Sorry for the lack of posting fellow Ferret book clubbers! A
vacation in sunny Fort Meyers with a happy, but sick, toddler will do that to
you. Our previous book club meeting to discuss Rin Tin Tin was fabulous, as
always. I’ll let others speak for themselves, but I did enjoy the book for the
most part. Orleans has a fabulous way with turns of phrases (I’ll post some
favorite quotes in the comments). But, I felt that the book bogged down in
several places. I really found it hard to get into at first; I have no
experience with Rin Tin Tin the phenomenon, so I wondered if I’d be interested
in the story at all. Of course, Orleans makes the story so much more than just
about the wonder dog of the cinema. Somehow she manages to include in the story
of a man and his dog details about the use of dogs in just about every capacity
in WW1, the birth of cinema, the rise of dogs as household pets and obedience
training, celebrity imposters, rabid fans, and more.
We also discussed what it means to be a work of nonfiction.
I think that the delineation between fiction and nonfiction is extremely
blurry. When we read any kind of book, there is a single author who has crafted
a narrative, whether using facts or not. The author leaves items out, presents
information in a dramatic form (otherwise, why would we read the book?),
chooses a timeline (or to artificially play with that timeline), etc. All of
this is expected in a work of fiction. In a work of nonfiction, these tactics
serve to distance you from whatever truth you believe you may be reading about.
Which parts of a person’s memoir does the author choose to reveal to you? Who
do they interview and how does their own view of the topic (total stranger,
tremendous fan, extreme critic) affect how they approach subjects to interview,
angles to focus on?
All in all, yet another great discussion for us.
Happy reading!
1 comment:
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
1. "Most afternoons Lee retreated to a little annex off his barn that he called the Memory Room, where he shuffled through old newspaper clips and yellowing photographs of Rin Tin Tin’s glory days, pulling the soft quilt of memory—of what really was and what he recalled and what he wished had been—over the bony edges of his life."
2. born. I don’t usually visit the birthplace of celebrities and stars, and have never understood why so many people do. I assume it is because they think it might supply some clue about who the person was and who they became, or maybe the desire is actually more primitive—an urge to absorb something in the air, as if the place itself breathed out the deep essence of the person, the way a volcano vents the deep essence of the earth. Maybe it also provides the idea of a beginning, proof that something large and fully realized was once a pinpoint of an event. Seeing a beginning allows you to retract time like a measuring tape."
3. As I drove away in the dusky light, I kept seeing the tailored rows of graves, those tiny repositories of stories that are hardly remembered, all those sad and broken boys resting in the velvet lawn of St. Mihiel, forever. Almost one hundred years of resting there, enough time to be forgotten, the lives that continued after theirs ended having now filled up the space that opened up when they died, so their absence now has been lacqueredover, smoothed out, almost invisible.
4.Could it be that we fill out our lives, experience all that we experience, and then simply leave this world and are forgotten? I can’t bear thinking that existence is so insubstantial, a stone thrown in a pond that leaves no ripple. Maybe all that we do in life is just a race against this idea of disappearing. Having children, making money, doing good, being in love, building something, discovering something, inventing something, learning something, collecting something, knowing something: these are the pursuits that make us feel like our lives aren’t flimsy, that they build up into stories that are about something achieved, grown, found, built, loved, or even lost.
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