February

This month our book is Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain

O’Faolain was born in Dublin, the second eldest of nine children. Her father was a well-known Irish journalist, writing the “Dubliners Diary” social column under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan for the Dublin Evening Press. She was educated at University College Dublin, the University of Hull, and Oxford University.She taught for a time at Morley College, and worked as a television producer for the BBC and Radio Telefís Éireann.

O’Faolain described her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which in her view feared sexuality and forbade her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expected her to marry and have children, of which she did neither.

O’Faolain was engaged at least once, but she never married. In Are You Somebody?, she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who published her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, O’Faolain lived much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They were registered as domestic partners in 2003.

O’Faolain split her time between Ireland and New York City. She had been diagnosed with metastatic cancer and was interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTE Radio One on 12 April 2008 in relation to her terminal illness. She told Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life”.

On 9 May 2008, it was announced that O’Faolain had died during the night. In 2012, RTÉ announced a major new documentary on her life

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January

This month we have a wonderful book called Saturday, by Ian McEwan.

Saturday is a novel by Ian McEwan set in Fitzrovia, London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, during a large demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The protagonist, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family dinner in the evening. As he goes about his day he ponders the meaning of the protest and the problems that inspired it, however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent, troubled man.

To understand his character’s world-view, McEwan spent time with a neurosurgeon. The novel explores one’s engagement with the modern world and the meaning of existence in it. The main character, though outwardly successful, still struggles to understand meaning in his life, exploring personal satisfaction in the post-modern, developed world. Though intelligent and well read, Perowne feels he has little influence over political events.

The book, published in February 2005 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and in April in the United States, was critically and commercially successful. Critics noted McEwan’s elegant prose, careful dissection of daily life, and interwoven themes. It won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

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December

Hi all and welcome to December’s book club. This month our book is going to be On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. This novel was published in 1982 and it was the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for that year. In 1987 it was made into a film, directed by Andrew Grieve.

The novel’s setting is the border of Herefordshire, in England, and either Brecknockshire, or Radnorshire, in Wales (there are Black Hills near both). In the early pages we are told the border runs through the very farmhouse:

One of the windows looked out over the green fields of England: the other looked back intoWales…

Culturally the central characters are Welshmen, with the surname Jones.

The story is told through the technique of flashback, and portrays the lives of twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, on their isolated upland farm called The Vision. The twins develop a bond that is shown throughout the novel as very special. Lewis is portrayed as the stronger or dominant twin, whereas Benjamin is the more intuitive one, both in appearance and in the tasks which he does around the house. He seems to be constantly drawn to his mother’s side while she is alive.

Lewis is the one who wants to break free but Benjamin is forced into the army at the time of the Great War. His efforts are frustrated by his family ties and the indefinable, unbreakable tie to the land. Chatwin also tells the reader of the brutality involved in farming at the time in this area. Amos, the father of the two twins, shows how his day-to-day job has brutalised his once caring and loving attitude, and we see this later in the novel when he hits his wife Mary on the temple with the book she is reading – Wuthering Heights. A jealous man, Amos attacks his wife with the very material that shows her intelligence; he feels threatened by this, feeling that the man is supposed to be the head of the family in all things, and he feels anger because of his limited education.

On the Black Hill is a novel which portrays themes such as unrequited love, sexual repression and confusion, social, religious and cultural repression, hate and the historic social values of that era, as is shown when Amos finds out that his daughter Rebecca has become pregnant by an Irishman. His religious fanaticism, social pressure, economic forces and an inability to express love results in him throwing her out of the household, and she is not mentioned in the novel again until the latter part.

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November

Hi all, Its that time again. Time for a new book and this months the book is,

Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”. In 2009, Newsweek ranked Things Fall Apart #14 on its list of Top 100 Books: The Meta-List.

The novel depicts the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia—one of a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo ethnic group. In addition it focuses on his three wives, his children, and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo (archaically “Ibo”) community during the late nineteenth century.

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject. Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo’s descendants and set in fictional African countries, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.

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October!

A Week In December by Sebastian Faulks

A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks’s tenth novel, came out in September 2009 to considerable press attention. Much of it focussed on his attempt to write a ‘state of the nation’ book at a time of economic meltdown and admired the ambition and the execution of the idea. It ‘could hardly be more timely’, said The Times; it is ‘unequivocally successful,’ said the Guardian and ‘perfectly constructed’, according to the Telegraph.

Faulks began with the intention of writing what he called a ‘modern Dickensian novel’, one in which characters from different walks of life were linked by initially unseen connections and in which London itself played an important part. The main characters are John Veals, a hedge fund manager, and his son, Finbar; Hassan al-Rashid, a student, and his father, known as Knocker; Jenni Fortune, a Tube train driver; Gabriel Northwood, a barrister; and R. Tranter, a hack journalist. At the beginning of the book it seems that all are destined to meet at a party given by a new MP’s ambitious wife, Sophie Topping; but what underpins and binds them all is that the lives they lead are virtual or synthetic: all have become disconnected from the ‘real’ world

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