We met at the Punchbowl in Warwick on Wednesday evening 23rd June. The book we had been reading was “The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer. Without exception everyone had read the whole book and liked it – a very rare occurrence with this group! The only possible weakness was the ending. Some people felt that by tying up all the ends so neatly, Mawer had weakened the structure of the story. Others found his way of drawing in the threads to bring the story full circle was clever and made the book more satisfying. In this fiction, the wealthy couple who build the fantastic modernist house in Czechoslovakia are a mixed couple – Victor is Jewish and his wife Leisl is not. The real couple who built the house were both Jewish and never returned to it. We would all recommend the book to a friend, learned a lot about the particular period in history and enjoyed the characters, finding them all rounded and completely believable.
Our next meeting will be on 28th July. We have chosen “The Elegance of th Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbier. This was a word of mouth success in France in 2006 & was translated into English to great acclaim. It is only recently available in paperback, it tells the story of Renee, the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building who leads a double life. To all appearances, she is the epitome of the rather dowdy person her tenants expect to see, reading a cheap newspaper & waching TV all day long. In fact she is a sharply intelligent, cultured and artisitc woman of great depth, knowledgeable and insightful. A second character in the book is Paloma Josse, twelve years old, also very intelligent and articulate & pretending not to be. Paloma intends committing suicide on her thirteenth birthday as she cannot see the point of becoming an adult. The death of one of their privileged neighbours brings dramatic changes to the lives of both these characters………
We will meet to discuss the book at about 6.00pm in the Old Punchbowl. We also made a list of other books we would like to read – ‘The Lacuna’ by Barbara Kingsolver (we all enjoyed the Poisonwood Bible) ‘Nine Lives’, by William Dalrymple, ‘Eleven Minutes Late’ by Matthew Engel (which is raising money for teenage cancer sufferers in Birmingham), ‘Around Ireland with a Fridge’ by Tony Hawkes, and Bill Bryson’s ‘Notes From a Small Island’. Inge, one of the members enjoyed our last book, “The Glass Room” so much that she would like to read another of Simon Mawer’s books, perhaps “The Fall”.
If you would like to join the group at our next meeting, please contact Frances at Kenilworth. We have recently welcomed two new members and we can probably squeeze in just a couple more.
