That Woman

That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor 
by Anne Sebba

This was our biography choice of the year and there was general disappointment in the style of this book. One comment was this novel reads like one long article about Wallis Simpson and the scandal.

We learn that Wallis may have been a hermaphrodite and had weight issues her whole life.  Was she really in love with the King or did she in the end feel she had to stay with him after the abdication?

One member suggests we should read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides which was a more engrossing novel about the journey of a hermaphrodite.  This received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003.

We rated this book 5.5 out of 10.

Our next novel was going to be The Red House by Mark Haddon but this has now been changed.
The new choice is The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman.

The next meeting will be at Megan's on Thursday July 25th.

A Visit from The Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

An intriguing title from a National Book Award Nominee writer which promised to be an interesting choice for our book group.  However, once again, many of us found the book hard to get into and the story quite disjointed.  It's a story about time and the author attempts to echo contemporary society's rapid fire lifestyle.

Melissa's insights into this novel are quoted below :

"An interesting juxtaposition - while the characters experience a kind of jaded cynicism about the superficiality and brevity of various kinds of success, the novel is written in a highly contemporary, vigorous and energetic style. Fresh writing about 'staleness' which is both curious and confusing for the reader.

The footnote on page 180 by the character journalist Jules Jones, seems to sum up the author's possible anger at the way Western society measures people. Assessing whether you're 'in' or 'out', acceptable or not, based on foundations as fragile as celebrity and corruption.

The author, in her quirky ambitious style, seems to be mourning the loss of important values and is rapping, if you like, to use a musical term, about the degradation of contemporary measures and morals. It is an important theme for discussion and although the author is quite brilliant at representing multiple points of view in an unexpectedly wide variety of literary (and non-literary) styles (eg. Powerpoint/text messaging), jumping around chronologically like someone reporting an event on Speed - the overall experience for the reader can be quite alienating. Whilst the author presents people in various states of indifference/oblivion and suggests perhaps that we are not caring enough about what actually matters, at the some time do not seem to care about the characters in her book and we get lost in the epic interconnecting stories which feels too hard to work out along the way.  If this was indeed her message, for it to have been more effective, we needed to care more."

We rated this novel 3.6 out of 10 (Only 5 of us finished the book and there was a low score of 2 and a high of 7).

Our next book is That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba.
It will be at Robyn's and on Thursday May 30th.