Memorable Beginnings & Endings – A Little Quiz

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book club in Richmond, book group, book reviews, famous endings, famous first lines, online book club

The 4th Tuesday of the month is traditionally our Theme night and this week’s was: Memorable Beginnings & Endings, chosen by Kay. We turned it into a little quiz and met via Zoom. Great fun was had and if you’d like a little fun too, read our memorable lines below and see if you can guess where they come from before checking the answers at the end of each member‘s contribution.

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Kay:

Although I chose this theme I have to confess that nothing actually stood out in my memory, so I turned to three of my very favourite books of all time to look at their openings and endings:

Openings:

1. ‘I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’
2. ‘The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time.’

Closing:

3. ‘He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living.’

Answers: 1. Regeneration – Pat Barker; 2. Possession – A. S. Byatt; 3. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

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Tim:

Opening:

1. ”For a long time I used to go to bed early”
2. “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over”
3. “O, they went, singing ‘Rest Eternal’, and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing .”
4. Now the difficult one! “Once a time there were four little rabbits.”

Closing:

5.“first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes  I will Yes”

Winner, no Google cheating! gets a drink on me when ???? we next meet at The Roebuck.

 Answers: 1. A la recherche du temps perdu – Proust; 2. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; 3. Dr Zhivago– Boris Pasternak; 4. The Tale of Peter Rabbit– Beatrix Potter; 5. Ulysses– James Joyce

************

Louise:

1. I can only ever remember the classic “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man etc.” but here are three I have just looked up from a couple of beloved books from my youth:
2. “From my seat on the bougainvillea-enshrouded verandah, I looked out over the blue and glittering waters of the bay of Victoria ….”  The clue is that an autobiographical trilogy by this author made a well-known and much loved TV series in recent years.
3. “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte”.  My love of TV crime/detective drama dates back to reading an omnibus of this author.“
4. “I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man”. More action drama, but I just love the use of the subjunctive in that line  (who would, writing now?)  Writers were properly educated people back then … especially the Scots. 

Answers: 1. Pride and Prejudice– Jane Austen; 2.  A Zoo in my Luggage – Gerald Durrell; 3. My Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett; 4. The 39 Steps– John Buchan

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Christine A:

Opening Lines (bit of a theme here – though the first one is overall a humorous book – the second certainly isn’t!)

1. “It was the day my grandmother exploded”
2. “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know”

Ending:

3. “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”

I know that last one could seem priggish but I also think it’s very true!

Answers: 1.The Crow Road – Iain Banks; 2. – The Stranger – Albert Camus; 3. Middlemarch– George Eliot

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Doreen:

1. I think this opening line is one of the most memorable – “It was a bright April day and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
2. And for a closing line:  “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Answers: 1. 1984 – George Orwell; 2. The Great Gatsby – Scott Fitzgerald

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Christine B:

Now, Opening and Closing – brings back memories of the Roebuck!

Opening:

1. “I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life of the village began.”
2. Following on from Louise’s Poisonville to – “Green dice rolled across the green table, struck the rim together, and bounced back. One stopped short holding six white spots in two equal rows uppermost. The other tumbled out to the centre of the table and came to rest with a single spot on top.”  
3. “Tonight I can write the saddest lines”
4. “To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping down to  the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishing boat-bobbing sea.”

Answers: 1. Cider with Rosie – Laurie Lee; 2. The Glass Key– Dashiell Hammett; 3. Pablo Neruda; 4. Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas

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Margaret:

I began to wonder if we were meant to find the arresting first sentence and the final one, in the same books. An intriguing first line can seduce you into a book, whereas the sigh of satisfaction or surprise at the end is a different emotion.

Opening and closing

1. “He knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” A classic warning from a master writer that dire events were to follow. The final sentence is, however, famously, ineffably poignant: “‘If he loved you,’ the priest had said, ‘that shows …’ She turned rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.” Yes, it’s two sentences, but a world of meaning is there and no reader can see that last sentence without a shudder for the obliterating betrayal the girl turning in the sunlight is going to experience.

Opening

2. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Who wouldn’t want to read on?

Closing:

3. “Tomorrow is another day.” Utterly succinct!
4. “The boat reappeared – but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted: living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisy fields together.”  (The tragic end to Tom and Maggie Tulliver was further acknowledged by the writer in a formal Conclusion. I always felt she could not bear to part with them. Thus, their tombstone: “In their death they were not divided.”)

Answers:1.Brighton Rock– Graham Greene; 2. Pride and Prejudice– Jane Austen; 3. Gone with the Wind– Margaret Mitchell; 4. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

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If you’re a visitor to our blog we hope you enjoyed our quiz. Do please let us know your most memorable opening or closing lines.

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The Dead by James Joyce

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best short story ever written, book club, Dubliners, James Joyce, online book club, Richmond upon Thames book club, The Dead by James Joyce

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The Dead is the final story in James Joyce’s short story collection, Dubliners. Published in 1914, it has been described by many as the finest short story ever written. It was Tim’s choice for our January ‘short story/novella’.

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Tim:

A 58-page story or novella, the last in Joyce’s Dubliners completed 1905/6 when Joyce was only 23/24 although not published until 1914.

When I read the hyperbolic statement that this is the best story ever written I was naturally sceptical but I was not disappointed. After the frankly disappointing visit to the unrelievedly maudlin Louise Gluck, this was uplifting. Set at Christmas in middle-class Dublin, c.1905, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, in their 30s/40s, visit his aunts’ jolly Christmas party where a good time is had by all singing, feasting and dancing. The reader may well wonder why the story is entitled The Dead. One of the guests, a Mr D’Arcy, sings a song, ‘The lass of Aughrim’. Gabriel notes that his wife was lost in a reflective enchantment by the song but thinks little of it, ‘a sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart’. The party ends and on the way back to their hotel, following Gretta though the snow he is overcome by love and lust for his wife. ‘Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory’. In their hotel room Gretta is unresponsive to his amorous mood, ‘why did she seem so abstracted’. She discloses that the song reminded her of a youth she had loved who had died. Gabriel ‘shy of intruding on her grief’ lets her sleep beside him. Gabriel suffers the awful realisation that the woman he loves has, all their marriage, loved another unattainable man. ‘It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband had played in her life’, ‘he thought of how she who laid beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live’.

The pathos evoked by a writer of 23 is remarkable, portending the work of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

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Kay:

Remembering my struggle to read Ulysses when I was about 19 (due entirely to a boyfriend at the time), I was geared to find this story hard going. As it turned out, it’s not, though its age (it was published in 1914) is evident not only in the language but the characters themselves and the descriptions of the Irish society in which they live. It’s a story that has won much praise: T.S. Eliot described it as one of the greatest short stories ever written; the New York Times on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Dubliners, that it is the ‘greatest short story ever written’. High praise indeed, which inevitably brings high expectations.

For me a good short story is one that captures one’s imagination and interest immediately and condenses a lot into a few words. The Dead excels in both these conditions. Its opening paragraph is a delight, immediately creating a vivid scene at the opening of a party, which is the centre stage of the story:

‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat, than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest.’

It is on one level so simple yet it tells us so much: we ‘see’ Lily and immediately understand her feeling harassed; we ‘hear’ the wheezy bell; we ‘feel’ that soulless bare hallway. Joyce’s story is rich in descriptive language – ‘A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat’ – but it is the layers of his story that have gained it such a big reputation. The characters and their internal lives are revealed through such descriptions but just as in life, and especially through the internal life of the main character, Gabriel, we witness how thoughts and emotions play out; are suppressed and then reveal themselves.

Gabriel is to make a speech at his aunts’ annual party. When we read that ‘He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand’, I cringed at his arrogance and yet it is more a display of his insecurity and he fears being seen as a failure. When an old friend, Miss Ivors, accuses him of being a West Briton (supporting British rule in Ireland) for writing a book review for The Daily Express, he becomes agitated and defends himself by thinking that ‘literature was above politics’ (and we, the readers, may ask, Is that true?). He plots in his head to take his revenge in his speech and a cruelty is exposed in his thoughts both of Miss Ivors and his aunts: ‘that was one for Miss Ivors. What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women?’. His pomposity shows through the speech: ‘… we are living in a sceptical … thought-tormented age … I fear that this new generation … will lack those qualities of humanity … kindly humour which belonged to an older day.’ Despite the fact he shows no kindly humour himself!

The character of Gabriel is a device through which Joyce exposes the paralysis of his fellow Irishmen in the years leading up to the War of Independence (1919-21). But it is through the paralysis of Gabriel’s marriage that epiphany finally comes. There is a beautiful description of his wife Gretta at the end of the party, standing on the stairs listening to someone singing: ‘There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something’ and he imagines how an artist might paint her. They are to spend the night in a hotel where ‘he longed … to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their ecstasy.’ But the evening ends in a shocking way: the song Gretta was listening to reminded her of a lost love; a boy she’d loved when 17 who had been very ill and died. She describes the tragic story and how the boy risked – and lost – his life in order to see her. She is too distraught now to respond to her husband’s attempt to make love. Gabriel ‘watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife’. Painfully, through Gabriel’s reaction, Joyce reveals how we can never really know another; how a hidden secret or experience can change everything. Now, thinking of his ageing aunts and the death that awaits us all, he thinks: ‘Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade dismally with age.’ This is such a wonderful way to look at not only how the young boy died, but how we should live out our lives to the full.  ‘Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love … His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead … His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world.’ He sees finally how we’re all connected, the living and the dead.

It’s a story that deserves time and thought. At first my pleasure in it turned to thinking it rather a grim story about an unpleasant man, but this gradually changed to my feeling Gabriel was just a rather pathetic figure and then compassion with his reaction to Gretta’s story at the end. I read much of the literature available, analysing the story, and am sure I will go on thinking about it and finding new layers for some time.

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Ted:

This is the final story in a collection of fifteen short stories in Dubliners, written in 1904-7 and finally published in 1914. Publication was delayed because certain passages in some of the stories were regarded as ‘obscene and the publishers were also concerned that the collection presented a bleak depiction of Irish life in Dublin at that time.

The setting is an annual dance and dinner party held by Kate and Julia Morkan and their young niece Mary Jane Morkan, which draws together a variety of relatives and friends. Their favourite nephew Gabriel Conroy is the main protagonist of the story and his wife Gretta emerges as an important character. It is symbolic that the party is set at or just before the feast of Epiphany on January the sixth. I initially found the party slow going but it was a way of getting to know Gabriel’s character. In his conversation with Miss Ivors he confessed to being ‘sick of my own country, sick of it!’ and was subsequently labelled a ‘West Briton’ during their dance. The story begins to change as the party is winding down when Gabriel notices his wife standing at the top of the stairs transfixed by a sad old Irish song The Lass of Aughrim being sung by a guest in another room. He feels joy and passionate feelings for his wife as they walk back to their hotel through the snowy streets. Later his romantic inclinations are dashed when Gretta bursts into tears and confesses that she had been thinking about that song which reminded her of a former boyfriend who had sung it to her in her youth and who later died after waiting outside her window under a tree in the cold. Gabriel is shocked and initially dismayed that there was something of such significance in his wife’s life that he never knew about. Later, as he watches her sleep he reflects that a man died for her love and Gabriel realises that he had never felt like that himself towards any woman. One epiphany follows another as he realises that they have both aged, he would soon attend his aunts’ funerals and he feels the shadow of mortality on all of them. He imagines he sees a the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree… ‘Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.’ It is difficult to put into words, but the last page has an almost cosmic feeling as he hears the snow faintly falling, all over Ireland and through the universe!

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Christine B:

I’m blown away by this stunning, perceptive, sensitive, beautiful story written in thirty pages by a genius.  I can’t say any more tonight but, if you haven’t read it, you must.

Thank you so much, Tim, for suggesting it.

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Do please let us know what you think about The Dead in Comments below!

The Poetry of Louise Gluck

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American poetry, American poets, book club, Louise Gluck, online book club, Richmond upon Thames book club, Winner of 2020 Novel Prize for Literature

Louise Gluck is an American poet who was born in 1943 in New York and raised on Long Island. She now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is an adjunct professor at Yale University. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 and was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.

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Tim:

I suggested we should visit her work not through prior acquaintance but on hearing she had been awarded the Nobel prize. I have only read ‘The Wild Iris’, published 1992 when she would have been 49 years old, which must qualify the generality of my remarks .

I was disappointed; you have all heard of my antipathy to blank formless ‘verse’. I am not alone . ‘Her work is not known for poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration’; a fellow poet has called her style ‘radically inconspicuous’ or ‘virtually an absence of style’.

Her youth was unhappy, suffering from anorexia. She failed to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College and underwent seven years of psychotherapy.

On first reading ‘The Wild Iris’ I thought I was reading the reflections of one at the end of life contemplating death, not a 49 year old. Not that youth is a proof against melancholia.

All ‘The Wild Iris’ seems to be set in her garden and she is quite a botanist e.g. the poem ‘Ipomoea’ – Morning glory. She personifies the plants:

What was my crime in another life,

     as in this life my crime

     is sorrow, that I am not to be

     permitted to ascend ever again,

     never in any sense 

     permitted to repeat my life,

     wound in the hawthorn, all

     earthly beauty my punishment 

     as it is yours…

Are the poems addressed to a deity*, her husband , her alter ego???. The book is dedicated to, inter alios, her husband, John and son Noah.

Seven poems are entitled ‘Matins’, ten ‘Vespers’.

          *Even as you appeared to Moses,because

            I need you,you appear to me,not

            often,however.I live essentially 

            in darkness.

Death is never far. ‘The Wild Iris’:

            At the end of my suffering 

           there was a door.

            Hear me out : which you call death

           I remember .

            It is terrible to survive 

            as consciousness 

            buried in the dark earth.

Perhaps not cheering reading for Covid lockdown!!!!!!!!

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Margaret:

In choosing this poet for today’s poetry session, I thought we were on safe ground with the 2020 Nobel prizewinner, but even that accolade did not prepare me for what I found. Today – after a hasty, stunned scanning of the material about her and some of her work – I know that I can’t wait to read more. In these strange and imponderable times, it seems to me that Gluck’s ostensibly direct voice, with all its nuanced comprehension of suffering, endurance and the prosaically awful nature of ‘real’ life, could be the one we need to hear.

I can only refer to ‘The Drowned Children’, which concerns a group of children who were drowned in a pond.  The poetic persona who narrates the story appears to be a detached onlooker, her tone as cold as the frozen pond itself. She says,

          ‘You see, they have no judgement. So it is natural that they should drown.’

This horrifying logic and the numb, but searing and harrowing description by the narrator of the children’s deaths leaves the reader to suffer the full shock of the incident without any guiding intervention from the emotions of the writer. Instead, she offers the reader her own pitiless observations. For example, here, she says,

          ‘… and then, all winter their wool scarves

          Floating behind them as they sink

          Until at last they are quiet.’

There is no description of the children, no detail of numbers, or of people screaming or attempting rescue. You are, in a sense, alone, watching these children succumb to the black waters. But the final lines, although tragic, ‘What are you waiting for/ come home, come home’ do serve to remind us that the poet is still there…

More than one critic and many readers has said they were haunted by this poem.

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Ted:

I was not familiar with her work and she has a huge anthology so it was difficult to know where to start. Ararat [1990] was referred to by the critic Dwight Garner writing in the New York Times in 2012 as ‘the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry in the last 25 years’! Not a good idea to read in lockdown, so after doing searches I opted for one of her most popular and critically acclaimed books The Wild Iris [1992] and have chosen the title poem.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

It is a beautiful poem but what is the poet saying? I’m not sure, but I think she is talking about the immortal human soul and persistence of some form of consciousness after death by using the perpetual life cycle of the iris as a metaphor. The iris withers [‘suffers’] and ’dies’ at the end of the growing season, yet remains alive underground [as a bulb] and is reborn in the spring. Her words also made me think of reincarnation and also of the resurrection of Christ. I look forward to hearing what you all think.

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Christine B:

Louise Gluck won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her book The Wild Irisand the poems are written as the voices of flowers, human, natural world and external. She is revisiting the myth of Persephone and, reading this idea, I felt very attracted to her concept but, unfortunately, I couldn’t believe in the voice.

It may be the unfortunate time we are living in but flowers give so much to us, their beauty, studying the changes through their lives and, inevitably their death, we know that they are ephemeral and it is wonderfully calming to look at a single flower for ten minutes; it will change in that time but reading her poem will remain unchanged, I felt a hardness that for me doesn’t work with flowers; that Trillium is lily, Latium is the nettle and ‘The Wild Iris’ is here (see poem in full above).

A more recent, very lovely poem is ‘Matins’, which reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s writing:

Matins 

The sun shines; by the mailbox, leaves

of the divided birch tree folded, pleated like fins.

Underneath, hollow stems of the white daffodils,

    Ice Wings, Cantatrice; dark

leaves of the wild violet. Noah says

depressives hate the spring, imbalance

between the inner and outer world. I make

another case – being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately 

attached to the living tree, my body

actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace,

     In the evening rain

almost able to feel

sap frothing and rising: Noah says this is

an error of depressives, identifying

with a tree, whereas the happy heart

wanders the garden like a falling leaf, a figure for

The part, not the whole.

 I found a longer poem, ‘Screened Porch’, interesting; I shall look for other poems that she has written.

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Please let us know in Comments whether you’ve read Louise Gluck’s poetry and what you think of it.

Monogamy by Sue Miller

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book blog, book reviews, online book club, Richmond book club, Sue Miller

Sue Miller is an American best-selling novelist, born in Chicago in 1943, who now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kay:

I came across the writer Sue Miller through the blog, A Life in Books, and so much enjoyed Monogamy that I’ve read two more Miller books since. I found Monogamy such a powerful read that once I’d finished it I felt sad to let it go and unable to start another book straight away; I haven’t felt like that about a book in a long time. It’s a wonderful, extraordinarily powerful read; moving and insightful. It’s a novel about life, marriage and relationships. All the characters seem so real. Miller understands the complexities of life, the structures we build both externally and internally to support our stories, the experiences that shape us.

Annie is Graham’s second wife; he remains on very good terms with his first, Frieda, and this is a relationship Annie has to absorb into her own life with Graham. Graham has two children: Lucas with Frieda and Sarah with Annie. Graham is a larger-than-life, gregarious man; the kind everyone is drawn to and ‘loves’. Annie seems to have lost of her way a bit, allowed herself to be absorbed into Graham’s life and huge needs, but is, as the novel opens, starting to take up her photography work seriously again; find herself again. But when she wakes one morning to find Graham dead beside her (and this is in the opening chapter so no spoiler), quite suddenly and unexpectedly, her life is thrown into disarray.

The novel is about coming to terms with grief; understanding how one can become lost in a long marriage, especially to such a big and overwhelming presence as Graham; and resolving in one’s mind a greater understanding of the life you’ve led and your part in the way it has played out. Annie was in no doubt that she had loved Graham, but at what cost to herself? Then into her grief comes betrayal: learning that Graham had an affair just before his death when she had believed so completely that they’d had a monogamous marriage. Miller brilliantly charts Annie’s journey through her internal landscape, full of grief and then betrayal and rage at the discovery of the affair, all the while conscious of the needs of his children and those around her. How does Graham, now gone but ever present in her life through her memories and other people who were close to him, even his bookshop which is a hub of the local community, fit into her life now? How must she think of him now? Can she still love him? Miller follows all the complex emotions that play out in Annie’s mind with such intelligence and understanding that it’s a powerful journey to follow and there is some relief at the end when she manages to find a way to remember the love and the good rather than allow the rage and hurt to dominate for ever.

Maybe because it touched in some ways on my own experiences, this seemed a novel about real life with real characters, and it had a profound effect on me.

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Christine A:

An absorbing read for the quiet period between Christmas and New Year. A well-constructed, evenly paced novel with some insightful characterisation. Also some whimsical twists and turns – the bequest for the cat really gave me a lift!

The subject of Sue Miller’s book is a long and essentially happy marriage; Annie, the wife, is a very believable protagonist and I quickly care about her fate. This writing is emotionally pitch-perfect throughout.

Each response to the death of a lead character for instance is analysed with laser-sharpness. The son of the deceased’s reaction is examined as follows: “Why did X’s sympathetic but essentially rote response reach him when the news from his mother hadn’t? Because his mother had her own sorrow, he supposed, and needed him … he realized that somehow his father’s death would have to be, for him, first about his mother. That her sorrow would have precedence over his…”

To me this is a book about how difficult the transition is between being recently bereaved, with all the rawness of parting, to the point where the deceased’s memory is a source of strength. So although it is an exquisitely written book, which I very much enjoyed as I read it, the after effect is profoundly sad.

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Do please let us know if you’ve read Monogamy of any other of Sue Miller’s books in Comments below.