Literary Award Winners Fiction Book Club discussion

Please comment here on ‘The Friend’ by Sigrid Nunez, 2018 National Book Award Winner.

An interesting, original, enjoyable short novel about a woman writer reflecting on her long friendship with a male author and lecturer who married three times. It did not matter that there isn't much of a plot and the characters are not well developed. It took me about ten pages to get used to the writing style. She writes and makes interesting comments about a lot of topics including grief, writing, academia, sexual politics, suicide and having a pet animal.

There are lots of short paragraphs on various famous authors including J.M.Coetzee, Christina Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Rilke, Kleist and James Patterson.

Definitely a book one could reread, especially if you have an interest in writing fiction.

Here are some quotes from the book that I liked:
‘What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.’
‘In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.’
‘Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.’

Started this last night. I think I need to slow down. These stream of consciousness books usually need more time to pick up the nuggets of profound writing. Right now, I am about a third into it and not liking her dead friend, not liking his third wife, not exactly liking the narrator. It just feels a bit too naval gazing. And the bits about the various authors are striking me a bit like a name dropper, look how well read I am. I have to remind myself that the narrator is a writing professor, so referring to these writers is probably not an act of trying to impress in her world.

After reading your comments I just picked up the book and opened at a random page where the author writes on page 102 that in fiction the internet barely exists..that ‘there are things we do all the time in real life that we don’t put in stories’. I like for instance how after raising a point, she will quote a line from a famous author. For example on page 103 she writes, ‘Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.’

Earlier in the book she writes how she googled ‘Great Dane’ to learn about the breeds origins.

It’s an odd novel. It’s like the author is providing an example of how to cope with grief. She seems to be stating that you get on with living and learning and doing, whilst at the same time, remembering. I think the book’s strength is the amount of interesting ideas she discusses. It is a book you can open up and read on random pages, interesting paragraphs that tend to be mainly related to ‘writing fiction’.

The plot and the characters seem to be incidental to what the book is about!

I am up to 75%. It feels more like a set of essays than like a novel.

Finished. It never grabbed me. Stream of consciousness is not my favorite. And I am not a dog fan; too much dog talk. Yes, the book/author bits were interesting, but those were the only parts that I can say I really enjoyed.