Endless Knots

Listen to Dr. Tom

Fiction Book Club co-founder, Endless Knots neighbor, and, more pertinent to this post, world renowned gastroenterologist Dr. Tom Lamont is the expert in today's Boston Globe Health Answers column, "Are antidiarrheal medicines counterproductive?"

Dr. J. Thomas Lamont, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says that in serious cases of diarrhea caused by bacteria, there’s some truth to the idea that stopping the symptoms could be unwise, because “there’s a flushing mechanism that promotes the removal of bad bugs.’’ For example, he says it’s best not to take medicines in cases of salmonella or shigella.

Much more at the link. Always such good, sound advice from Tom.

Thrill your bookclub: Import Roy Kesey from Lima

The world-famous (well, among us) Fiction Book Club conference called last night with Roy Kesey pummeling him with questions about his stunning novella, Nothing in the World. That the book won a literary award (Bullfight Little Book Prize) is little surprise when you read it; that it's short means you can prove me right in one long sitting.

Here's how we did it: First the book club members met to talk as we typically do, discussing what we liked, what we wondered about, and, but not in this case, what we didn't like. Our overall opinion of the book was unanimous: everyone loved it.

This story about the war that consumed most of the Balkans during the 1990s is hair-raising, horrific, mythic, and supremely well written. Gorgeous. Such exquisite language that one of our members read out a section that he called poetry.

About an hour later, Roy called us from Lima, Peru, where he and his family are living. (His wife, Lu, is a Peruvian diplomat.) Each person did a self-introduction while I snapped pictures and emailed them to Roy. Then we fired questions at him: Why did he write this book? How much time transpired from the beginning of the story to the end? How did he go about writing it? What was the meaning of a particular character? How did the book come to be published? What role did the vignettes play in the story? Why did he choose the title? And all kinds of other intrusive-none-of-our-business queries whose answers I'm not going to give away in hopes that you'll ask them yourselves.

Graciously, with humor and diffidence, Roy explained everything, including his telling us that in fact some of the prose began as poetry, that he had visited the area both before and during the war, that he knew some of the stories, variously, first, second, and third hand, and that it took much courage (he didn't use the word) to throw out some 40,000 words that were once in the draft.

It was a great evening and I recommend that you do the same with your book club. Read this book, invite Roy to attend by conference call, and you'll have an evening you never forget.

And, thanks, Roy. We'll be delighted to host you when you come to Boston on your next book tour.

Almost forgot! How do I know Roy? Zoetrope, of course. One aspect of being part of the Zoe writer community is critiquing the work of other writers. (In exchange for every five stories you critique, you can submit one of your own.) I was in the business of amassing critiques when Roy posted a story, which I loved--and wrote many notes back to him about, suggesting this that and the other thing. What I remember most was my feeling after reading it - that he must have written it, then fallen over in an exhausted heap. Such energy in his writing. And now having read more of his work, such range. We decided to read this book at the suggestion of our December '09 author-guest, Ron Currie Jr., who calls Roy "the best unknown writer in America." Not for long, both Ron and I wager.

He really matters

He's funny, his thinking original, his second book unlike anything you've ever read. "How old is this guy?" one friend asked when he finished reading the book. It's hard to believe that someone with such insight and such an unblinking eye toward human foibles is only 34.

 

Our Fiction Book Club spent last evening with Ron Currie Jr. to talk about his award winning second book,  Everything Matters! I've already raved about the book and written aplenty about my admiration for Ron's work. Just read it - and if you're lucky, he'll come to your book club too.

Roland at the Fiction Book Club

In the pocket of secrets that fill our lives, threads fray. While most sew them right up,  an unusual few take certain strands and pull them in just the right way that they make what is normally private more public.

Such was the great luck of the Fiction Book Club yesterday when Roland Merullo visited us. That we were fortunate enough to have a few moments with Amanda, wife of, and Alexandra and Juliana, daughters of, was its own gift.

In preparation for our special Saturday session, we read Breakfast with Buddha, the novel of Roland's that's been nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award (and which he's discussing today as the book chosen for its first "Wayland Reads" program). As a bonus book, we also agreed to read his latest, Fidel's Last Days, which most in the group also read and loved.

We asked a lot of questions: Why did he write the book? How did he write it? Does he plot out his novels in advance? Why did the characters do this or that? When did he start writing? What did he do before he wrote and/or when he was waiting for his books to be published? What is he working on now? What in Buddha is real, what imagined?

While I could do a very long post now, jotting down all that Roland said, commenting on it and suchnot, instead I'm just going to report what everyone agreed:

"This is the best book club we've ever had."

And how the two-and-a-half hours with Roland affected us:

It was another four hours before everyone left, during which time we had perhaps our most profound conversation as a group about where we are in our lives and where we're thinking of going.

I doubt that was Roland's intention as he is hardly a person who tries to get others to do things or influence them in ways that seem right to him.

What caused this to happen, I think, is his openness, his "straightforward" way, as one book club member said.

I count myself as extremely fortunate to have met Roland when I did, at a point in my writing career when I needed someone to stand behind me and point in different directions, which is precisely what he's done. Unexpected has been his unstinting generosity, which I've been the beneficiary of in so many ways, including his taking time yesterday to sit with our book club and open us further to possibilities.

A rave for Roland on "Fidel's Last Days"

These are the reviews writers live for: "In "Fidel's Last Days," Roland Merullo takes readers on a fictional thrill ride filled with so much danger and drama that they won't want it to end."

Thank you, Chuck Leddy, reviewer for the Boston Globe ("A thrilling ride in Castro plot"):

In his 11th book, "Fidel's Last Days," local [he lives in Western Massachusetts] author Roland Merullo has penned a fast-paced and highly satisfying spy thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. Merullo seamlessly switches the action from Miami, where a secret organization of Cuban expatriates is plotting to kill Castro, to Havana, where we see Castro's dictatorship in action and watch an internal assassination plot develop among Castro's own advisers.

Eleventh book. Think about that. How many writers can pump out so many, in such different genres (this and another are both thrillers, love stories, coming-of-age, memoir, technique (golf), an uproarious and cheeky trilogy about spirituality, politics, and the hereafter...)? This is talent.

Our Fiction Book Club is reading Roland's Dublin International Prize-nominated Breakfast with Buddha for our March book, which, not so incidentally also is the community read for the nearby Town of Wayland that month; Fidel's Last Days is our bonus book for our meeting and, lucky us, he's gracing us with his presence. We hope he'll talk about both. I promise to post some pictures.

April '08 book club: Old School

Oooops, forgive me. I missed the post on Old School by Tobias Wolff, the pick of the Fiction Book Club for April. I have an excuse. I couldn't attend due to work-related travel - not even a vacation. The group, I am told, liked the book very much, as did I, if only because it takes place in my hometown. I recognized the school (The Hill School, then a private boys' school educating the likes of James Baker, a 1948 alum and this year's graduation speaker), the "village" (Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a borough in actuality), and even the picture on the cover of The Hill School dining hall, where I first ate broccoli with hollandaise sauce. My friend, Mary Hartman, lived at The Hill because her father taught there.

Wolff's book is about belonging and authenticity and how simple smudgings of the truth can result in massive consequences. That the book is also about three authors and about students as writers made it even more appealing. The writers in question were "names" who visit the school for the annual lecture, having chosen in advance the work of one student to celebrate: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. The send-up of Rand is hilarious and refreshing, given how truly venal Rand's view of humanity is. The appearance or lack thereof of Hemingway is the trope around which the story unwinds. Good stuff. Well done, Mr. Wolff. I bet we passed each other on High Street when you went off-campus and perhaps you were even at the dance where I wore my first black velvet gown.

March '08 book club: The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

For those following my Fiction Book Club posts, you know that I've revised my policy (hammered out over many smoke-filled, backroom nights). Instead of just announcing the book, I'm now saying something about the book club's response after we meet. As is the case with most good policies, I failed to observe it in the very first month after my announcement. The reason will be revealed a few paragraphs down. Meanwhile, this month we read (and discussed last night ) Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl translated by Edith Grossman, who's ported much of his work and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (among other Latin American greats) into English. I'm including Grossman's picture here from a Washington Post interview that she gave with another of her translatees, Mayra Montero. Here Grossman explains her process, or at least comments on it. Why include her picture in this post? As thanks for Love in the Time of Cholera, this book, and many others. A life of translation, exquisite work, of which The Bad Girl is yet another.  

We were missing a couple of our most stalwart members last night (rumor has it that this was the first club ever missed by two of our co-founders, Tom and Emily) yet we survived a discussion in which seven  loved the book, two hated it, and one was mezzamezz. I loved it. In just a few hundred pages, Vargas Llosa manages to span three or four decades, fixate the reader (at least this one) on an obsessive love affair, accurately portray a Paris and London in 1968 that I remember vividly, document Peruvian politics, and bring onto the stage characters who are complex, contradictory, and engaging - just like my friends. Which brings me to this: when I said I knew someone like "the bad girl," I was queried as to who she was. But first: the bad girl (Lily, among other names) is a disturbed, beautiful, exploitative "user," the kind of woman who collects rich husbands. The good boy, Ricardito, as he calls himself in his interior dialogue, becomes fascinated with her when they are still children. Circumstance and coincidence cross their paths over and over through their lives, sometimes by mere happenstance, other times because one or the other, mostly him, seeks the other out.

So whom have I known like the bad girl? I had a gorgeous and brilliant dear friend whose self-esteem and insecurity were so pronounced that she made repeatedly bad choices in men until the right one came along in her mid-30s and she woke up. The bad girl of this novel is not a sympathetic character until you lop off the first syllable - and then her pathetic-ness  is overbearing. She thinks a rich man is going to solve her "problem," provide her security, her problem and insecurity being nothing more than what we're all stuck with - being human. I'm about to lose the whole morning if I don't stop here. Read it and tell me what you think.

And, as promised, why did I not post about the last book? Because I couldn't get past about ten pages, which will make the Cormac McCarthy enthusiasts click right out of this blog. The Road, which uncharacteristically I will not even provide a link to, is another of McCarthy's indulgences. We all know the man can write and that he can write about a father's love for a son (ten pages proves it) but beyond that...good lord, McCarthy. Have you ever written a positive paragraph about a woman? Couldn't you have reduced this to about ten pages? I do not understand this writer's appeal. Or what would possess a writer to spend his/her time this way? With this kind of talent - and living in the times we do that call for all of us to pitch in and help, why are you wasting your talent this way? And why do you get awards for it?

Next up for April '08: Old School by Tobias Wolff, which I can't wait to read. It's set at The Hill School in my hometown of Pottstown, Penna., where I went to my first cotillion and to which I wore my first black velvet dress.

February '08 book club: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Next up the much talked about Cormac McCarthy book, The Road.

The way in which I'm handling the Fiction Book Club's reading here is not useful. Each month, I've been posting what we're going to read and since I'm usually screeching into our meetings while reading the last few pages, I never have anything useful to say about the next month's book. It would be better if I posted after I've read the book and could include opinion...so going forward, I'll have to change my evil ways.

Meanwhile, since I trust his judgment completely, I'm quoting Dennis Lehane here from the review that he wrote for Amazon. It's much longer than this ... and had he not mentioned the father's love for his son by the fourth sentence, I doubt that I could even open this book:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work.

January '08 book club: Water for Elephants

The Fiction Book Club has chosen Sarah Gruen's Water for Elephants for our first reading in 2008. I know very little other than this: it's #3 on NY Times paperback trade list this week *and* it's published by Algonquin, those clever folks who've got the distinction of publishing three in a row by Roland Merullo.

December '07 book club: A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Fiction Book Club ends the year reading Khaled Hosseini's newest work, A Thousand Splendid Suns. And, websters, you'll be pleased to know that Hosseini has his own website.

Sad to say that due to travel I'm missing tonight's book club discussion of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. But I'll be there for the next one as it takes place at our house.

Feel free to comment on this book or any other under the Fiction Book Club category.