It was lovely to see that nearly all the newcomers from the last two meetings came back again, and hopefully Bridget will be able to join us next month too – horses permitting!
The sheer length of The Lacuna did defeat a few, although with readers giving up somewhere between 100 and 400 pages in, no-one can say they didn’t give it a good try. Of those of us who did finish it, nearly all of us really loved it. We agreed that Shepherd was a strangely passive and dispassionate observer, but the book was populated with some great characters, particularly the three women in his life, his mother Salome, Frida Kahlo and Violet Brown, all of whom we liked in their different ways. It was a book of very different phases, and corresponding changes in pace. Some readers were more interested in the periods he spent in Mexico, whereas others prefered those in America, particularly those towards the end when Shepherd was caught up in the pre-McCarthy trials.
Some commented on how many descriptions there were of baking, usually without translations of the Spanish so we didn’t even knew what he was making! We also talked about the descriptions of the war effort, and the effects on both American individuals and on industry, much of which surprised many of us.
In my reading around the book beforehand I had come across some debate about the ending (which I won’t give away here), but when I raised it, it turned out that we all agreed that although the author had not spelt it out specifically, we thought there were enough comments for us all to have been quite clear about what happened, and we joined the author who is (apparently) rather mystified by reports that some readers found it an ambiguous ending.
Next month we will be looking at Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood – long, but not as long as The Lacuna! We’ll also be choosing another classic, for our July meeting. With everyone’s agreement I decided to slightly change the time-frame, and we’ll now choose a book published between 1900 and 1940 (rather than 1960), which still gives us DH Lawrence, HG Wells, Hemingway, Edith Wharton, F Scott FitzGerald and many more greats of literature. It doesn’t have to be a book you’ve read, it could be one you’ve always wanted to read but never got round to (she said, having only just got round to reading To Kill a Mockingbird last summer and absolutely loved it!).
Hope you all find a sunny spot for your reading and choosing – see you on 11th May!
Cathy
