No. 31 – Complete Maus

Hi everyone

Book club no.31 took place yesterday at Flemming’s place in Fulham. A small but perfectly formed group of Flemming, Pete, Andy and Camilla dined on roast duck, roast potatoes and red cabbage and found time between delicious mouthfuls to discuss Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Complete Maus”, the first graphic novel the book club has considered.

The issue of the relationship between words and pictures, and how a graphic novel can represent the action normally found in a literary novel – let alone something as complex as the Holocaust – was the focus of our discussion. Camilla kicked off a close ‘reading’ of Spiegelman’s pictures by noting how the mice – representing the Jews – do not have mouths except in images of them in pain, and how this suggested their essential ‘voicelessness’. The group discussed the use of different animals to represent the different nationalities and to what extend this was a successful or distracting conceit.

Andy’s interest was in the use of time and how the format of the comic allowed the representation of time to be more fluid, so the narration could flit back and forth between the 1940s and 1980s in a way that, he felt, would have been much harder for a literary novel to achieve.

Pete highlighted how the portrayal of a Jewish father from that generation mirrorred similar stories by other Jewish writers, including memoirs by Philip Roth. Flemming pointed out that the book’s long gestation period (it was written while the author’s father was alive but not published till after his death) suggests Spiegelman struggled to escape his father’s presence. Pete noted the Freudian resonances that echoed throughout the book. Andy – as is required in every book club – discussed the presence of the mouse’s ego, superego and id in the narrative.

The group also discussed whether the book demeaned or suitably comemmorated Holocaust victims, whether it worked as fiction or biography, the effect of using real photos at different points in the book, the reason for the absence of the mother’s suicide, and the impact of the ‘interchapter’ of Spiegelman’s previous comic.

Overall, prejudices about graphic novels were successfully challenged and the group agreed that the experience of reading “Maus” had been overwhelmingly positive.

Having looked at the list I think it’s Sophie’s turn next.

Pete

No. 30 – The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

Hello

July 5th – not Independence Day, but nonetheless a day that will go down in history as the day when Roger Federer finally won 15 grand slam tennis titles – saw another historic milestone. Yes, that’s right: book club no.30! If only we’d realised this at the time we might have made more of an effort to celebrate it.

The text before us was “The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell” – two separate, short works of non-fiction prose (our first foray into this genre) by renowned English bohemian and all-round literary dabbler, Aldous Huxley.

The group was reduced to a core of four personages – Owain (host), Sophie (hostess and sous chef), Pete (watching the tennis) and Ed (late). Nonetheless – and despite a certain amount of trepidation about how to approach these tricky, ambiguous books – the session was immensely fruitful and thought-provoking.

Debate started by considering Huxley’s motivations for writing the book, a description of a mescalin trip he took in 1953 and its impact on his thinking about mystical or visionary experiences. Pete argued that Huxley in some sense through this book helped give birth to the Californian movement (which has been so important in the modern West) which focused on self-realisation and consciousness expansion, and that this book was particularly influential in giving credence to the drugs movement that became emerged during the 1960s. When considering why these books remain in print and are regarded so highly, we felt that Huxley’s status as an outsider – an English aristocrat arguing for drug legalisation – was significant.

We also discussed how Huxley’s attitudes to drugs in these books seem to differ from that in “Brave New World”, where his invented drug ‘soma’ is used to keep the masses in a state of soporific acquiesence. And we considered the relationship of this book to previous book club authors, including JG Ballard (who wrote a cursory introduction to our edition of the text) and Thomas Pynchon, the former developing Huxley’s interest in how drugs began to permeate mainstream, ‘respectable’ society during the second half of the twentieth century, while the latter was clearly influenced by Huxley’s description of the paranoia that drug trips could bring on.

However, despite the interesting ideas raised by both books, the group found them on the whole rather disappointing. “The Doors of Perception” – with its greater narrative drive – was agreed to be the stronger of the two, but “Heaven and Hell” came in for particular criticism, especially from Ed who commented on Huxley’s pro-drugs stance and the distinct lack of a “hell” in his description of what drugs such as mescalin do to people’s minds and behaviour.

Owain (who chose the book) was particularly let down by it, finding the narrative description of Huxley’s trip – though its strongest part – still weak and unexciting, while he felt the other sections looking at the role of mysticism in art and religion were simply poorly argued, biased and subjective. We also agreed that the pieces of art shown or played to Huxley during his trip by his wife and friend – Cezanne, Mozart, Botticelli, Van Gogh – demonstrated a canonical bias of Huxley’s time and place without shedding too much valuable light on the impact of the drug trip itself.

All in all, there was much to discuss – including genre, the status of the book as ‘scientific’ or otherwise, its Western bias and Orientalist attitudes, and its wider cultural impact – but our feeling was the book was not all it was cracked up to be.

The baton is passed over to Fleming (host of one of our favourite ever book clubs) even though he couldn’t be bothered to turn up this time.

Pete

No.29 – Washington Square

Hello

Book club no.29 was held at my flat on Saturday. Our text this time was “Washington Square” by well-known effete Anglo-American short story writer and novelist, Henry James.

This was one of the better-received texts we’ve read for book club, with many participants agreeing it deserved a place in the upper pantheon of the Book Club Hall of Fame (still under construction). However, Flemming was particularly vociferous in his distaste for the book, claiming its characters were worthless and unlikable. Specifically, our debate focused on the character of Catherine Sloper – was she a wet drip who remained a wet drip at the end of the book, or was she the story’s only honest character who lived and suffered by her own moral code (as Wakeling proposed)? There was a pronounced male-female split in the discussions, with some of the boys admiring Dr Sloper’s gruff exterior, while Wakeling and Mofo were more sympathetic to Catherine’s predicament.

Overall, though, the text stimulated some interesting debate on matters such as the story’s inherent theatricality, its use of silence, the metaphor of the square, and the varieties of sexuality on display. Pete also helpfully guided the discussion via his useful GCSE-level questions scrawled in the back of his copy of the book.

The baton for book club no.30 – surely deserving of some kind of celebration? – is handed over to Owain.

Pete

No.28 – The High Window

Hello Book Club #28 was held at Wakeling’s house in Old Street on Saturday

The text before us was Raymond Chandler’s 1943 detective novel “The High Window”. The book caused an outcry of critical responses, and provoked Andy to describe it simply as “the worst book I’ve ever read”. Others were more sanguine, however, and we managed to find a few nuggets of historical and textual interest amidst a wasteland of outdated racial stereotypes, misogyny, pedestrian prose and leaden dialogue. The kindest verdict we could draw was that Chandler’s novel – now seemingly so cliched and predictable – was the starting point of the cliches that have since become so widespread. We must give him credit for inventing this particular branch of the detective novel, even if reading it 66 years on is like bashing yourself over the head with a mallet. But overall it nestles comfortably next to “The Sorrows of Young Werther” as the poorest book club text so far. The new book is chosen by me. I have decided to go back to basics with a 19th century classic – Washington Square by Henry James. Enjoy. As a kick-off for possible dates at my place – how about Sat 2nd or 9th May? Soph – can you forward this to Fleming, as I don’t have his personal email address?

Thanks Pete