Wrapping up 2019

Breakfast was consumed, books were discussed.

Here is the first round of books for 2020.

January: "Signs Preceding the End of the World" by Yuri Herrera. (Greta will be reading this in Spanish.)

February: "Missing Person" by Patrick Modiano. (Greta will be reading this in French.)

Read on!

To Recap

July was ""Milkman."
August was "Exit West."
September was "Milkman" again. Why? Don't ask me, I was not present in August. "Say Nothing" by Patrick Radden Keefe had been suggested as supplementary reading for those who had already read "Milkman."
October will be "Say Nothing" by Patrick Radden Keefe. Again.
November will be "The Bastard of Istanbul" by Elif Shafak.
December will be "Revolutionary" by Alex Myers.

And then it will be 2020.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing

Seamus Heaney 

I.
I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of  'views
On the Irish thing'.  I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,
Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and Sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.'
'They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably ...'
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

II.

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome's
a happy man this night.' His flock suspect

In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make

As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow

When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight

But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering-
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke-while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

III.
"Religion's never mentioned here", of course.
"You know them by their eyes," and hold your tongue.
"One side's as bad as the other," never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung
In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV.
This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was déjà-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

Here's what happens when you don't come to Book Club

We go ahead and line up the next three books.

"Lie Down in Darkness" was universally declared to be a dreary slog and racist to boot. The author of this review shares our disappointment when revisiting it after many years.

Dimmed by Age

Our next few reads are as follows.

June: "There There" by Tommy Orange
July: "Milkman" by Anna Burns
August: "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid

Sounds like a good summer of reading ahead.

Spring Update

After agreeing on how much we admired Baldwin's writing in "If Beale Street Could Talk," we chose to read "Giovanni's Room" for March. Due to illness and traveling we did not meet in March but used the magic of the interwebs to select Truman Capote's "Other Voices Other Rooms" as our April book. Janice had a last minute date with a falcon but all others were in attendance on April 13. Two books were discussed!

Our May book with be "Lie Down in Darkness" by William Styron.