NEXT BOOK-TO-MOVIE

Friday, February 3 at 7pm

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

Read a review of the movie here: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/the-prestige-20061020

and the Library Journal review of the book:

“Notions of doubleness pervade this tale of a feud between the families ot two Victorian-era magicians. Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier have spent their careers trying to sabotage one another. When Borden ups the ante by developing a seemingly impossible trick in which he is moved across the stage in a unimaginable short time, Angier responds by enlisting inventor Nikola Tesla to build a turn-of-the-century version of a Star Trek-like transporter. The magicians’ story is framed by that of two descendants, affected by the feud in ways they are only beginning to fathom, who meet at the Angier family’s desolate country estate. Mixing elements of the psychological novel with fantasy, this is an inventive, if somewhat far-fetched, British neo-Gothic. For most collections.?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.”
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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LIBRARY BOOK GROUP

Books are now available for the next Library Book Group discussion of The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller.

The discussion is on Wednesday, February 8 at 7pm.

The Senator’s Wife
By Sue Miller

At almost the exact center of Sue Miller’s eighth novel, a woman prepares to eat breakfast on the balcony of her apartment in Paris: a croissant, seedless raspberry jam, rich dark coffee with steamed milk. “She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap. The consolation of the daily, she thought.”

It’s a moment of pure Miller. Tasteful, elegant, sensuous, the scene celebrates a domestic epiphany as intense and glorious as a stained glass window. Simultaneously, the moment pierces the privacy of a character – the senator’s wife, in fact – to lay bare her sensibility: middle-class grace notes of napkin and specially prepared milk; insightful, complex personal dialogue; and a rueful comment on the minor but not insignificant gratifications of everyday existence. For this author, the consolations of the daily are often the stuff of life.

But there’s more. This brief pause in France marks the turning point of a carefully paced story about marriage and maturity – the moment when its heroine can choose either to continue her life of solitary quietude, which has been gained at considerable personal expense, or fly back to the hospital bedside of her husband, Tom. No prizes for guessing her choice. With Miller, it’s not over until it’s over.

“The Senator’s Wife” is Miller’s latest extended contemplation of marriage, and a master class in the refinement of craft. No pair of hands is safer when it comes to the fine sieving of mood, or impulse, or nuance of self-knowledge. No chronicler of family dilemmas is more comfortable with the minute ebb and flow of relationships that, over time, can wear down granite.

Here she enfolds a decades-long union within a much younger one, a symmetry allowing her a double female perspective and the chance to consider alternate versions of the arc of marriage. Chapter 1 opens with Meri and Nathan Fowler, 10 months wed, house-hunting in Williston, an East Coast college town where he has secured a tenure-track teaching job. Middle-class Nathan is buoyed by the prospect of his future while working-class Meri is traveling far more apprehensively, conscious that Nathan is planning a life “she’s not sure she wants to live.”

This opening seems to set the stage for marital conflict, breakdown even, yet those expectations remain unfulfilled. Instead, the young couple functions initially as a bridge to Delia Naughton, wife of charismatic politician Tom – “one of the really good guys,” as Nathan describes him – who turns out to be the Fowlers’ neighbor when they buy the other half of a pair of historic attached homes in leafy Williston. Now in her 70s, Delia appears to live here alone, or in her small French apartment, while Tom makes only rare visits.

The older woman’s charm and privacy intrigue Meri, and when asked to house-sit, she finds herself crossing boundaries, exploring Delia’s study, reading her private correspondence. This breach of trust echoes much larger ones that come to light via Meri’s snooping, and also prefigures one to follow.

It turns out that the Naughton marriage has been a sequence of transgressions, of affairs pursued by Tom, who, good guy or not, seems incapable of fidelity or keeping his word. Delia had put the first heartbreaking betrayal behind her, but over time, and after one particularly hurtful liaison, came to realize she would have to break away. Yet the two have remained not just married but also lovers, their relationship a bespoke arrangement known and understood only by them. So when Tom is felled by a stroke, Delia barely hesitates before taking him – damaged and dependent – fully back into her life. The novel takes place in the early 1990s, the beginning of the Clinton era, another long story of marital accommodation. Delia’s choices may not, after all, be so exceptional. And let’s not forget her advice to Meri: Life teaches you that you can endure anything. After all, isn’t that what must be done with things that cannot be changed?

“The Senator’s Wife” delivers two differently flawed accounts of the state of wifehood in such a seamless form that the novel’s bleakness registers only slowly and late. Delia’s all-consuming union ends badly, and Miller’s favored themes of transgression and forgiveness here seem overshadowed by ineradicable streaks of resolute, atavistic need.

From a coda set some 14 years later, we learn that Meri’s more prosaic marriage to Nathan produced a very different result. From Meri’s perspective the destruction next door served as an unfortunate lesson in her own progression along the marital learning curve. Seemingly wedlock, like death, is a subject that cannot be learned except through personal experience. And all manner of things are permissible, in the name of love.

by Elsbeth Lindner January 13, 2008
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Third Friday Movie Night

FRIDAY, February 17 at 7pm

REJOICE & SHOUT

The Dixie Hummingbirds

The evolution of gospel music is examined. Say amen, somebody!
By Sam Adams
Don McGlynn’s gospel documentary pays tribute to the ecstatic praise-singing tradition of the American black church, but the film itself is the equivalent of sitting through a long Sunday sermon: earnest, bland and unfathomably dull. The sheer weight of talent involved is staggering—interviews with Mavis Staples, Smokey Robinson and the Dixie Hummingbirds’ Ira Tucker; vintage clips from Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Swan Silvertones—but Rejoice and Shout’s baggy two hours would be better spent searching YouTube.

Though McGlynn doesn’t neglect secular crossovers—both Sam Cooke and Al Green rate passing mentions—the director skips over the fascinating era when veteran gospel singers controversially turned their sacred style to pop songs, in some cases rewriting hymns to express more earthly loves. Tucker, who died in 2008, alludes to the fierce rivalries that sprung up between gospel groups in the music’s heyday, but the brief flashes of drama don’t disrupt the unending, and largely unstructured, string of wasn’t-it-great reminiscences. No movie that includes Tharpe’s blistering electric guitar and the soaring falsetto of the Swan Silvertones’ Claude Jeter can be all bad, but it’s astonishing how little this time capsule adds to its phenomenal source material. You might even call it a miracle.

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E-BOOK NEWS!

Kindle users may now borrow eBooks from the New Hampshire Downloadable Books Consortium.

Come in to the library for your checkout number.

Watch this video for instructions:

Download eBooks onto your Kindle for free

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NEW FREE SERVICE!

Brown Memorial Library now belongs to a consortium that offers Ancestry Library Edition for your genealogical research.

Ancestry Library Edition has all the resources of Ancestry.com, but doesn’t allow you to save personal items on the website. With the library edition, you can print out documents and/or save them to your personal disc.

I have played around with it a bit, and I’m amazed at what is available. I found the ship’s passenger lists for two great-grandparents one coming from Scotland and the other from Italy. I learned that my grandmother was tagged to be seen by a doctor on arrival and the family was in quarantine for a month!

So far, I have seen resources from Canada, England, Scotland and Wales. Many other European countries are represented.

This resource must be used in the library. I will sign in to the service for you and help with any questions. Computers may be reserved for one hour blocks (of course, you may continue to use it if another library patron is not waiting). I am here during all library open hours except between 3 and 5pm.