One of Jostein Gaarder's previous books Sophie's World captured the imagination of readers world-wide. Unfortunately this offering failed to captivate our BTLBCers.
One of our regulars was quite adamant that this novel was written for a Young Adult audience and therefore deemed it quite irrelevant for her particular vintage. There was a shared notion among our readers that this could be the case but we could find no evidence in the book itself to support this claim. There was discussion about the hard-nosed style turning off YA readers anyway.
Some of our readers felt that the tone was too 'preachy' and thus it lost them as a sympathetic audience. Others considered the genre too muddled for its own good. They did not see the value of the detailed statistics thrown up in the book at regular intervals. Some supported the viewpoint that the author could have either written a novel with an environmental message or flavour, or written a non-fiction book that could utilise the wad of statistics in a more significant way. They spoke of other novels that they had read that endeavoured to convey the possible implications of climate change in a more subtle way and therefore had made a greater impact on them.
One of our readers regarded the climate change message as background noise and concentrated on the ruby ring as the important link in the story. From her perspective, the novel was well-constructed as the story began with the grandmother receiving the ruby wonderful ring from her middle eastern lover and then as the story progresses, the ring eventually passes to her descendant Nova who falls in love with the Arab boy with the camels who were travelling through Norway due to the increasing desertification of Europe thus, from this reader's perspective, closing the ring neatly. This reader enjoyed the way the colour red was splashed throughout the book.
Other readers found the book easy to read but felt it left no impression on them. They could not connect to the characters and were so uninvolved with the book that once it was read, it vanished from their mental radar. There was much laughter as one of our BTLBCers told us of her decision not to bother reading the book based on her discovering it had such a consistent run of single stars on 'The Goodreading' website. She figured that if this was the opinion of such a variety of readers, it was not worth her effort to read a book that there was a pretty good chance that she would not enjoy! She was happy to agree with their ratings even without reading the book!
There was the notion put forward that Nova was unnecessarily harsh on her grandmother and that Nova could not miss all of the extinct animals as one cannot miss what one has never experienced. There was the idea proposed that as we did not live with dinosaurs we cannot in reality comment on missing them and that Nova was really in a similar situation. Some of our readers would like to experience the green booths and thought hard trying to envisage how this would really work and what it would look like.
Overall, our members were disappointed with this offering from Jostein Gaarder and there was discussion about maybe the message being lost in the translation or whether the story itself referenced a Norwegian or Scandinavian tale that we Australian readers were unaware of and thus missed its significance. Most of our readers scored this novel at below five out of ten. It was unusual to have such general disenchantment with a book.
Our next book club book takes us to London with the story of the Indian migrants' experience of England. The Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota, set in contemporary times, was short-listed for the 2015 Mann Booker prize.
We meet on Thursday 30 June at 6.00pm at the Gordon White Library Community Meeting Room to exuberantly share our experiences of this modern novel.
Happy reading!
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