SUGGESTIONS NEEDED FOR MARCH/ APRIL FICTION DISCUSSION!

It's time to start thinking about what book of fiction we would like to discuss during the months of March and April.

Please add your fiction book suggestions here and remember to add a link to the book you are recommending. Feel free to add whether or not you have already read the book you are suggesting, and why you feel it would make for a good discussion. Comments on the books suggested are crucial to deciding which books will go into the official poll. Please leave feedback on the suggested novels, without feedback, it is impossible to determine which books will generate the best discussions.

Members who are eligible to nominate books are those members who have made a minimum of 25 posts. The goal for our fiction discussion is to attract active members who will participate in the discussion of the book of fiction that is ultimately selected.

The novels which receive the most positive feedback will be placed in a poll open to all members with 25 or more posts. Personal taste in books of fiction varies greatly. Please keep this in mind and be respectful when making any negative comments.

I'm looking forward to seeing the suggestions.

My nomination is "The Iguana" by Dinis Thérialut, a Canadian writer:
Product Description at Amazon:
Set on the rugged north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, The Iguana tells the realistic, yet fabulous, story of an extraordinary friendship between two young boys who appear to have nothing in common except a tragic loneliness. Recently, the narrator’s safe childhood world was shattered by a fatal snowmobile accident involving his parents. He was taken in by his grandparents in the village of Ferland, "a natural crucible where the wind merges with the forest and the waves." Slowly, he befriends his classmate Luc Bezeau, a misfit who takes refuge from a brutal home environment in a magical undersea realm inhabited by fantastic beings. Together, the boys construct new reasons for living, which launch them on a wild, adventurous search. The author’s dramatic flair and lyrical imagination pull the reader straight into the heart of a plot where hope and helplessness, love and desperation collide.
L’iguane (The Iguana), Denis Thériault’s first novel, was published to great critical acclaim and won three major literary prizes: the Prix Anne-Hébert 2002, the Prix France-Québec/Jean Hamelin 2001, and the Prix Odyssée 2002 for best first novel.


About the Author
Denis Thériault was born on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near Sept-Îles, Quebec. After studying psychology and drama, he began to write for the stage and television. Today, he is an award-winning screenwriter, living in Montreal.
Liedewy Hawke’s translation Hopes and Dreams: The Diary of Henriette Dessaulles, 1874-1881 won the 1986 Canada Council Prize for Translation (now the Governor General’s Award for Translation) as well as the John Glassco Translation Prize. Her other translations include Memoria (Dundurn Press, 1999), House of Sighs (The Mercury Press, 2001), and The Milky Way (Dundurn Press, 2002), which was shortlisted for the 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation.

http://www.amazon.com/Iguana-Denis-Ther ... =1-2-spell

I would like to add that the book's subject matter at first turned me off as I did not want to read yet another coming of age story. Sounded dull. But the boys serve actually as a vehicle for a wonderful magic realism take/tales. The use of language is magnificent as is the imagery. The style, the story, the magic realism.....all components that leave you thinking about the book long after you've finished.

Death in Venice and Other Stories
Thomas Mann

From the Publisher

This superb new translation of "Death in Venice" and six other stories by Thomas Mann is a tour de force, sure to establish itself as the definitive text for English-speaking readers. The seven stories in this collection represent the early part of Mann's literary career, beginning with work he produced in 1896 at the age of 21, and culminating in his most celebrated novella, "Death in Venice" (1912). Although Mann continued working until the end of his life in 1955, he despaired of ever matching the quality of his early writing. In these stories, Mann began to grapple with themes that were to recur throughout his work. In the first piece, "Little Herr Friedemann," as in "Death in Venice," a character's carefully structured way of life is suddenly and unexpectedly threatened by sexual passion. In "Gladius Dei," puritanical intellect clashes with beauty. In "Tristan," Mann presents an ironic and comical account of tension between an artist and bourgeois society. All seven of these stories are accomplished and memorable, but it is "Death in Venice" that truly forms the centerpiece of the collection. Themes that weave their way through many of the shorter stories come to a climax in this novella, out century's most haunting, magnificent tale of art and self-destruction.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Venice-Othe ... 55&s=books

An admission: I know I am supposed to adore The Magic Mountain and that it is one of the greatest novels ever written, but I really don't like it much. I have not read it in the English translation, but the German sentences begin on one page and end 4 pages later, complete with 16.5 clauses and tense changes.
That said, I adore Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger, etc. Beautiful literature. Here again, I haven't read them in English, but I loved them in German.
So, I would be willing to read them again (btw, required reading in German schools). Mann actually wrote in a house 3 kilometers from where I live (was only there shortly).

Does anyone have any novels that have been sitting on their shelves for who knows how just waiting to be read. Something that you have always wanted to read but just have not gotten the chance to? If so, why not think about suggesting it for our next discussion.

This is my dusty book suggestion:

THE GREAT FIRE
Shirley Hazzard

From Booklist:

Despite this Australian writer's absence from the world's fiction stage--since the 1981 publication of The Transit of Venus, which earned her great acclaim, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award--her readers have continued to hold hands in devotion and anticipation. Their thrill over her new novel will be completed; the long days and nights of waiting will be forgotten. Time and place have always been exactly evoked in Hazzard's fiction, and such is the case here. The time is 1947-48, and the place is, primarily, East Asia. Obviously, then, this is a locale much altered--by the events of World War II, of course, and, as we see, physical destruction and psychological wariness and weariness lay over the land. Our hero, and indeed he fills the requirements to be called one, is Aldred Leith, who is English and part of the occupation forces in Japan; his particular military task is damage survey. He has an interesting past, including, most recently, a two-year walk across civil-war-torn China to write a book. In the present, which readers will feel they inhabit right along with Leith, by way of Hazzard's beautifully atmospheric prose, he meets the teenage daughter and younger son of a local Australian commander. And, as Helen is growing headlong into womanhood, this novel of war's aftermath becomes a story of love--or more to the point, of the restoration of the capacity for love once global and personal trauma have been shed. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Fire-Novel- ... 0374166447

All I have are my dusty books

Here's my pick... and it's sad because I've been relegated to fiction only when I read mostly non-fiction. Too bad everyone wants to read about god - without atheists god wouldn't be brought up in the least. Praise atheists... long live the king.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. This is a 19th century French romantic writer of the 1st order. Expect pining and eager men, a woman unsure but wanting, and hopefully a consummation of love between the two. I've read Sentimental Education by this writer and it was a very good book. For those who don't consider themselves romantic, this is still a good book to read as it is good enough for even romantic connoisseurs. Your appetite should be satiated with the most select literary morsel... although I admit to have never read it. A sell like all "loves" are, right? ...interested?

http://www.amazon.com/Madame-Penguin-Cl ... 453&sr=8-2

For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.

President Camacho wrote:All I have are my dusty books

Here's my pick... and it's sad because I've been relegated to fiction only when I read mostly non-fiction. Too bad everyone wants to read about god - without atheists god wouldn't be brought up in the least. Praise atheists... long live the king.

Madame Bovary sounds an interesting choice. There's a good chance I have a dusty copy somewhere.

The book, I mentioned over there in non-fiction, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is not about god and only peripherally about religion. I think you would like this book, Camacho.

Here's a couple of comments from the jacket:

"In the three decades since I discovered The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it has continued to fascinate and inspire me. Joseph Campbell peers through centuries and shows us that we are all connected by a basic need to hear stories and understand ourselves. As a book, it is wonderful to read; as illumination into the human condition, it is a revelation." -- George Lucas

"Campbell's words carry extraordinary weight, not only among scholars but among a wide range of other people who find his search down mythological pathways relevant to their lives today. . . . The book for which he is most famous, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, [is] a brilliant examination, through ancient hero myths, of man's eternal struggle for identity

I have returned to no book more often since leaving college than this one, and every time I discover new insight into the human journey. Every generation will find in Hero wisdom for the ages." -- Bill Moyers

Hey, whatcha doing Geo! Take your non fiction back where it belongs! Hummf, the nerve, trying to steal a fiction reader away, for shame!

How about:

The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
Translation: Richard F. Burton.

Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. These are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Shahrazad always withheld the ending: A thousand and one nights later, her life was spared forever.

This volume reproduces the 1932 Modern Library edition, for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the most famous and representative stories from Sir Richard F. Burton's multivolume translation, and includes Burton's extensive and acclaimed explanatory notes. These tales, including Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp, Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, have entered into the popular imagination, demonstrating that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken.

http://www.amazon.com/Arabian-Nights-Th ... 55&s=books

President Camacho wrote:Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Needs to stay dusty.

I'd read Arabian Nights but I don't think I own it... I'll have to check.