Literary Time Period Nominations February 2012 • The MR Literary Club

[Nyssa]

I will 2nd Neuromancer {1984} by William Gibson.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Spoiler:

At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future. (from Amazon)

This book is available for Kindles and as epub. Inkmesh Search.

I have or had a 1988, award winning, copy of Beloved. I remember my step-mom taking me to the store to buy it after one of my English teachers suggested it. I tried reading it numerous times but just could not do it. I didn't get very far during any of my attempts, as the book just scared the bejeesus out of me.

[caleb72]

Happy to second Remains of the Day.
Just remember - the butler did it.

[issybird]

I'll second In the Pond.

[hpulley]

Third Neuromancer

[sun surfer]

I'll nominate two works:

Godric by Frederick Buechner, 1981

If you think a novel about a saint is likely to be a dry and airy sort of thing, think again. Godric was a 12th-century saint--born to Anglo-Saxon parents in Norfolk almost in the year of the Norman invasion (1066 for those of you long unschooled!). He was a peddler and wanderer long before he settled into the life of a hermit in northern England, led there by the famous hermit St. Cuthbert, who told him, "your true nesting place lies farther on, [and] until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage."

In Godric Frederick Buechner captures the voice and the times of this saint with a style that recalls the richly alliterative language of Middle English poetry. So too does it recall the beautiful earthiness of that literature, reminding us that this time of deep spirituality was also a time of real flesh-and-blood folk. And in some ways this is the deepest point of this delightful (and at times comic) novel: these people, like those who live among us today, become saints not by leaving the body behind but by finding a way to live more deeply within it. They find a way to turn it to glory.


"In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Frederick Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality. Godric is a living battleground where God fights it out with the world, the Flesh, and the Devil." - London Times Literary Supplement

And something perhaps appropriate for the month that contains Valentine's Day:

Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner, 1984

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.

But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.


"Brookner's most absorbing novel...wryly realistic...graceful and attractive." - The New York Times Book Review

[sun surfer]

I'll also nominate In The Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, 1994.

It is November 25, 1960, and three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.”

In this extraordinary novel inspired by the true story, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

And with my last nomination, I'll second The Rings of Saturn.

[fantasyfan]

I'll third Remains of the Day.

[John F]

I'll add nominations for Remains of the Day and Neuromancer.

[issybird]

Second Godric.

[hpulley]

I'll fourth Remains of the Day.

[hpulley]

I will also add support to Money and The Rings of Saturn.

That is my four...

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'll use my second nomination to second Beloved by Toni Morrison.

[John F]

Originally Posted by hpulley

I'll fourth Remains of the Day.

I believe this is a fifth (my nomination was the fourth).

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'm going to use my third nomination to nominate:

The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (1986). The great Californian novel about Yuppies in the bay area written entirely in verse. I doubt it's going to make it to voting, but it's one of my favourite books of all time. This is not available in e-book format. I wish it were.

Amazon's Writeup