Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

Edwidge Danticat Everything Inside (2019)

Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, the short story collection Everything Inside, explores how people come to terms with death, both their loved ones’ and their own. We agreed with the publisher’s comment that the collection offers “vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love” 

Danticat is a two-time National Book Award finalist, MacArthur Genius fellow, Neustadt laureate, and winner of scores of other prestigious literary honors. NPR describes the book as “ a stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat’s brilliant career.”

We had decided that each of our group members would choose one story on which to comment. When we met, we discovered that our choices were split mostly between two stories: “ Sunrise, Sunet” and “Seven Stories.” All of us commented that the story we chose was so heartbreaking that we almost did not return to read more, but, we all would return, compelled by Danticat’s beautiful prose, her precise descriptions, her memorable characters. 

We talked about our observations of how she created male characters striking for their gentleness. For example, in “Sunrise,Sunset” the elderly grandfather lovingly tried to protect his wife and hide her dementia from others and the young husband tried to understand his wife’s disinterest in their baby, though he had no understanding of what we recognized as post partum depression. We shared our experiences with the ravages of dementia on families, and we recalled a similar kindness in our own lives or in other literature; for example, in the Madonnas of Leningrad which some of us read in the group some years ago. 

Each character, no matter how flawed, was legible in some way that did not exclude them from care. We considered how Danticat’s portrayals are kind, even loving, and noted that, like Tillie Olsen’s portrayals of suffering characters, Danticat cares about her characters; none are villains or beyond compassion.I have often encountered the notion that reading fiction helps to create empathy. Whether or not that is true, we discussed how we felt that Danticat’s stories insist on our empathy not only for her specific characters but for our communities.

We were delighted to have a visitor join our discussion: Oakland librarian Nabilla Mohamed, who helps our members locate books, sometimes even having them delivered to the member’s local branch. Nabilia read Danticat’s stories and shared her insights about the experience of homelessness that haunts every person who has moved from a homeland to a new country, whether by choice or necessity. She shared about attempts to maintain the best of one’s homeland culture, the values, the foods and spoke of the experience of always feeling to some extent as an outsider in both places even when one has the means to return for visits. We all wanted her to join our group despite her young age, and assured her she would always be a welcome guest.

The LARB review comments of the collection that “This is existentialist fiction: everyone is exiled in their own suffering, we can’t fully know another’s pain although we can touch it briefly, and our full essence — everything inside — is not manifest until the moment of death.” While this failure of total knowledge is of course true, that “brief touching” is meaningful, and we were grateful for the ways Danticat’s collection both exemplified that meaning in prose and in our own personal experiences that her prose invited us to share. 

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

February 7 2025

Our winter 2025 season opened with a lively discussion of A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman (2012), a novel about which a number of members shared strongly held opinions. One reader pointed out her disappointment—-not only in the novel but more importantly, its divergence from the stated original focus of our book group: the book is neither written by a woman nor focused on an old woman. When I admitted that members had recommended two few on-topic books for t this season, she reminded me that she submitted a lengthy list. She had been unaware that we only consider books a member has read (we diverged from this “rule” when we agreed, prior to its publication, to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything because we so loved her other books. 

Our resultant disappointment in Strout’s most recent novel coupled with a discussion regarding our shifting from our founding goals resulted in our determination to dip into that lengthy list of on-topic books prior to our next round of selections.

To that end, please send me your suggestions of books you discover that are written by women and focus on older women! You can see our list to note what we have read previously.

Now back to A Man Called Ove,originally published in Sweden In 2012  and then translated by Henning Koch and published in English in 2013. The novel was on the New York Times best seller llist for 42 weeks. It has been adapted for two films, one in Swedish and a second in English.

The story follows a miserable, grumpy, elderly man living alone on a suburban street. Bitter over and still grieving the loss of his wife, Ove, alone and misanthropic, is disillusioned with the modern world and determines to end his life.  Described by his neighbors as “the bitter neighbor from hell” he eventually strikes up a friendship with a boisterous young family who moves in next door. His pregnant neighbor Parveneh, keeps interrupting his solitary life with her daily challenges. As you may anticipate,these multiple interruptions eventually re-connect Ove with the joys of human connection. The plot is obvious from the beginning, and members either  found it boring and derivative or appreciated the ease with which the plot  structured reading and the promise of a feel good ending..

The Kirkus review notes: “The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: ‘Ove is fifty nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars  and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.’ What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-inn-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold.

We generally sympathized with Ove and the hardships he had endured since childhood: the loss of both his parents, his loss of a job for refusing to be a snitch, the loss of his house to fire,his unborn child, and finally the loss of his beloved wife, Sonja whose upbeat personality balanced his curmudgeonly take on life. Some of us attributed his attitudes to grief; others said he was born into the wrong time, and we agreed that as readers “of a certain age,” we shared some of his complaints about the ineptitude of ordinary people to make their own household repairs, to mend a bicycle, or to back up a vehicle. We applauded his integrity and disagreed some about whether he had a heart of gold or just a sense of responsibility

The general tone of many reviews and the views of many of our group align with this feel good take on the novel. However, some members of our group wholeheartedly disagreed, frustrated with how the novel removes his own responsibility for his emotional disconnection, and provides little reason for his wife to have loved him except a tired adage that she saw something underneath his surface lack of empathy or kindness.  The novel also leverages the stereotype of the repressed, isolated Swede enlivened by the warm, open woman of color and her “chaotic” energy. 

The discussion was lively, and we all agreed that in this exhausting moment, the sort of “gentle ease” of the novel made it an easy read. We agreed that we will continue to look for books by women that focus on “old ladies” as we had decided to do five years ago, when the group began.

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat January 2025

Tell Me Everything (2024) by Elizabeth Strout

“A generous, compassionate novel about the human need for connection, understanding and love, and the damage that occurs when those things are denied.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters — Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and others. In this novel, the community must navigate a shocking crime in their midst.

Our book group previously had read Strout’s Olive Kitteridge at my suggestion. I had taught the book at Mills, and the students found the stories engaging and thought provoking. The book group agreed, and we eagerly returned to Strout’s characters in Olive, Again, Oh, William, and Lucy by the Sea, so when we saw the announcement of Tell Me Everything, we immediately added it to our fall 2024 reading list. We anticipated Strout’s familiar conversational style, her quirky characters, with a central plot threading together all the bits and pieces. dWe were surprised by the larger cast of characters, the multiple plot lines, and we were a little disappointed.

We had not been put off by large casts of characters or multiple plot lines in other books, and we wondered why this book, well reviewed as the Chronicle quote above indicates, did not sit well with us.

Perhaps we expected her more familiar form. Unlike novelists whose books do not return to the same places or characters, Strout’s connected novels, while not formally a series, create a fictional world that invites readers to return to a place they know well, offering new surprises and plots but within an expected structure. So the shift in structure, as it did not have a clear point–was not obviously making an argument via form–put us off a bit.

We also had feelings about the characters’ fates. We have leaned into novels with tragic or or unhappy outcomes, but here we were invested in the characters across a series of stories, and so our reactions and expectations differed. Perhaps we were perplexed by the choice to make Lucy remarry William, whom none of us really like. One group member wondered why she built up the intimacy between Lucy and her friend Bob Burgess only to alter it so abruptly. We speculated that Lucy married William to force herself to loosen the ties to Bob. Our reaction, as if these are people we know, is fascinating to consider. For example, long after my initial reading and weeks after the group discussion, I still feel the initial burst of satisfaction I had when Olive’s good friend in the memory care section of their shared nursing home defied her daughter’s insistence to move across the country near family and insisted she needed/wanted to stay close to her best friend, Olive.

Strout’s characters always feel “real,” and her writing is always strong, but I wonder about the dangers of writing a series of linked novels, as well as the pleasures. I did not, finally, enjoy this novel nearly as much as the previous ones. I’d love to know what you think!

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat

The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016)

Jennifer Manuel

This book was difficult to find. We could not find copies in local libraries, but group members managed to obtain copies nevertheless as Carole’s note describes, in a brief anecdote that reminds me of the connections we make by reading together, connections that Bernadette, the protagonist of this novel, longs for:

“Linda and I live just a few minutes’ walk from each other and we’ve shared books for our group before. Usually, I’d finish and pass the book on to Linda, but this time we had a more elaborate arrangement. I found that I had no time to read during the day, so Linda had the book during the day and I had it overnight, since I seem to have quite a bit of awake time during the night these days. Mostly, we left the book for each other, inside my front gate or at Linda’s front door. Sometimes we met up for the exchange. It was fun to check in about where we were in the book and what we thought about what was going on. “

I was unable to access the book in an audio version; I had ordered a copy from a local bookstore, hoping I might be able to read parts with my magnifier, but it had not arrived by the time we met. So my contribution was simply a quote from one of the novel’s reviews I was able to access online. I quoted Carrie Breck’s Blog to open the discussion: “A truly conscientious writer brings first-hand experience, research, and timeless understanding, to a relevant issue.  For this reason Jennifer Manuel’s 2016 debut novel, The Heaviness of Things That Float is well worth talking about.” 

And talk we did, in a rich discussion led by Diane Anderson, who first suggested this book that touches on so many important topics. Diane writes:

There are 4 main themes in the book, as seen through the characters. They are starting over, loss, belonging, and the depiction of the indigenous community. The main character, Bernadette, has worked for 40 years as a nurse and is about to experience the loss of her job and identity: ‘Nobody could wholly know the heart of another, no matter which side of the unbalanced world we live in’ (284).  Bernadette longed to belong to the First Nation community, but the Tawakin people still considered her an outsider.  Her only sibling, her sister has recently died and left her a home on the mainland. She has rejected her former lover, Frank as a partner and has lost Chase Charlie, Frank’s biological child whom she loved. The author insists on people’s dignity and humanity in the face of unflinching sorrows (alcoholism, abuse, poverty, suicide).

The novel contains beautiful prose, describing the reservation as a community  where stories are

like organisms all their own, life upon life, the way moss grows around poplar trunks and barnacles atop crab shells, the way golden chanterelles spring from hemlock needles. They spread in the cove with the kelp and the eelgrass, and in the rainforest with the lichen, the cedars, the swordferns. They pelt down inside raindrops, erode thick slabs of driftwood, puddle the old logging road that these days led to nowhere.

I am sorry I could not read all of this evocative novel, but am lucky to have been introduced to it so well by this group of excellent readers. The novel reminds us that there are many sorts of community, and how important attentive belonging is.