PLEASE NOTE THE TIME CHANGE: Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 12, at 7:00 p.m. At the meeting we will discuss “Plum Wine” by Angela Davis-Gardner.
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. As this enthralling novel opens, Barbara Jefferson, teaching English in Japan in 1966, receives a bequest from her Japanese fellow teacher and mentor, Michiko Nakamoto, a Hiroshima survivor who has just died of cancer. Barbara's superiors arrive at her apartment bearing Michi-San's gorgeous tansu chest, filled with bottles of homemade plum wine dated by year. After a short, perfectly rendered struggle with the elder Japanese teachers over the possession of the wine, Barbara discovers that the rice paper wrappings of each bottle contain a portion of the story of Michiko's life. Barbara's path through the texts, which she cannot translate herself, forms the rest of the novel. As Barbara delves into Michi-San's life and loves, an odd triangle forms between Barbara, Michiko and Michiko's childhood friend Seiji, a man who is between the two women in age, and who translates some texts. Author of Felice and Forms of Shelter, Davis-Gardner handles the Japanese mores of the time expertly, and the dialogue spoken by non-native English speakers is pitch perfect. She quietly wows with this third novel, which features a wonderfully inventive plot and a protagonist as self-possessed as she is sensitive.
We hope you’ll join us!
2 comments:
Hi all- I would like to invite my neighbor to attend this book club meeting because she works at New Canaan Library and recently led a discussion on this book. Is that okay with everyone? And where are we meeting? Thanks.
Of course you can invite your neighbor to attend this meeting. An email will go out with a reminder on date/location soon. I just finished the book and I think it would make for an interesting dscussion.
Rupa
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