walls of his artificial world hid from view, and he must never hear the sound of music, not even from afar."...also not allowed words signifying origin and end..."enchanted present" life
• p.373..."You have to recognize me, Ines, accept me even if only for the moment, as I am, whoever I may be--Humberto, Mudito, old woman, baby, idiot, fluctuating damp spot on the wall--awake now because you're touching me."...Hmmmm
• p.377..."My imagination is you slave just as Ines's body was your slave, you need my imagination in order to exist, Ines and I being your servants, Ines and I being heraldic beasts invented to support the symmetry of your heroic proportions, one of us on either side of you."
• Comments/Observations:
• p.31...the tale of the girl-saint Inez Azcoitias told by grannies so children can begin to learn "what fear is"....never thought of it as something valuable to learn
• Humberto is Mudito?  Humberto is father of Iris Metaluna's child, then is the child?
• wrapped in swaddling clothes?
• Monsterhood....threatening and ugly
• Humberto's father feared being faceless, a monster
• the Boy was a monster in looks
• Jeronimo was a monster in actions....or were his actions loving, like Buddha's father, an attempt to protect
• Peta Ponce....Ines...one and the same?
• Even the monsters had a social class system
• fear of extinction can come from within or without an individual?...p.285
• p.287...the father's poncho a symbol of protection and suppression at the same time...protecting is controlling
• p.289...awful scene when one woman's posterior protects another from insects
• Dr. Azula's role.....monstrous surgeries, reducing Humberto to 20% (what did that mean)
• p.321...references to the "gargoyles of the choir chair"...Iris sat there as did others
• Humberto fled when he realized it is impossible to control anything
• Review:  One way to sum up the experience of reading this novel would be to suggest that Salvador Dali would be the perfect person to illustrate it.  Does that give a hint as to the surreal journey of immersing oneself in this tale?  Be prepared to suspend reality and abandon yourself to the rapid current of this novel.  Once I did that I found that I was thoroughly entranced.  I could say that this is the tale of one man's obsession with continuation of his proud family line regardless the cost, but that would be such an injustice.  I think I come closer by saying that this is a parable of monsterhood.  What is a monster?  Is it defined by being threatening and ugly?  Is it defined by intent, actions, or outcomes? When does protection of other become control over other?   At one point the author indicates that "old women like Peta Ponce have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bend those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs."  I think each of us must read the book and decide for ourselves why he may have done that!  Fantastic literary experience.

"Epitaph of a Small Winner" by Machado de Assis *****

• Summer read with Beth from 2013 list
• Brazilian author
• Originally published in 1880
• Foreword by Susan Sontag
• Dedication:  "To the first worm that gnawed my flesh"..............love it 
• Quotes: 
• p.7...One morning as I was strolling through the grounds of my suburban home, an idea took hold of the trapeze that I used to carry about in my head.  Once it had taken hold, it flexed its arms and legs and began to do the most daring acrobatic feats one can possibly imagine."............love the imagery
• p.9..."....nature is immensely whimsical and that history is eternally irresponsible."....food for thought
• p.21...."Each age brought its share of light and shade, of apathy and struggle, of truth and error, and its parade of systems, of new ideas, of new illusions; in each of them the verdure of spring burst forth, grew yellow with age, and then, young once more, burst forth again." .....continuity and rhythm....I like it
• p.51..."Ambition, like a new born eagle, now broke through its shell and transfixed the world with its tawny, penetrating eyes."........perfect metaphor
• p.78..."The it occurred to me that tight boots are one of the greatest goods in the world, for , by making feet hurt, they create an opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of taking off your boots.".....Yep, works for many experiences.....pregnancy/childbirth, joy/sorrow, yin/yang, etc
• p.88..."Every man has the need and the ability to contemplate his own nose, in order to see the divine light,a and such contemplation, resulting in the subordination of the universe to one nose, establishes social equilibrium.  If noses contemplated only each other, the human race would not last two centuries; indeed, it would not have survived the most primitive tribes."............laugh out loud and love it!
• p.89..."The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society:  love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual.  Procreation, equilibrium.".......Fantastic!
• p.92..."Thus, I, Braz Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the Law of the Equivalence of Windows, and established the principle that the way to compensate for a closed window is to open another window, so that the conscience may always have plenty of air."
• p.182..."...the smile was always there, but at the beginning it had been internal--in the bud, so to speak; as time went on, it blossomed forth into flower and became visible to everyone.  A simple matter of botany."...lovely
• p.188..."Heart and soul, I had been all set to go, and here this doorman, Propriety, suddenly blocked the entrance and insisted on seeing my invitation.  I consigned Propriety to the devil, and with him the constitution, the....."
• p.167..."...even if so radical a concept did not carry with it its own refutation, the most superficial consideration of the salutary effects of public opinion would suffice to establish it as the supremely superfine product of the flower of mankind, namely, the greater number."
• Comments/Observations:
• I love that Braz points out the great flaw in his book as the reader, ever in a hurry to move along.....I find that to be true sometimes....eager to be on to the next book at the expense of savoring the one at hand!
• Review:  What a romp!  Who new a posthumous memoir could be so wonderful?  Our narrator, Bras Cubas, the dead one, finally makes his mark in the world by inventing the posthumous memoir. According to Susan Sontag, in the introduction, this occurs in counterpoint to "Tristram Shandy" speaking to his audience before birth. (I need to read that novel) Finally, Cubas can heave his eternal sigh of relief by achieving a worthy epitaph.  His life was pretty typical, full of love, envy, profound delusions, a touch of intrigue, a variety of failures, petty maneuvering, and embarrassing moments.  So what the heck, is it so much to ask for an eternal sigh of relief now and then?  I think not!

"Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ****

●  Audiobook
●  Nigerian author
●  Originally published in 2013
●  Setting:  Initially in Trenton, NJ, then Lagos, Nigeria

●  Ifemelu chooses to return to Nigeria after 15 years in America


Review:   Once again I am impressed by Adichie's writing.  In some ways it felt as though I had read multiple novels at once, so completely developed are the varying threads and themes of her story.  I can describe the themes of the novel as racism, immigration, thwarted love, cross-cultural reality, or simply as a metaphor for the journey of life, of love, of humanity.  Let's face it. There is nothing new about being human, but Adichie describes it really well.  The protagonist's journey from Nigeria to the USA and back to Nigeria was punctuated by her insightful and often cutting observations of ridiculous and/or offensive behavior on the part of others.  Ouch!  Good read!!