Robin Agnew
This week, our book club met and discussed Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water. We pick books via a ballot, and this one had been in a very tight contest with a Sandi Ault book, and in fact the Camilleri squeaked through with one vote. When we talked about the book, the split was pretty obvious, with the majority of people disliking the book and those who liked it, really liking it.
I think there are many reasons people read, but comfort and familiarity are two big ones. I think part of the reason series fiction is so popular - especially in an uncertain world - is that you can pick up a new book in a series and catch up in a familiar setting with familiar characters, with only the story being different.
With a book by a foreign author, there are two types. One type, as an astute reader (and fellow bookseller) pointed out, tells the story from a western perspective. The perfect example of this kind of writing is one of our perennial bestsellers, Donna Leon. Though the books are set in Italy, Donna Leon is British, and the stories are told in a familiar. classic detetctive story mode. They are, in short, pretty accessible to the Western reader. It's nice that Leon is also such a wonderful writer.
Other books, such as the one we read by Camilleri, are more difficult. One way to put it is that the reader must hit the ground running, something that's difficult to do, as Sicily seems so very different from the United States. Now, if you read for comfort and familiarity, you aren't going to enjoy this. Our employee, Marty, loves any book that takes him anywhere else - he loves to travel in any way possible. Camillleri is one of his favorite writers.
I felt jarred by the first chapter, I admit - I was trying to get a grip, but by the time a body was discovered, I felt I was in familiar enough territory to push forward. And I'm glad I did. Like the other members of the group who enjoyed the book, I loved the humor and the main character and simply the way Camilleri told a complicated story in a seemingly simple fashion. He made the difficult look easy, always something to be admired, wherever you find it.
The other bone of contention was in fact the humor, which some book club members felt was too dry. Since parts of it made me laugh aloud when I was reading this was something I couldn't quite understand (though we'd encounted this with books by Sarah Caudwell and Pamela Branch as well). Next month we're reading Rosemary Harris' Pushing Up Daisies. I don't foresee any problems, but my book club is always full of surprises.
It's a real crapshoot, isn't it. A lot of my group only likes didactic books about how women are suppressed. It's a real chore trying to get them to read anything else. And I don't know if it's worth it. Pushing them to read anything that doesn't hold the world up to shame, is tough. I wish I had a group that read such things.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | May 02, 2009 at 04:56 PM
I lived in Italy for awhile and found much of the humor there perplexing. But I also enjoyed that about it culture as well. Some of the jokes there made me laugh for the wrong reasons.
One book I enjoyed that played off of these cultural clashes was Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was written by a Chinese woman but took place in England.
Posted by: VicariousRising | May 02, 2009 at 05:16 PM
Patti - I think you need a new book club!
Posted by: Robin Agnew | May 02, 2009 at 05:28 PM
Here's some information about the location of Andrea Camilleri's stories in Sicily from my blog WhereDunnit:
http://wheredunnit.blogspot.com/#vigata
Posted by: Steph Davies | May 04, 2009 at 07:54 AM
Thanks for the link - I just forwarded it to my book club. I loved seeing the photos.
Posted by: Robin Agnew | May 04, 2009 at 10:00 AM