A Good Read with Notes Lost Somewhere North of Here

Title: Canada
Author: Richard Ford
Host: Joanne

Pulitzer-prize-winner Richard Ford supplied our October read, which we met to discuss. Unfortunately, the blog writer was sick in bed so missed the conversation. Any notes that may have been made were promptly whisked north of the border, where they are buried in an abandoned field.

But we want credit for having read it, and don't want to forget we read it, either.

So, here is the book description from the publisher, Ecco:

"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic.

Insights and Opinions

If you have either insights OR opinions, please leave a comment.

Prime Numbers, Intellectual Posturing, and Baseball

Title: The Housekeeper and the Professor
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Host: Gail

We took a highway whose number starts with a prime number (followed by two numbers that have prime numbers as square roots: 394--think about it!) to get to Gail’s welcoming living room where, surrounded by books, we discussed The Housekeeper and the Professor.

Because of the special nature of this book (exploring the delights of a mind that focuses everything through the lens of mathematics) we reminded ourselves that no matter how passionate we feel, we don’t start out “I loved this . . .” or “I hated this.” We also recognized that, had been the title of a book written by an American, it most likely wouldn’t have the theme of mathematics. And some thought the story hinted at more romance than just the love of mathematics.

Insights and Opinions

+ Steve opened the discussion by likening the book to musical theater. “In a musical, the story is constructed to support the songs. Here, the ‘songs’ are lectures about mathematics.” -- a delightful observation, since many of us started the book thinking that we don’t like math, and what are we doing here?

+As we got into it, we found ourselves mulling versions of “why does the world exist? Is it true that math predates human existence? Is this a philosophy of existence? Did humans have to create math or was it already there? Isn’t this the whole platonic ideal?” All of this emerged after the professor introduced the concept of ”zero” as a state of being. (p. 120)

+ Like the Housekeeper, we had to wonder “why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers.”

+ Linda observed that this work felt a lot like The Anthologist, except there we learned a lot about poetry; here we learned a lot about math. She would have loved the book if it were about a poet searching for the perfect word.

+ This book, with its intellectual posturing, reminded Blanche and others of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

+ Whether we like math or not, the book employed a wonderfully imaginative construct, with mind-tickling details such as the maintenance of hand-written notes all over the professor’s suits to help him since each day starts as a blank, with memory that lasts 80 minutes, and the sub-theme of baseball (some people love the game, others love the statistics. )

+ Still, the plot felt “painfully thin” with a number of missing pieces; when the 80 minutes started feeling limited, we wanted it to go somewhere. Readers who didn’t have time to think through the math found it less engaging. We wondered why the sister-in-law turned over the care of the Professor to a series of housekeepers. Several readers felt we missed a sense of the world in which these characters lived, but Chris--who surprised and delighted us by her appearance--who had lived in Japan, said it is such a controlled society, and she thought it felt true to the country she experienced.

+ While several of us would recommend this book to friends “with a warning,” Gail summed it up best by observing it’s a book you can read on many levels.  And, someone said it is the kind of book that encourages a reader to “stay young, stay inquisitive, don’t limit yourself.”