The Book Group 10th anniversary list

The best so far?

Ten years in the life of a London book group…

Atonement – Ian McEwan (Nov 2001) *

Oxygen – Andrew Miller (Dec 01)

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (Jan 02) ***

Stupid White Men – Michael Moore (Mar 02)

Rings of Saturn – WG Sebald (Apr 02)

The Year of the Goat – Mario Vargas Llosa (Jun 02)

Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate (Sep 02)

Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust ??? (Oct 02)

Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Jan 03) *

A Fine Balance – Rohan Mistry (Mar 03)

Light of Day – Graham Swift (May 03)

After the Quake – Haruki Murakami (June 03)

Code of the Woosters- PG Wodehouse (July 03) **

Voyage au bout de la Nuit – Celine (Sept 03)

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates (Oct 03)

Tomorrow’s People – Susan Greenfield  (Dec 03)

Touching the Void – Joe Simpson (Jan O4)

Vernon God Little – DBC Pierre (March 04) **

Elizabeth Costello – J. M. Coetzee (April 04)

The Comedians -Graham Greene (June 04)

The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst (Sept 04)

Clear – Nicola Barker (Nov 04)

Havoc in its Third Year -Ronan Bennett (Dec 04)

The Plot against America – Philip Roth (Jan 05)

A Heart so White – Javier Marias (March 05)

A Tale of Love and Darkness – Amos Oz (April 05) **

Saturday – Ian McEwan (June 05)

The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth (July 05)

Identity -Milan Kundera (Sept 05)

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood (Nov 05) **

We need to talk about Kevin – Lionel Shriver (Dec 05)

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Jan 06)

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (March 06) ***

Prague – Arthur Phillips (May 06)

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (July 06)

Kalooki Nights – Howard Jacobson (Sept 06) **

People’s Act of Love – James Meek (Nov 06)

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (Jan 07) **

The Secret River – Kate Grenville (Mar 07)

Homo Faber -Max Frisch (May 07)

My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk (Sep 07)

Run Rabbit Run – John Updike (Nov 07)

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (Jan 08)

Blindness – José Saramago (Feb 08)

What Sport Tells Us About Life – Ed Smith (May 08)

The Enchantress of Florence – Salman Rushdie (Jul 08)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon (Sep 08) **

Engleby – Sebastian Faulks (Nov 08)

Homecoming – Bernhard Schlink (Jan 09)

Audacity of Hope – Barrack Obama (Feb 09)

Oscar Wao – Juan Diaz (Apr 09) *

Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow (Jun 09)

Scoop – Evelyn Waugh ** (Nov 09)

Pnin – Nabokov (Jan 10)

Therese Raquin – Emile Zola (Mar 10)

The Razor’s Edge – Somerset Maugham (May 10)*

The Death of Ivan Ilyich / Kreuzer Sonata – Tolstoy (Jul 10)

Alone in Berlin – Hans Fallada (Aug 10)

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen (Sep 10) *

Byzantium Endures – Michael Moorcock (Jan 11)

The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge (Mar 11)

The Heather Blazing – Colm Toibin (Apr 11)

The Tunnel – William H. Gass (Jun 11)

Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos (Aug 11)

The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt (Oct 11)*

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain (Nov 2011)

On the Shelf of Honour

Gardenia of Eden

Billie Holiday by Robin Carson

What a wistful look was captured in this famous portrait of Billie Holiday, a world of experience in those dark eyes. What did it take to capture that? The song Strange Fruit (the subject of my last post, Bitter Crop) and a bottle of gin.

The photo session for publicity shots was arranged in 1944 by a young playwright friend of Billie’s called Greer Johnson. The photographer, Robin Carson, had been clicking away for a good while but felt he had failed to capture the singer’s essence. Billie didn’t know what else to do and Johnson suggested she sing Strange Fruit. She protested a bit, said she needed an accompanist, downed the gin, then finally sang it a cappella. Johnson recalled it as: “one of the most fantastic performances I have ever heard in my life, and the camera never stopped”. She has the look of having been transported which seemingly was the impression she gave often when singing that unique song.

By way of yardstick, here’s a photo of Woody Guthrie by Carson from about two years before:

Woody Guthrie by Robin Carson

Bitter Crop

The night before last the New York jazz club of the 30s and 40s Cafe Society was recreated in London at the Purcell Room on the South Bank for one night only. The club was set up in 1938 as an alternative to the largely segregated, mob-run nightclubs then on offer. Behind it was Barney Josephson, the New Jersey-born son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia. His declared ambition was to create ”a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front”. His socialist tendencies are well captured in the club’s motto: The wrong place for the Right people.

Cafe Society was opened in 1938 by Billie Holiday and it was there within the year that she unleashed upon the world Strange Fruit, a song like no other. Picking up on my earlier post about great song lines, Shelter from the Storm, there is one line in this poem turned song that ranks among the all-time great song lines:

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

If you ever wanted to illustrate irony… that word “gallant” kills off a view of the Confederacy in one mighty blow. When Holiday first heard the lyrics her one question was: what does ‘pastoral’ mean? Which is ironic in itself in that her whole being understood what Strange Fruit meant which is why she made the song so much her own.

With the same irony that has Danny Boy being composed by an English lawyer, it was actually written by a white man, a Jewish school teacher called Abel Meeropol – pen name Lewis Allan, after two children he lost in their infancy. Meeropol’s motivation was simple: “I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.”

Here’s the poem he brought to Holiday and Josephson at Cafe Society, already set to music, already performed in obscure left-wing circles, ripe for the magic of a singer who could perform it from her soul and evolve it into something uniquely powerful.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Holiday delivered this body blow to audiences throughout her career – here’s one later take on it (the instability of the picture seems to suit the song, as if it can’t fully be retained by the technology):

 

Update 19.xi.11

Barney Josephson didn’t seem to have his own Wikipedia entry so I’ve just made him one