This Is The Last…

Naive.Super, by Norwegian author Erlend Loe, was our book club choice of December. Our 3 month theme has been crazy people that aren’t that crazy. I really enjoyed this book and hope to find more works by this author in the future.

The narrator of our story is a 25 year old guy, that’s recently hitten a wall. I think they call this the quarter-life crisis. He’s feeling anxiety about life, he’s not sure what the point of everything is, he doesn’t have the feeling that everything will be okay in the end. He decides that until he can figure everything out he’s gonna start making lists. Lists of things that make him happy, things that he liked when he was a kid, things that he has, things that he wants.

The character is really likable. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it. Part of this book takes place in Norway and the other half our main character has a vacation in New York. This book is really simple, a little odd, and funny here and there. Sometimes I think I just need to sit there with the hammer and nail like our main character.

This book was a quick read, it has a big font with big margins. I really liked this book. If you haven’t read this book, pick it up. It’s well worth the 3 hours it’ll take to read.

This month our book club choice is Naive.Super by Erlend Loe. This is the third and final book in this 3 month period. Our theme for these last 3 books were crazy people that aren’t that crazy.

This book is a little difficult to find. I couldn’t find it at Barnes & Noble. I was able to get a copy through Amazon. The last two books were a bit dark, but this one is a little more light-hearted.

Starting January, we’ll do another 3 month series with a different theme. Any suggestions?

Our Book Club choice for the month of November was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. Our Book Club theme for these three books are crazy people that aren’t that crazy.

The novel was first published in 1962 and was developed while Kesey was still a graduate student at Stanford University. In 1975 it was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson. While the film was very much a success, it was heavily criticized by it’s author for changes in the screen adaptation. The main difference being that the novel is told from the first-person narration of a deaf and mute Indian named Chief Bromden, who isn’t really deaf or mute. Kesey also opposed the casting of Nicholson as McMurphy. Ken Kesey never saw the film.

The entirety of the book is set inside a mental institution and focuses on the introspective nature of Chief Bromden and his isolation from society, as well as the struggle between the authoritative Nurse Ratched and patient Randall McMurphy. McMurphy is sent to the hospital after being kicked out of other work farms and correctional facilities for being disruptive. But the other doctors and Nurse Ratched speculate is McMurphy is only pretending to be insane to get out of hard manual labor. McMurphy is the protagonist of the novel who enjoys gambling and sometimes brags that he is a psychopath. He is full of energy and mischief and a lack of control; and his character represents everything opposite Nurse Ratched. .

For being in a mental institution, McMurphy is quite well adjusted and holds clear thinking ability, unlike many of the other Acute patients in the ward. At one point in the book, McMurphy learns that unlike jail with a definite release date, he is committed to the institution until Nurse Ratched releases him. This news causes him do change his behavior due to the fact that being disruptive could hinder his chances of being released. Later McMurphy asks the other patients why they didn’t tell him this earlier. They reply that they forgot, since most of them are there voluntarily. McMurphy is astonished that they would choose to stay in a hospital full of Nurse Ratched’s rules instead of enjoying a life of girls, fast cars, and freedom. A young man with a speech impediment named Billy Bibbit becomes upset and screams furiously and says he’s too scared to leave. He begins crying and stuttering hard and the wounds on his hands begin bleeding. This scene made me wonder about choices we make in our own lives not because their easy, but because we’re afraid of change.

The novel presented many other scenarios between characters that symbolized the counter-culture era and beatnik movements of the fifties and sixties. I really enjoyed the style of writing that authors like Kesey, Kerouac, and Wolfe developed during that time. What did you think of making the Chief the narrator of the story? I like how his narration would drift between his consciousness and hallucinations of a fog. Which other patients on the ward caught your attention? In the book, McMurphy bragged that Nurse Ratched’s oppressive nature was pent up sexual frustration and could be easily cured by one night with him. Why do you really think Nurse Ratched treated her patients so severe and cold heartedly?

This is our second month of doing the Book Club. We’re doing 3 books of the same theme over 3 months. Our Book Club theme is crazy people, that aren’t that crazy. Last month we read Veronika Decides to Die.

Our Book Club choice for November is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey.

Please feel free to share your thoughts. We’ll be putting up reviews shortly.

Enjoy.

Our book club choice for the month of October was Paulo Coehlo’s Veronika Decides to Die. Our book club theme for these 3 months are crazy people, that aren’t that crazy.

As the book starts, we’re introduced to Veronika. She’s young, beautiful, and seems to have everything going for her. Yet, she has decided that she wants to kill herself. Not because she’s depressed just because she’s bored. She feels that the world is messed up and she feels powerless. She is unsuccessful and lands herself in a mental hospital. Veronika is told she only has a week to live, because of the damage she’s done to her heart.

Veronika develops friendships with some of the other patients at the hospital. She hears their stories of how they ended up there. This book gives us an interesting perspective on asylum life. Faced with death, Veronika starts feeling a deep desire to live. She starts playing the piano late at night, passionately and unrestrained. She pours her heart and soul into it. She plays like she never had before.

Coehlo threw in his usual mix of philosophy/spirituality into the story. But despite that, I really liked it. I like his writing style. I liked how Paulo Coehlo dropped into the book, and then quickly dropped out again. Its very interesting to me that Paulo Coehlo spent time in an insane asylum, when he was young. His parents put him there, not because he was crazy, but because he wanted to be an artist. That wasn’t socially acceptable to his parents. So Coehlo has an intimate knowledge of asylums, treatments, the relationships between doctor and patients, and the comforts and harrows of living in a place like that.

I liked how Veronika was comforted by the fact that when you’re in a mental hospital you can do whatever you want. Nobody thinks anything of it, because you’re crazy. Like when Veronika, walks up to the member of the Fraternity and smacks him across the face. On hearing the news that she is soon to be released from Vilette, Zedka reflects, “Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks.” What do you think about that quote?

I really liked this book. What about you? What do you think of Dr. Igor’s theory about Vitriol, the name he gives to a “disease of the soul” that affects people who have grown embittered? How do you feel about Dr. Igor’s experiment on Veronika?

Starting today we’re going to be doing a book club. We’ll read one book a month. Three books of the same theme.

All of our choices were inspired by the song lyric….

See the sea wants to take me,
the knife wants to slit me,
do you think you can help me?

All 3 of these books are about crazy people, that actually aren’t that crazy.

Our first choice is Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coehlo.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this book. We’ll be writing reviews of it very soon.

Enjoy.