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Sweet Tooth by ian McEwen
Staps language laboratory 5/16/14, 12:15 PM

The plot is set in early-1970s England. Serena Frome ("rhymes with plume"), the daughter of an Anglican bishop, shows a talent for mathematics and is admitted to the University of Cambridge. But she struggles academically, and graduates with a third. While at Cambridge she becomes romantically involved with Tony Canning, a professor, who before abruptly ending the affair secures a position for Serena with MI5. The job is low-level, but a more exciting opportunity appears when Serena is offered a chance to take part in a new covert program codenamed "Sweet Tooth". To counter Communist propaganda during the Cold War, the agency wants to offer financial assistance to young writers, academics and journalists with an anti-Communist bent. Serena, who is an avid and quick reader of fiction, is given the task of vetting burgeoning writer Thomas Haley.

Serena is immediately taken by Haley's published short fiction. She travels to the University of Sussex, where he works, to offer him a stipend from the fictional Freedom International foundation. Soon the two begin a romantic affair, but things gradually start to unravel. Serena discovers that Professor Canning (who, it turns out, broke off their affair only because he knew he was dying from cancer) was in fact a Soviet spy, and she was recruited because the agency wanted to keep tabs on Canning. Then, when Haley's first novel comes out, it is a great critical success, but its dystopian, anti-capitalist theme is not well received by the agency. Finally, his affair with Serena is exposed by the press, and the whole Sweet Tooth program is threatened.

Serena fears that she has lost Haley's love forever, now he knows she has deceived him. Haley, however, had known about the program for months, and instead of ending the affair, had decided to turn the story into a novel. The reader now discovers that the author of Sweet Tooth is in fact Haley, despite its being written from Serena's first-person perspective. As the novel ends, Haley asks Serena in a letter to marry him.

All Passion Spent by Vita sackville West
Staps language laboratory 3/14/14, 12:15 PM

All Passion Spent is written in three parts, primarily from the view of an intimate observer. The first part introduces Lady Slane at the time of her husband’s death. She has been the dutiful wife of a “great man” in public life, Viceroy of India and a member of the House of Lords. Her children plan to share her care between them much as they divide up the family property but, completely unexpectedly, Lady Slane makes her own choice, proposing to leave fashionable Kensington for a cottage in suburban Hampstead that caught her eye decades earlier, where she will live alone except for her maidservant and please herself — for example allowing her descendants to visit only by appointment. Part 1 concludes with Lady Slane’s developing friendships with her aged landlord Mr Bucktrout and his equally aged handyman Mr Gosheron.

Part 2, shorter than the others, is composed of Lady Slane’s thoughts as she muses in the summer sun. She relives youthful events, reviews her life, and considers life’s influences and controls, happiness and relationships.

Summer is over. Part 3 takes place after Lady Slane has settled into her cottage, her contemplative life, and approaching end. To her initial annoyance, her past life still connects her to people and events. In particular Mr FitzGeorge, a forgotten acquaintance from India who has ever since been in love with her, introduces himself and they form a quiet but playful and understanding friendship.

Mr FitzGeorge bequeaths his fortune and outstanding art collection to Lady Slane, causing great consternation amongst her children. Lady Slane, avoiding the responsibility of vast wealth, gives FitzGeorge’s collection and fortune to the state, much to her children’s disgust and her maid’s amusement. Lady Slane discovers that relinquishing the fortune has permitted Deborah, her great-granddaughter, to break-off her engagement and pursue music, Deborah taking the path the Lady Slane herself could not.

The Awakening kate Chopin
Maison des Langues Campus D302 12.15 1/10/14, 12:00 AM

The novel opens with the Pontellier family vacationing on Grand Isle at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her two sons, Robert and Victor. Léonce Pontellier, a businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage, his wife Edna, and their two sons, Etienne and Raoul, make up the Pontellier family.

Edna spends most of her time with her close friend Adèle Ratignolle. Boisteriously and cheerily, Adèle reminds Edna of her duties as a wife and mother. At Grand Isle, Edna eventually forms a connection with Robert Lebrun, a charming and earnest young man who actively seeks Edna's attention and affections. When they fall in love, Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture. The narrative focus then shifts to Edna's shifting emotions as she reconciles her maternal duties with her desire to be with Robert and for social freedom.

With the summer vacation over, the Pontelliers return to New Orleans. Edna gradually reassesses her priorities and takes a more active role in her own happiness. She starts to isolate herself from New Orleans society and withdraw from some of the duties traditionally associated with motherhood. Léonce eventually talks to a doctor to diagnose her, fearing she is losing her mental faculties. The doctor advises Léonce to let her be and assures him that things will return to normal.

When Léonce prepares to travel to New York City on business, he sends the boys to his mother and leaves Edna alone at home for an extended period. This gives Edna physical and emotional room to breathe and think over various aspects of her life. While her husband is still away, she moves out of her house and into a small bungalow nearby and begins dallying with Alcée Arobin, a persistent suitor with a reputation for being free with his affections. For the first time in the novel, Edna is shown as a sexual being, but the affair proves awkward and emotionally fraught.

Edna also reaches out to Mademoiselle Reisz, a gifted recitalist whose playing is renowned throughout New Orleans but who maintains a generally hermetic existence. At a party earlier in the novel, Mademoiselle Reisz's playing profoundly moves Edna. Mademoiselle Reisz represents what Edna longs for: independence. She focuses her life on music and herself, instead of society's expectations, acting as a foil to Adèle Ratignolle, who encourages Edna to conform. Mademoiselle Reisz is in contact with Robert while he is in Mexico, receiving letters from him regularly. Edna begs her to reveal their contents, which she does, proving to Edna that Robert is thinking about her.

Eventually, Robert returns to New Orleans. At first aloof (and finding excuses not to be near Edna), he eventually confesses his passionate love for her. He admits that the business trip to Mexico was an excuse to escape a relationship that would never work.

Edna is called away to help Adèle with a difficult childbirth. Adèle pleads with Edna to think of what she would be turning her back on if she did not behave appropriately. When Edna returns home, she finds a note from Robert stating that he has left forever.

In shock and devastated, Edna rushes back to Grand Isle, where she had first met Robert Lebrun. Edna commits suicide and ultimately escapes by drowning herself in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.[1]

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
Jim's Bookcorner 10/11/13, 12:15 PM

Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics who lives with his second wife, "Fred," in a "northern" British town. He is becoming increasingly deaf, and, although he wears hearing aids (except when he doesn't), his social interactions--even those with Fred--are fraught with difficulty and occasional hilarious misunderstandings. His deafness is at the center of the novel, providing the title of this work of fiction, but also serving as an extended, often funny, but ultimately serious impetus to riff on aging, disability, and mortality. "Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse" (19).

Bates is at loose ends. His wife is busy with her successful interior decorating business, his adult children live elsewhere. He considers himself a "house husband" and does not really enjoy it. His aged, widowed father insists on living alone in London although he cannot be trusted to take care of himself without endangering his life (such as starting a fire in the kitchen during meal preparation). Bates visits him dutifully once a month with a mixture of dread, obligation, and guilty relief when it is over.

Desmond's hearing difficulty and boredom set him up for an encounter with a female graduate student and its unexpected complications. She is working on a thesis about suicide. Their interaction is threaded throughout the book and drives the "plot," but the details of life with hearing impairment, loss of professional involvement and purpose, and coping with an old, stubborn parent who is slipping into dementia are the main events of this clever, well-written, entertaining novel. And along the way are witty commentaries on contemporary life. The link between the narrator's profession of linguistics and his difficulty hearing the spoken word are also significant.

How it all began by Penelope Lively
Jim's bookcorner 5/29/13, 12:15 PM

How It All Began begins in uncharacteristically violent fashion: "The pavement rises up and hits her. Slams into her face, drives the lower rim of her glasses into her cheek." Charlotte, a retired schoolteacher in her late 70s, finds that she has been mugged and relieved of her house keys, bank cards and £60 in cash. As a reader, you share her sense of shock and bewilderment – after all, one might expect to be reasonably safe from street crime in a Penelope Lively novel; though the book introduces a number of elements you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find, including East European immigrants, chocolate cream frappuccinos and errant text messages used as a plot device.

How It All Began
by Penelope Lively

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Lively still draws the line at Kindle owners, whom she recently dismissed as "bloodless nerds". But these innovations aside, the novel is mostly preoccupied with the themes of recollection and consciousness which run through her fiction as a continuous thread. One of the principal protagonists is an ageing historian (there's often an ageing historian), while Charlotte is presented less as a character than a complex composite of previous states of being: "Charlotte viewed her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business." It is a distinctive device which has recurred in almost every one of Lively's novels since 1987's Moon Tiger, in which Claudia (an ageing historian) reflects that she is "composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water".

Having suffered a broken hip in the attack, Charlotte is left to consider what has hit her: "This faceless person with whom she has been in a transitory, intimate relationship. Him. Or possibly her. Women muggers now, no doubt; this is the age of equal opportunities." It soon becomes apparent that being knocked down has a knock-on effect. Charlotte is forced to move in with her daughter Rose while she recuperates, which means that Rose is unable to accompany her employer, Lord Peters, to receive an honorary doctorate in Manchester. His Lordship's niece, an interior designer named Marion, goes with her uncle instead, though a text explaining her absence is intercepted by the wife of her lover, thus hastening the demise of their marriage. It all unfolds with the inescapable logic of a well-oiled farce, though every so often Lively's authorial voice intrudes to comment on the domino-toppling effect: "Thus have various lives collided, the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away, offstage, impervious."

The novel contains some of Lively's funniest and most enjoyable character studies, not least the pompous bubble of self-esteem that is the academic relic Lord Peters; once a leading authority on Walpole, he now worries that "the 18th century has passed him by", and hopes to re-establish his reputation with a David Starkey-style television series. Lively is deliciously intolerant of interior designers – Marion's paramour, who runs a reclamation yard, is painted as little more than an jumped-up junk merchant; while Marion's business is principally based on the resale of "a cargo of interior adornments forever on the move, filtering from one mansion flat or bijou Chelsea terrace house to another".

Yet the most telling relationship is that which develops between the comfortably married Rose and Anton, an economic migrant who comes to visit Charlotte for literacy lessons. Rose surprises herself by developing an affection for this timid man with soulful eyes and fractured English, but sensibly limits the relationship to wistful strolls round London parks and weekend assignations in Starbucks.

Anton, a trained accountant, has had to accept work on a building site while struggling to master the language. Charlotte achieves a breakthrough by throwing away the standard uninspiring teaching materials and presenting him with a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. "I am like child," he says, happily. "Child learn because he is interested … Story go always forward – this happen, then this. That is what we want. We want to know how it happen, what comes next. How one thing make happen another."

It can only be a matter of time before Anton graduates from Maurice Sendak to Penelope Lively novels, as she remains a sublime storyteller – the opening sentence has us riveted with curiosity as to what will happen next. Yet she also keeps us consistently aware of the nature of the illusion. "So that was the story," she concludes, "so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story … These stories do not end, but spin away from one another, each on its own course." In other words, they momentarily collide and separate to form the kind of narrative at which Lively excels: the untidy, unpredictable one in which everyone lives ambivalently ever after.

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