November Salons Announced
Alesian Literary Salon Newsletter
October 12, 2006…..looking towards November’s Salons…
- November/December Salons announced
- Details & Explanations
- Reading Sunday at Red Wheelbarrow
- Jorge Luis Borges quote from The Inheritance of Loss
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1. Announcing….the next series: (first the details, then the explanation)
Salons start Tuesday November 14th and finish December 19th
Tuesday Afternoons 2-4 PM: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy….perhaps to be paired with The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (just announced winner of the Man Booker Prize 2006)
Tuesday Evenings (8-10 PM): The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
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Some thoughts on The God of Small Things:
From The Optical Unconscious in The Post-Colonial Novel by Richard Lane (Polity Press, 2006)
Just under a decade after the publication of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, another immensely creative and in many ways controversial novel was published: Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize Winning The God of Small Things(1997). Published in the fiftieth year of India’s independence, The God of Small Things performs a critique of the Indian caste system and of patriarchal values within marriage and society, transgresses conservative codes of caste and ‘good taste’ in its depiction of intimate human relationships, and creates a new poetic prose that deconstructs the dominance of English grammar and opens a new chapter in magical realism. Beginning this chapter with a reference to Rushdie is not an arbitrary gesture: Roy’s adoption of a hybrid form of writing creates links with Rushdie’s work, as many critics have noted.
The group that is just finishing Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and celebrating with a Bollywood film and Indian meal, wanted to continue our study of contemporary Indian literature. I find the voice in literature from India to be bursting forward- with hope and despair, tragedy and comedy. It seems to me that any nation whose creation was an act of imagination might be an ideal place to find a new vision- a remaking of language and form even as we struggle to see if the idea of the nation holds. Literature from India must straddle boundaries- across ideas of nationhood, language, juxtaposed faiths- and so may reveal a new approach to the idea (or myth?) of difference.
As The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai was just announced winner of the Man Booker Prize 2006, I had a wild idea that this Salon may want to read the two works alongside each other. I think there are thematic links and narrative conjunctions that would allow for some great insights…
Here is a blurb for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter :
In an appraisal of her life and work accompanying McCullers’s front-page obituary in the September 30, 1967, New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote of the impact of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in what could also be an assessment of McCullers’s lasting influence:
It is not so much that the novel paved the way for what became the American Southern gothic genre, but that it at once encompassed it and went beyond it. . . . The heart of this remarkable, still powerful book is perhaps best conveyed by its title, with its sense of intensity, concision and mystery, with its terrible juxtaposition of love and aloneness, whose relation was Mrs. McCullers’s constant subject. . . . Mrs. McCullers was neither prolific nor varying in her theme. . . . This is no fault or tragedy: to some artists a vision is given only once. And a corollary: only an artist can make others subject to the vision’s force. Mrs. McCullers was an artist. She was also in her person, an inspiration and example for other artists who grew close to her. Her books, and particularly “The Heart,” will live; she will be missed.
After the amazing work of the Tuesday Evening group with Faulkner, this suddenly seemed an obvious choice. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter deals with a similar time, place and themes- but in a very different voice. Those who have studied Faulkner will find the comparisons illuminating; those who have not will find entry into the fragmented world of the South via McCullers’s sharp vision.
Why the Agony in choosing this set? Because the current group of Salon participants- in their passion, energy and ideas- makes me want to read everything all at once together. The choices proposed were so wonderful! I also feel that for the next several series we will continue to explore new territory- as much as I always desire to re-read Beloved, Invisible Man, To the Lighthouse- these other works- and studies of Henry James, Nabokov, Jane Austen, Carson McCullers- will only continue to open up the possibilities in the old favorites. I apologize to those whose choices did not get picked for this round- please keep suggesting- and dare to try a work that perhaps did not appeal immediately! With over 25 responses to my call for input, putting together the final list was hard hard hard….so now I am already looking forward to the next series…Virginia Woolf and Faulkner cozying up together, perhaps?
Even if you were not part of the Sept/Oct series, feel free to jump in now and take advantage of those in the Salon who will have studied the works related to those on offer. As much as I would love to run 3 Salons at this time, to do justice to the demands of the study I can only offer the two sessions- so I encourage you to sign up early as they filled up last time.
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3. 15 October at 16h00—Come and hear E. A. Markham at the Red Wheelbarrow. Poet, novelist and short-story writer, Archie Markham is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, At Home With Miss Vanessa, as well as the 2005 collection, Meet Me in Mozambique, both published by Tindal Street Press. Mr. Markham has had numerous poetry collections published by Anvil Press Petry, Peepal Tree Press, Salt, and others, as well as a collection of essays/travelogue, A Papua New Guinea Sojourn: More Pleasures of Exile, published by Carcanet (UK). Please check www.theredwheelbarrow.com for more information or see www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth147 for a full bio. AT: The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore, 22, rue St Paul, 75004 Paris France, Tel / Fax (+33) 01 48 04 75 08
email: red.wheelbarrow@wanadoo.fr or see their site : www.theredwheelbarrow.com
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4.
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
Understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
The willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
—Jorge Luis Borges
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