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Title: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, Kimberly Schraf, Kimberly Scraf, TBA ISBN: 1-59316-027-5 Publisher: Listen & Live Audio Pub. Date: 26 March, 2004 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 7 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A delightful book that rewards rereading...
Comment: This is one of those books that instantly earns a place on the shelf with your most-loved books. It's a book to return to over and over, seeing something new each time. Fowler is a sly and complex writer who still manages to do that most important of things: tell an engaging story. By the time you finish reading this book you know the characters so well -- Sylvia, Jocelyn, Grigg, Bernadette and Prudie -- that they feel like old friends and you feel like a lucky member of their book club. Each sentence is a finely tuned gift full of humor and wisdom. I can't recommend this book highly enough, for Austenites and those who've never read a word of her. It's perfect.
After you finish reading this one, you'll want to go look up Fowler's other remarkable books: SISTER NOON, SWEETHEART SEASON, SARAH CANARY, and her story collection BLACK GLASS. She's a writer with an unbelievable range who never disappoints.
Rating: 4
Summary: An ode to the timelessness of human relationships
Comment: The timelessness of human relationships, the nature of love and the question of happy endings is the central focus of Karen Joy Fowler's whimsical and breezy twenty-first century comedy of manners. Like Austen, Fowler is a master of wit and irony, and with memorable, endearing characters, The Jane Austen Book Club provides a wonderful example of the paradoxes and incongruities that exist in modern human relationships, while also brimming over with astute observations of our foibles and follies. The author has a tart, and gentle manner in which she retells the mistakes and misunderstandings that complicate even our most well-intentioned relationships.
The narrative focuses on a pre-established book club made of up five women and one inscrutable man who meet on a monthly basis to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, one at a time. While deliberating the ins and outs of Austin's characters, they gradually divulge their own private insecurities and Austen-like foibles. There is Jocelyn who has everyone's best interests at heart, along with a strong matchmaking impulse, and an instinct for tidiness. And Prudie, with the years receding behind her like a map "with no landmarks, a handful of air, another of water." There's Silvia who wants to slip off while the author's back is turned "to find love in her own way" showing up in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face. And then there is Allegra, an out lesbian who is a creature of extremes "either stuffed, starving, freezing or boiling, exhausted or electric with energy." She's a liberated woman who sees the world as an obstacle course where you pick your way across it while "the terrain slips about and things fall or explode."
The conversation, like the conversation on Austen is variously shrewd, inconsequential, apparent and amusing, and the drama of each character's lives unfolds at a fast pace. Every month they take a breather from their exhausted lives and sit around talking about their personal daydreams while serving "green salad made with dried cranberries, and candied walnuts, artichoke dips, cheeses, and peppered crackers" (it sounds delicious!). Fowler combines a gentle, uncomplicated way of writing with wonderful powers of description; she sees "the fingernail moon slicing open the clouds, and she describes Allegra's face as "having a silent-screen-star expressiveness and a lunar polish."
Like Austen, Fowler is also exposing and revealing the pursuit of love and saying that virtue, in whatever form, will be recognized, and rewarded. How love will prevail, how life can be a romance, and that happiness in marriage and relationships is mostly a matter of chance, is at the thematic heart of The Jane Austen Book Club. This is a quirky, whimsical and highly original novel and reinforces the notion that relationships and human frailties are not that much different today than they were in Austen's time. Mike Leonard April 04.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Lot of Fun For Any Fan of Jane Austen
Comment: I read this book because Jane Austen is one of my favorite authors. THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is inventive, original and lots of fun. It certainly can't approach the depth and high hilarity found in Austen's books, though, but maybe it wasn't meant to. Fowler has included plot synopses of all six of Austen's books, so one needn't be familiar with her work in order to read this book. On the other hand, a familiarity with Jane Austen and her work will definitely make your reading of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB a richer and more rewarding experience.
There are actually six different "main" characters in this book (five women and one man) and each one of the six characters will discuss one of Austen's novels, with input and feedback from the other's, of course. The six characters are members of the "Jane Austen Book Club," and each is more different from the other than they are alike. Jocelyn, the organizer of the club, is a never married, fiftysomething, control freak; Sylvia is Jocelyn's unhappily married, longtime best friend; Allegra is Sylvia's beautiful, thirtysomething, artist daughter who is still smarting over the break up with her girlfriend (yes, girlfriend). Prudie is a twenty-eight year old, married French teach; Bernadette, at sixty-seven, is the oldest member of the group and a woman who, at one time, was something of a femme fatale. And then there is Grigg (not Greg, Grigg). Grigg belongs to the linguistics department of the local university. At first, Bernadette, Allegra, Sylvia and Prudie don't really approve of Grigg and they can't understand why Jocelyn chose him to be a member of the group. For one thing, he is (horrors) a man. For another, he's a reader of science fiction and knows little about Jane Austen.
Fowler, however, has more in mind than a discussion of Austen and her books. Diversions and flashbacks let us know about each character and gradually, we find out why she (or in the case of Grigg, he) was included. As the members discuss their favorite Austen book, they discuss themselves as well.
For the most part, THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is a very funny book, although some of the dialogue does fall flat and some of the members' obsessions (such as Jocelyn's with breeding show dogs) eventually get tiresome. Comedy is as hard as writing can get and there are times when I think Fowler should have used a lighter touch.
One of the best things about this book are the cozy asides and observations from an unseen narrator, a narrator who obviously isn't one of the six club members (not even Jocelyn) and just might be Jane, herself. Yes, this book is a little affected, but that affectation doesn't, in my opinion, hurt it much at all.
Anyone looking for an education regarding Jane Austen and her novels won't find it in this book. Those all ready familiar with Austen and her work will find a lot to laugh about and a light, enjoyable reading experience. Don't expect this book to be written in the same style as Austen's books are, though. It's not. It's written in Fowler's style.
I thought THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB was a lot of fun, but certainly not faultless. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who loves Jane Austen, though. Don't go into it with too much criticism; just enjoy.
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