Welcome to the Club

FRAN & MURRAY'S BOOK CLUB

By Murray Arndt (Former Director of RC)

Oprah's retirement from book reviewing having so desperately rent the fabric of our culture, Fran and I leapt enthusiastically at the invitation to recommend a few good "reads" in each issue of The Following. This time it's my turn. Here follows, with brief annotations, some initial recommendations from our library.

1. I was seventeen when Charlotte Bronte overwhelmed me with Jane Eyre and set me on a lifetime course of wonderful reading. Her marvelous Romantic love story transported me into some parallel universe where love and loyalty, honor and deception, trial and bitterness, and heroism and villainy lived dramatically, and where, in the end, goodness and integrity finally triumphed. I have read the novel half a dozen times since and always find it true and moving and wise.

2. When I retired from teaching, I set out earnestly to read all the great things I had not got round to or had faked my way through. The first book on that list was Tolstoy's War and Peace, and to my astonishment, it proved the most powerful experience of my reading life. His canvas is huge and panoramic, his themes timeless and universal, yet he seems perfectly attuned to every nuanced detail and every bit player. I spent a full six weeks reading the novel, immersed in it the way I had never before been immersed in a book, hoping against hope that it would never be over. Despite all he asks of the reader in terms of attentions and patience, Tolstoy, in the end, makes it all worth while. War and Peace is the best novel I have ever read.

Lately I've been reading more contemporary things; let me here just note three:

3. Charles Fraser's Cold Mountain. Fraser's novel, the most recent of these, recounts the Odyssey-like journey of a wounded, disillusioned, young deserter from the Confederate Army as he makes his tortured, agonizing, sometimes tragic way back home to his young beloved. The book is wonderfully fearful about real warfare, but what is particularly good is its realization of what happened to the women left behind. I wait anxiously for Fraser's next.

4. Michael O'Brien's Strangers and Sojourners is the sleeper on this list. O'Brien is a Canadian writer well known for his work in other artistic fields like stained glass, frescoes, and statuary. The novel, which intends to be the first part of a trilogy, was published by a small press in Canada and has riot gotten much attention in the states. That is really too bad because it is a wonderful story of a family struggling to survive in British Columbia in the late 19^th century. It was again one of those books that I didn't want to end, but fortunately there is a promise of more.

5. Reynolds Price's Roxanna Slade. Reynolds Price is a very well known contemporary writer whose work I neglected for the stupid reason that I felt too close to him (he was sort of a contemporary at Duke) and I thought that he couldn't really be that much better than the rest of us. Well, let me tell you he is. Roxanna Slade is just an extraordinary piece of work that brings to full life a magnificent woman. It is a novel that convinces you that the extraordinary lives dramatically in the ordinary. Roxanna tells the story from her own perspective of ninety-nine years. She lives in the backwoods hill country of North Carolina through two world wars, a terrible depression, and personal disappointment and trauma so severe that you are amazed she survived, let alone triumphed. She is a woman for the ages and this is her wonderful life. Thank goodness there is lots more Price out there for me to pursue.

Hey, what have you been reading?

Write to Murray Arndt at amurrayfran@aol.com

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