Literary Hamlet53 Vote • April 2014

[sun surfer]

Help us choose the April 2014 selection to read for the MR Literary Club! The poll will be open for three days.

The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like.

The Rotating nominator (this month - Hamlet53) may not vote in the poll.

A discussion thread will begin shortly after a winner is chosen.

In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll (where the Rotating nominator again may note vote). In the event that the run-off poll also ends in a tie, the tie will be resolved by the Rotating nominator.


Select from the following works:


Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz

Spoiler:

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United States, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--and the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.—Goodreads

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Spoiler:

In the brilliant novel V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.— New York Times

Desert by J.M.G. Le Clézio

Spoiler:

“Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille. His central characters are the stalwart young boy Nour, who in 1909 is migrating north across the Western Sahara in a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy, copper-skinned young orphan named Lalla, descended from the blue men, whose parentage helps her survive immigrant life in the 1970s. — New York Times

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Spoiler:

The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.—Howard Hibbett (Translator)

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago

Spoiler:

This is a skeptic' s journey into the meaning of God and of human existence. At once an ironic rendering of the life of Christ and a beautiful novel, Saramago' s tale has sparked intense discussion about the meaning of Christianity and the Church as an institution.—Goodreads

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Spoiler:

This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.—Amazon

The Passport by Herta Müller

Spoiler:

The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.—Amazon

No Man's Land by Harold Pinter

Spoiler:

Do Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Fraser. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination.

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

Spoiler:

The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first—but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.—Amazon

The Pathseeker by Imre Kertesz

Spoiler:

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history..."

The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction.

In a mysterious middle–European country, a man identified only as “the commissioner” undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife—a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside—that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors ... and slowly revealing a past he's been trying to suppress.—Amazon

[sun surfer]

Each new batch of rotating nominations is "a time of gifts" (). Mulling over them is a pleasure.

I need to think about this batch a bit before voting. There is a French/Austrian film of The Piano Teacher that is really fantastic, though dark (it is the same director as Amour). Isabelle Huppert gives another stellar performance as the title character.

[Bookpossum]

What a terrific selection Hamlet - I want to read them all! Like sun surfer, I need to take a bit of time to work out my priorities, and also the availability of the books.

[caleb72]

I will definitely be voting for Saramago as that is already on my TBR list. However, I know almost none of the others, so I think I'll do a bit of research before I make my choice.

[Billi]

Hamlet, I've always found your goal interesting to read all the Nobel prize winners and I was thinking if I could "borrow" it. So, this month seems to be a good start into a very long literary adventure!

[Bookworm_Girl]

Great choices, Hamlet53. I think it is going to be another month of close votes!

Originally Posted by Billi

Hamlet, I've always found your goal interesting to read all the Nobel prize winners and I was thinking if I could "borrow" it. So, this month seems to be a good start into a very long literary adventure!

Busted. So will you try go from the start to the finish as I did in chronological order? Actually I found that in the first decades there were a few books I really enjoyed in there, even if for most I was left shaking my head at the obvious change in evaluations over the decades.

So I hope that with ten different authors to select from the final choice will be good with everyone.

[Billi]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Busted. So will you try go from the start to the finish as I did in chronological order?

In principle, yes. But I will start it with this month's selection.

[Bookpossum]

Starting to look like a tie!

I'm barracking for Akhnaten - such an interesting man to make such radical changes.

Thanks for voting all. So it will be Akhenaten. It sounds interesting to me, and all of these are on my TBR list anyway so I could not lose.

[BelleZora]

Even though I didn't vote, I'm delighted Akhenaten won and look forward to reading it. I just returned to wifi range a couple of days ago and haven't yet caught up on the MR forums or reading. Just finished On the Trail of Genghis Khan yesterday and am reading a book with an Albuquerque setting (where I am now) before wading into April's club choices.

[sun surfer]

Akhenaten it is!

I would've read any of the ten that won, but I'm happy for Akhenaten out of the ones I didn't vote for. If I had voted for four instead of three, then I would've voted for it as well. The only reason I left off is because I noticed it was rather short and I thought the others I voted for might be a meatier read for a club selection. It was an easy reason to eliminate one but that was a superficial elimination since any length of work can be mentally stimulating and engrossing if well written. This looks to be an interesting read and discussion and I'm excited to finally read something by Mahfouz (though I could've said that about most of them as I haven't read anything yet by nine of the ten!).

I'll have the discussion thread up within a day.

[Bookpossum]

I'm looking forward to it - sounds fascinating.

Welcome back from the wilderness, Belle!

[Bookpossum]

Just downloaded it: there are some 50% off codes at Kobo, shown on the front page, for those who use epub.

[caleb72]

Although I didn't vote for this one, I reconsidered my interest when I looked at it again and I snapped it up on Amazon. Interestingly, this is the first time I've coughed up $9.99 at Amazon for a long, long time.