Memoirs of a Muse, by Lara Vapnyar

Our April's pick will continue to explore the themes of literary dreams, the origin of inspiration, search for self-actualization, and immigration (voluntary exile, if you please).

"As a fatherless girl in Moscow, Tatiana becomes fascinated by the great Russian writers, especially Dostoyevsky. As an adolescent, she is told by a lecherous teacher that she will become "the muse to a great man." When she immigrates to America to pursue a graduate degree in history, she chooses to fulfill her destiny as a muse instead, readily abandoning the stifling immigrant enclave in Brighton Beach for a writer's Central Park apartment." Needless to say, her chosen object - a young New Yorker who is more interested in fashion, dining out, and TV - is not exactly the budding Dostoyevsky. The book is allegedly a great parody of a self-obsessed male artist, as well as a "withering critique of the immigrant experience".

The book club will be hosted in Greenpoint - one of Brooklyn's staunchingly Slavic neighborhoods. Being myself a recent (and Russian) arrival in New York, my curiosity is peaked both in regards to the book and to the menu:

-delicious blinis
-herring
-potatoes
-pickles
-shots of ice-cold vodka
-horseradish martinis
....and more

Where and when: April 27, 1:00pm, 146 Milton Street, #2, Brooklyn (Take the G train to Greenpoint Avenue - but check the MTA weekend advisories first...)

What Were YOU Doing Last Sunday?

Because members of the best damn book club in Brooklyn were eating this:


Jealous??

Michael Silverblatt Rules Book Interviews 4-EVA

Ever since listening to this Bookworm interview with Junot Diaz, I think of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao differently.

The interview raises what I see as essential questions about the book and the intention of the author. I tried to type them up exactly as they were phrased on the show, but I don't think I captured them all completely--definitely listen to the show to get the full questions and discussion around them. (Warning: there are sort-of spoilers in the interview, so maybe wait until you've finished the book.)

• Was it possible for Yunior to ever love Lola? Does his failure to love her brother Oscar represent a failure to love not only Lola, but Dominican history as a whole?
  
• Is this book--Yunoir says my book--is this [book] a warding off of the curse (fuku) or is it the next generation of the curse?
• We're usually not very tolerant of other small lives, even if our lives have been small. And sometimes we'll be tolerant of a small life, and then next thing we know we're not longer tolerant...Being human--one of the things Oscar's character keeps asking is is being human something that you do once, you make one choice and it proves that you're human? Or is it a choice you have to keep making through your whole life? I think most people like to pretend you reach a certain age and you become a human. I've always felt that every day life puts you in a box and says are you human today or are you an animal?
• Or does the book ask, are you human today, or are you an addict (to sex, to a fantasy world, to a dictatorship)? Are you fighting the daily fight or have you given up to an addiction?

Seriously, this interview is amazing and absolutely a cliff notes on what we should talk about at book club. Here it is embedded, because that's a cool thing bloggers do:

Some thoughtful print coverage of the Diaz

I just got done reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and started going through all the press that was written on it. Thought you all might be interested.

The thoughtful first:

Powells.com interview with Diaz: "That's more a product of very hard work than any skill. Certainly I wanted that voice to come off as fluid, but I'm sure there are people out there for whom this stuff comes easy. For me, this is the product of thirty rewrites."

LA Times review: "People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer."

Really, it's a love novel."

Slate.com interview with Diaz: "And as a footnote: No one can write a straightforward political novel about the Trujillato and capture its phantasmagorical power. That's another reason I had to go hard-core nerd. Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillato cannot be accessed, eludes our 'modern' minds. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It we cannot see."

NYTBR (A. O. Scott): "Díaz’s novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar’s coming-of-age is in some ways the book’s thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus."

And some not-so-thoughtful, but maybe worth reading for discussion's sake:

New York Times (Kakutani)

Salon.com (Roland Kelts)