Fudge Book Club

Our first Book Club started back in February 2008 in our upstairs lounge at Fudge.

The group has grown in numbers and is becoming one of our most popular evenings, with food, wine and discussion.

Groups meet once a month on a Sunday evening at 6pm. We are planning this to be the 3rd Sunday of each month from September. The group enjoys discussion about the chosen book with free glass of wine followed by a two course menu £12.95pp. Gather a few friends or come alone. Email us to book your place. info@fudgecafe-restaurant.com

This is a reminder for those of you who weren't able to get to the June meeting that the book choice for July is Love and Summer by William Trevor. William Trevor is one of the most revered contemporary Irish authors and this is his latest novel; a more traditional read than last month's book and fairly short.

WE aim to have the diary for 2010-11 available at the July meeting, which is on Sunday 18 July at 6pm. We are currently updating the reviews on the website - I think there is only one missing now. If anyone can remember something about The Reluctant Fundamentalist and would like to offer to write a paragraph, I'd be very grateful! The double bill of summer reads will be Nocturnes, a collection of short stories by Kazuo Ishiguro and Good Companions by J B Priestley. And if you want to plan ahead, September's choice is Anne Tyler's new novel, Noah's Compass. Looking forward to seeing you on 18 July for our last meeting of the 2009-10 season.

Life Class

by Pat Barker

"Is Barker out of her depth with only enough confidence to dip her toe in the water? Or is she showing that the war overshadowed and disrupted all creativity with its ‘single bullying voice’? I think she is out of her depth. On a more positive note, Barker does paint a very effective portrait of traditional relationships and shows that they are not all that they appear to be..." - Ann

The Night Gardener

by George Pelecanos

"I have found reading it an irritating experience.  I am a fan of crime thrillers and have enjoyed reading the genre by authors such as James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard. However, I cannot say that I will be in a hurry to read George Pelecanos again. Whilst I appreciate that when writing about a particular section of society it is essential to use local idioms in the dialogue for authenticity, but it is used in this book to such an extent that it is nearly uninteligible, I would suggest, to the majority of readers outside the east coast of America..." - Chris

Astonishing Splashes Of Colour

by Clare Morrall

"Astonishing Splashes of Colour didn’t quite live up to the promise of its great title! The first person narrator is Kitty, a young woman who’s suffered the double blow of losing her mother at a young age and then her own child. She appears to suffer from the condition of synaesthesia, in other words experiencing emotions in colour; indeed the novel opens powerfully with an evocation of the yellowness of the school playground and the waiting mothers. Yet that potentially very powerful theme fades as the novel progresses..." - Sue

Poppy Shakespeare

Poppy Shakespeare
by Clare Allan
"Poppy Shakespeare is a distinctive and powerful debut, full of brave experiments that generate unexpectedly fierce emotional heat. In a literary scene whose established stars milk tragedies such as the Holocaust or 9/11 for precious little reason beyond their own artistic vanity, Allan has given us something indigestibly, potently true"

Suspicions Of Mr Whicher

This is a difficult book to review because it is Fudge Book Club’s first work of non-fiction and, however hard one tries not to, it’s easy to slip into a critique which measures it against fiction! Mind you, the blurb on the back of my edition didn’t help by claiming the book is as gripping as a novel. It isn’t and that’s not through any shortcomings on its part, simply that real life is messy, inconclusive and not shaped by a fictional narrative. Therefore we don’t find out who murdered Saville and we don’t really discover what makes Whicher tick. Great family secrets are hinted at but are never able to be fully unveiled... For me personally, the result was disengagement. I admired the book and have learnt a lot from it ( for example, trial by media is nothing new)  but ultimately that knowledge has necessarily been of an intellectual kind, the experience serving to remind me why I love reading novels! Sue Wilsea

English Passengers

March Choice: English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. One member who has already read it says it is the best book she's read for some years.

Not all of Kneale's narrators are fully rounded fictional people: many letter writers are there purely as a sly way of shoe-horning in background information. But Kewley, Potter, Wilson and Peevay are memorable creations, and crowding in upon the fictional company are a host of deftly colourful thumbnail portraits. It's a book shouting with life.  Every page fizzes with linguistic invention, and the interleaving of high comedy with dramatic terror is expertly handled. Why it has been ballasted with such a deathly boring title I cannot imagine, but English Passengers deserves to be welcomed into port with a riot of bunting and prizes.

Adapted from a review by Stephen Poole for guardian.co.uk  

Netherland

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill - April 09 choice

The Road Home

Rose Tremain's book, which won the Orange Broadband prize for fiction. "I liked the way there was no sentimentality about the book: Lev, the central character, is seriously flawed and indeed his quest which drives the whole action of the book ie the desire to provide a better life for his mother and daughter, is put under scrutiny. His daughter obviously misses him badly and he keeps prolonging his return home even when he has accumulated some money.... It has some lovely descriptive touches – eg P46 daylight pale as milk but never overdoes it. My kind of book! click here for Sue's review

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo By Stieg Larrson

If, like me, you normally avoid crime thrillers, this may be the book to change your mind. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a contemporary thriller set in Sweden, the first of a trilogy by this author, who died shortly after the third book was finished.

It takes a while to pick up all the story lines, which intermesh cleverly throughout the book, but once you get into it, it’s a real pageturner, the action twisting and turning, flipping from one location to another.

Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, has been convicted of libelling an industrialist who  indulged in some very dodgy dealings. Blomkvist is taken on by the head of the large family owned Vanger corporation to investigate the death of his granddaughter 30 years previously. By a series of events an enigmatic and mysterious young girl called Lisbeth Salander, who is the real cult heroine of this series, becomes his partner in investigating the crime.  She can do anything with a computer – she’s a hacker who can access just about any piece of information you can think of and the book describes these processes in some detail.  She has had a difficult life, mostly in the care of state, with a legal guardian lawyer who abused her, and this has made her fierce and fearsome.  Together Blomkvist and Salander do solve the crime, in the process unearthing some very dark secrets about members of the Vanger family.  This book comes with a health warning as there are some disturbing scenes of a violent and sometimes sexual nature, but these are an integral part of the story and in no way gratuitous.

An excellent translation makes this book eminently readable and delivers a fast moving narrative.  As a couple of Fudge Book Club members observed, by the time you’ve finished the book you know a lot about the author’s – um – areas of interest and are in awe of the Swedish capacity for consuming industrial amounts of coffee. 

Jackie Goodman

When Will There Be Good News By Kate Atkinson

July 09 Book Club: When Will There Be Good News is Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring the retired policeman Jackson Brodie. To place it in the crime genre could be misleading although it bears many of that genre’s hallmarks: the man accused of a brutal family murder thirty years before is freed from prison, one of the survivors goes missing and amateur detective Reggie suspects foul play. There are twists in the carefully constructed plot, a potential love interest between Brodie and Chief inspector Louise Munroe, some brutality and a train crash. But there are other ingredients too and this is what makes Atkinson such a delight to read: humour including ironic one-liners, some idiosyncratic characters, contemporary and cultural references and, above all, an overriding sense on the part of the reader that the author has had enormous fun with her writing! Sue Wilsea

Toni Morrison - A Mercy

This slim book by Toni Morrison deserves a review in inverse proportion to its size.  

It also requires a similarly disproportionate amount of time to begin to
unpick the threads and meanings of the story. The book is set in the Atlantic
colonies between 1682 and 1690. The main narrative uses the voice of Florens, a
16 year old African slave, who is given to Jacob Vaark, an enlightened New York
farmer, to settle a debt.  Florens feels betrayed by her mother, who begs Vaark to take the girl instead of her.  Only towards the end of the book does it
become clear that this is a gesture of love and hope that Florens might escape
a life choked by lack of opportunity.  

The themes of this book are all-embracing, taking in the philosophical, the spiritual and the feminist.  The trio of principal female characters,
Lina, a native American who works in Vaark’s household, Rebekkah, Vaark’s
English wife and Florens, develop a subtle and often unspoken support for each
other, which survives Vaark’s death and Rebekkah’s illness.  The book explores the victimisation and
survival of women, attitudes to religion and the roots of racism.  Florens’ passion for a black freedman
culminates in an event which changes her life. This is not an easy book to read, partly because of the shifts in time
and Morrison’s poetic and individual use of language.  It was not until the last line of the last
page that some of the threads were pulled together and made a second, more
informed reading seem a necessity to piece together the complex layers from
which this small book is beautifully crafted. Jackie Goodman

Birds Of America By Lorrie Moore

So why wasn’t this collection of short stories more enjoyable?  Non-communication, dislocation and women who don’t quite fit;  this consistent diet  becomes, perhaps, a little too rich.  One longs for someone, who, just now and then, is a bit more sorted, who can drum up a positive perspective occasionally.  Yet, amongst the complex relationships and dysfunctional individuals, are flashes of brilliant humour and perceptive observation.   Descriptions of a bat (‘a mouse with backpacking equipment’), a visiting writer (the smile on his face was...slightly pharmaceutical’) and the mother of a baby who has been diagnosed with cancer (‘the mother’s face is a big, white dumpling of worry’) are a few of many examples of writing which is highly evocative and will, no doubt, be picked over in university literature classes.  

The stories seem to work best when they focus on a short time period and a specific incident (Charade;  Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens;  Dance in America).  Some lack resolution, which is fine if you like open-ended stories.  Some are enigmatic.   This collection takes some getting into and many book club members found it difficult to remember the individual stories when looking back over the book.  Lorrie Moore is a technically skilled and at times highly original writer, and, like walking round Venice, the reader feels compelled to stop and admire the frequent flashes of craftsmanship, while wishing sometimes for the respite of a slightly less overpowering landscape.

Jackie Goodman

22 November 2009

South Riding

Winifred Holtby's greatest novel is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Book Club member Ann Folan writes a review

Brooklyn By Colm Toibin

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

The theme of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn – the Irish immigrant experience - is certainly not a new one and it’s questionable to what extent the author succeeds in throwing any new light on it. However, the skill with which he handles his subject is immense. The protagonist, Eilis, is an ordinary, arguably dull, Irish girl of the 1950s who seems at first to be almost passive in the way she unprotestingly concedes to her mother and sister Rose’s wishes that she uproots to make a new life for herself in America. Her incapacitation during a stormy Atlantic voyage ( far too much vomit detail here!) reinforces this impression but it’s not long before the reader realises that Eilis is no victim; she doggedly preserves in attempts to better herself, battling loneliness and the alien environment of Brooklyn and can give as good as she gets if the occasion demands. Her dilemma – which forms the later and possibly less successful part of the novel - is what to do when she returns home to Ireland following Rose’s death and, pursued by a former suitor, is tempted to abandon her new life which happens to include a husband.

Toibin’s prose is leisurely, understated and meticulously crafted. There is a wealth of physical detail: sensory references are frequent and clothes play an important role, literally and metaphorically. The way the narrative, although omniscient third person, is almost entirely refracted through Eilis’s experience produces a deeply empathetic picture of the female psyche. The end result is an enigmatic novel ( is it a subversive romance?) which got mixed reactions from Fudge readers!

Sue Wilsea

Even The Dogs By Jon Mcgregor

EVEN THE DOGS by Jon McGregor

McGregor’s first book, If Nobody Speaks of RemarkableThings, introduced us to the narrative style which is employed here – rushes of description, sometimes encapsulating highly poetic fragments, acute observation and gusts of thoughts, often in unfinished sentences.

The book was difficult to get into and I never got quite as absorbed in this book as I did in Remarkable Things.  The first section is perhaps the most difficult to attune to and I became a bit irritated by the similarity with the style of Remarkable Things.  I began to ask myself if McGregor is a one-trick pony.  As with Remarkable Things, something happens at the beginning and the book takes us full circle, trying to explain the reason in the process.

The narrative voice is complex.  it seems to be an amalgam of the friends who are the main players in the book, Danny, Mike, Steve, Ben et al; their – or some other - spirits and an invisible camera which is acting as the reader’s presence. 

The writing style in subsequent sections of the book, while displaying a similar pattern of piling phrase on phrase, is a bit slower and more easily absorbed.  As you get into the book, however, the narrative, which seems jumbled, even chaotic, at first begins to make sense.  Without making any grand statements, McGregor uses a subtle ‘show not tell’ method of weaving some moving and central issues into this book.  By using a structure which is parallel to film-making, he uses this snapshot or slice of life on the streets in a town or city, which might be any town or city, to underscore and humanise the complex reasons why people become detached from society and the way that society deals with them.  Danny, survivor of the Falklands; Steve, who comes from a middle class family and served in Afghanistan;  Robert, whose wife and daughter have left him, Ben, who has a predilection for a sinister sort of violence;  and others who have been brought together in a sort of self-dependence or brotherhood of the dispossessed.  Nobody is blamed but circumstances are revealed.  Like ‘Remarkable Things’ the more you ponder, the more emerges and the more I admire McGregor for the detail with which he writes and for getting under the skin of life on the streets.

Jackie Goodman

19.06.10

Juliet Naked By Nick Hornby

In Juliet, Naked Nick Hornby returns to the theme of perhaps his best loved novel High Fidelity, namely music and the emotional space it occupies for emotionally retarded male anoraks!

Hornby’s previous work has resulted in him being branded a comic writer and there is certainly much humour here. The opening of the novel is an exemplar of bathos with Annie and Duncan, a long-term unmarried couple with an unevenly shared passion for the music of Tucker Crowe, visiting a men’s toilet in Minneapolis where Crowe apparently had some kind of emotional meltdown before becoming a recluse. Hornby successfully updates his theme by having the Internet play a key role, not just in the way it facilitates communication between Annie and Crowe, but also the part it plays in helping create and shape our modern idols by means of global fandom. Thus the novel, despite being essentially light and entertaining, does offer the reader some social commentary. Moreover, there is pleasure to be had in the skill with which Hornby describes the small, private details of a relationship – he is perhaps surprisingly good at empathising with Annie and her childlessness – and the side stories, for example Annie’s dead shark exhibition in the small seaside museum she curates and Malcolm, the world’s worst therapist. Of course for us in Hull there is also the pleasure of recognition in ‘fictitious’ Yorkshire place names such as Gooleness! The novel flags a bit when Crowe actually appears and takes centre stage, necessitating a switch of scene to the USA. Perhaps Hornby is not on quite as safe ground here and some critics did comment on the lack of narrative atmosphere and tension in the middle sections. However, the author still succeeds in getting us to sympathise with Crowe, despite his having behaved pretty badly over the years in his abandonment of a number of wives and children! Nick Hornby appears to be an amiable chap, witty but not cruel, and this pretty much sums up his writing. Sue Wilsea

Love And Summer By William Trevor

July 2010 book choice