South American novels divide book group!

The annual "plus other halves" book group dinner at Alison & Steve's last night was a lively affair which ended up with far too many glasses on the table than is decent for a Thursday evening. For the record, there had been a rebellion in the ranks and only two of the assembled company had finished Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, a lengthy and challenging book featuring, we were told, more than 52 characters which others of us who had attempted it, found too confusing for words. According to the Wikipedia entry, the middle section alone has more than 40 narrators, the thought of which makes my head spin. Caroline and Ian, however, were obviously touched by it and spoke compellingly about its intricacies and pleasures, poets and politics in South America. Ian declared that it would be a book that would remain on his shelf for years to come.

Those of us with less application and stamina tackled Anne Patchett's State of Wonder which received a very positive reception; Caroline was the golden girl of the class as she was the only one of us to have read both books. We discussed Patchett's ability to draw us deep into the book, to recreate the heat and terrors of the Amazonian jungle (and indeed the blandness of Minnesota) to the extent that you could almost feel your skin crawling with insects. We spoke about the credibility of the science and the project in the jungle, the characters of Marina and Dr Swenson and the issues of medical ethics that arose; we missed the input of our resident expert on the subject. It was, we concluded, a cracking story well told although perhaps with too many themes. You can watch the YouTube clip of Patchett talking about the book here: Anne Patchett on YouTube

Alison challenged the men to come up with a book for our next read, I think in response to the suggestion that State of Wonder is a "girls" book (which I don't think it necessarily is). The result is, inevitably, a thriller of sorts: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. Of course, by the end of the evening we were stumbling badly over both the title and the name of the author.......too many glasses on the table.