Machar Book Club
Open to all Machar members
The Machar Book Club meets to discuss a book that is of mutual interest to club members. The current selection is announced in the Machar newsletter.
Recent books read include:
 Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop by Joseph Lelyveld
In this memoir, the author reflects on this detail as well as other familial eccentricities as he sorts through his dying father's belongings. He recalls not just his own past, but that of his rabbi father and Shakespearean scholar mother, as well as political events of their time, like the Scottsboro trials and the Zionist movement. With a reporter's skepticism, Lelyveld investigates his personal history and ponders the nature of memory even as he relates the events of his own life. Although the book's title implies a sweep back into his past and then forward again, Lelyveld actually supplies more fragments than a single, continuous loop. He tends to double back, change subjects, introduce characters that aren't seen again and flip between present and past tense even when dwelling primarily on childhood events.
 The Master by Colm Toibin.
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success.
The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction.
Daisy Miller by Henry James.
The book's title character is a young American woman traveling in Europe with her mother. There she is courted by Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne, an American living abroad. In her innocence, Daisy is compromised by her friendship with an Italian man. Her behavior shocks Winterbourne and the other Americans living in Italy, and they shun her. Only after she dies does Winterbourne recognize that her actions reflected her spontaneous, genuine, and unaffected nature and that his suspicions of her were unwarranted.
Like others of James's works, Daisy Miller uses the contrast between American innocence and European sophistication as a powerful tool with which to examine social conventions.
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