Tag Archives: Claire Messud

The reading (and travelling) life

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Image courtesy The Graphics Fairy
Image courtesy The Graphics Fairy

I’ve got a five hour car trip ahead of me today and last night I fell asleep reading. Which means the light was on and I wasn’t wearing my CPAP. So I may be puling off for micro-naps today.

I’m heading in to the final stretch of my reading challenge in a Goodreads group, so I’ve got a very defined book list.

In printed text, I’ve got just a few pages left in The Woman Upstairs by Clarie Messud. I’ve owned this book for a while and thought it was a kind of thriller or something. But it’s not. And it’s terrific, resonating on a number of levels. More to come when I review it.

Next up in will be Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother by Priscilla Uppal, a non-fiction memoir that I’ve been hearing great things about. I’ve also got The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (Keep Toronto Reading and my next book club selection) on my pile, as well as Washington Square by Henry James (for TIFF Books on Film).

Audio books are a terrific accompaniment to long drives and boring housework. I’m halfway through Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, a fascinating look at memory and how memory champions train for competition. Next up will be The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which will (hopefully) be good prep for my trip to 221b Con in Atlanta next month. I purchased that through Downpour which has great deals on the ACD canon at the moment.  I’ve also got The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the OneClick Digital Recorded Books program through my public library, but the app seems to be glitchy so I’m not sure that I’ll be able to listen to it unless there’s an update.

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This week, I hope to get my mom’s condo ready to put on the market. There’s still a lot of stuff to clear out, and I need to find a cleaning crew to give it a once-over. I’ve got some friends and family to see in town, and I’d love to catch the new Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Blogging may be light as I won’t have wifi chez moi, but who knows? I’ll try to at least keep busy on Instagram.

And finally, my indoor herb garden in rocking my world! Everything’s up except for the garlic chives. The cilantro suddenly appeared yesterday and I’m very pumped about that one as it’s the hardest to find in garden stores.

The Dinner by Herman Koch – Book Club Resources

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My book club had an excellent discussion about The Dinner yesterday afternoon. As moderator this month, I had done some research and prepared a set of discussion prompts. This book generated one of the best meetings we’ve had, with its interesting structure and commentary on society, family, and politics.

I wasn’t able to find many resources for book clubs online for this novel, so decided to share my outline and some links to reviews and commentary here. I have edited my notes to make them more user-friendly. Resources are listed at the end. A PDF of the discussion questions can be downloaded here.

The Dinner by Herman Koch – Book Club Discussion Starters

Without saying why, how would your rate this book on a scale of 1 to 10?

(Our club often asks members to rate a book at the beginning and end of each meeting. Some interesting shifts occur after members have had a chance to discuss a work.)

Structure

  • The author structured the book around a dinner, but used flashbacks to tell the story. Did this work for you?
  • How did you feel about the narrator at the beginning of the novel? At the end? When did you realize that he was unreliable?

The Story

  • Do you need to like the characters in order to like a book?  How did you feel about the main characters in this novel?
  • How did you feel about the reveal of the narrators genetic disorder?

Morality

  • Were you surprised by how far the parents were willing to go to protect their children? Why do you think they did that? What would you do in similar circumstances?
  • To what extent can psychological factors mitigate criminality? What about those who elect not to take medication?

Society

  • What does the restaurant setting say about the society in which the novel is set?
  • Tolerance and moral superiority: Discuss the adoption of Beau/Faso and subsequent narrative about him
  • What, if anything, does the particular crime say about society, youth, or anything else?
  • What commentary does the novel make about today’s political system?

Other

Why did you rate the book the way you did at the beginning of the discussion and would you change your rating now?

Online Resources (a selection)

  1. Online interview with Herman Koch in The Globe and Mail (Canada). March 2013
  2. Review of The Dinner by Claire Messud in the New York Times. (March 2013
  3. Review in The Telegraph. (August 2012)
  4. Review in The Guardian. (July 2012)
  5. Review in The Independent (July 2012)
  6. Bios of Herman Koch (Wikipedia, Dutch Foundation for Literature, HKs homepage (in Dutch))

The Dinner has been adapted for the theatre (2012) and made into a film (2013), both in Dutch. Cate Blanchett will make her directorial debut in an American film of the novel.