Book club choices for March 2013 meeting:
1. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child,
Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. By Anne Fadiman. 368
pages
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital
in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong
child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted
what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne
Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism
at its finest.
2. The Lower River. By Paul Theroux. 336 pages.
Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He
runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still
dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut
short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife
leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him
to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can
be happy again.
Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the
school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and
apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no
fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an
escape or a trap?
Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation
and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a
terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.
3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, 291 Pages
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their
tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into
Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli
settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke
adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines
for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the
vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer
by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli
knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic
name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the
first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and
wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the
defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents,
but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define
ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon
elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply
felt novel of identity.
4. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, 370 pages
From The New Yorker: Through the story of one man’s
experience after Hurricane Katrina, Eggers draws an indelible picture of
Bush-era crisis management. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born
painting contractor, decides to stay in New Orleans and protect his property
while his family flees. After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue
people, before being arrested by an armed squad and swept powerlessly into a
vortex of bureaucratic brutality. When a guard accuses him of being a member of
Al Qaeda, he sees that race and culture may explain his predicament. Eggers,
compiling his account from interviews, sensibly resists rhetorical
grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves. His skill is most
evident in how closely he involves the reader in Zeitoun’s thoughts. Thrown
into one of a series of wire cages, Zeitoun speculates, with a contractor’s
practicality, that construction of his prison must have begun within a day or
so of the hurricane.
5. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, 324 pages
From Publishers Weekly: Erdrich's 13th novel, a
multigenerational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds
its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, N.Dak. The
family's infant daughter is spared, and a posse forms, incorrectly blames three
Indians and lynches them. One, Mooshum Milk, miraculously survives. Over the
next century, descendants of both the hanged men and the lynch mob develop
relationships that become deeply entangled, and their disparate stories are
held together via principal narrator Evelina, Mooshum Milk's granddaughter, who
comes of age on an Indian reservation near Pluto in the 1960s and '70s and
forms two fateful adolescent crushes: one on bad-boy schoolmate Corwin Peace
and one on a nun. Though Evelina doesn't know it, both are descendants of lynch
mob members. The plot splinters as Evelina enrolls in college and finds work at
a mental asylum; Corwin spirals into a life of crime; and a long-lost violin
(its backstory is another beautiful piece of the mosaic) takes on massive
significance. Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping
apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates
intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.
