Book of the Week

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

Recommended by Mr Hager

'I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.'

Amy Hempel's new collection of short stories is an, at times, moving and provocative read. It is also a quick one.

Hempel is regarded as a minimalist, although she doesn't like the term because she feels it implies that plot and detailed emotion are required in normal fiction. She is famous for the precision of her sentences and for the ways in which she often achieves her effects without creating the standard story arc, or without obvious points of tension and conflict. Some stories might feel flat as a result, or might fail, but when they work there is a sense of something quite remarkable that has been created out of almost nothing. James Wood, writing in his New Yorker review, says, 'her stories assemble extraordinary sentences. And each purified sentence is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma.'

See if you agree, and let the Blog know which ones you thought were the best. The opening story alone is worth the price of the book, and there are other gems hidden away.

You'll also enjoy Hempel's characters' eccentricity, and the ways in which she uses the humorous and the mundane. There's a story that approaches the civil rights movement, for example, through the artwork 'Doll Tornado' that has divided critics.

If you're someone who likes to define things, then read some of Hempel's stories and decide what constitutes a short story, or a poem, or a prose poem. There's a lot of food for thought here, and some of the stories are compact enough to fit into the time between a lesson, and certainly into a couple of Pauline lunchtimes.

Book of the Week

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Recommended by Nick Stanger

Apart from the mysterious foreshadowing of tragedy in the title, the most immediately enticing element of this novel for me was the backdrop of 1980s New York. The fast-paced nature of the book combined with its omniscient narrative style packed full of dialogue really fuels the atmosphere of a hectic lifestyle which is established from the onset.

The novel documents just a few months in the life of Sherman McCoy, a successful bond broker at Pierce & Pierce on Wall Street who lives in a flashy two-storey Park Avenue apartment with his wife, to whom he is unfaithful. Whilst navigating the Manhattan highway with his adulteress Maria Ruskin, who is also married, Sherman takes an accidental yet damning turn into the Bronx.

Book of the Week

Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward

Winner of the National Book Award in the USA, this novel has been praised for its unflinching state-of-the-nation treatment of the lives of black Americans in Mississippi whilst also criticised for some of its overt literariness - it owes a considerable debt to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, for example.  Some critics have claimed that the style takes away from the emotional impact of the novel, but I found this book genuinely moving and utterly compelling.

Told through the perspective of a young mother, Leonie, her son Jojo and the ghost of an ex-convict, the novel bridges the gap between contemporary, post-Katrina Missippi and the world of Jojo's grandparents.  The novel is centred around the journey that Leonie and Jojo make to pick up Michael (Leonie's white husband) from prison, and the aftermath of his return to the family unit.  Jojo's and Leonie's relationship with Pop and Mama (Leonie's parents) also forms an important aspect to the story, as does the gradual revelation of Pop's prison story from decades ago, which impacts the living and the dead.

The novel mixes banality with epic tropes and there is a good deal of humour here, as well as a ferocity to the critique of contemporary America.  The writing arguably approaches poetry on occasion and, even if the comparison with Faulkner leaves this novel in the shadow of the works it is indebted to, this is absolutely worth your time.

Lady Brett Ashley: A Hemingway Anachronism

by Ben Ballard

The ‘roaring twenties’ are often seen as the coming of age for women, who were liberated to wassail and flaunt their sexuality. Despite its contrasting intentions, the Prohibition era in the United States saw the transformation of women across the United States; the 1920s woman smoked, drank, voted and cut her own hair. However, this salvation of female sensuality became only another reason for 1920s men to condemn the nature of women to the core. These notions of misogyny were inherited by contemporary popular culture and particularly by the male-dominated field of literature. Critically-acclaimed authors such as T.S Eliot, Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald harnessed a wide range of ‘femme fatale’ or just simply ‘bitch’ female characters in their work to express their misogynistic views but no author epitomised this era of chauvinist literature quite like Ernest Hemingway.

Book of the Week

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Recommended by Nicholas Stanger

The novel follows the story of Wall Street banker Sherman McCoy (known to himself as a 'Master of the Universe') and his lover Maria with whom he is having an affair.

English Society hits the road ...

Sebastian Kobler writes: The first meeting of the rebooted English Society will be today at 12:45 in E1. We will be discussing On The Road, Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 novel based on his own travels around the United States.

We follow Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty as they hit the road, travelling across late 1940s America, indulging in the jazz-influenced underground culture. The novel is considered a classic of the Beat literary movement, which was closely intertwined with the cultural revolution of post-war America and influenced, among others, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Come along this lunchtime to find out more about On The Road and discuss a few passages.

If you'd like to know a little more about Kerouac and his novel, here's a piece by Mr O'Keeffe reflecting on the significance of cars and journeys in On The Road, and in twentieth-century American literature in general.