Well, not off to a rip-roaring start, am I? Late getting the discussion going on the very first month! Things have been a bit in turmoil on my end. Anyway, please accept my apologies, and let’s get this party started!
I’ll post a few questions. Answer any and all, add your own questions or comments, come back to see what others have written and post as often as you’d like.
1. Did you like the book? Why or why not? Or what aspects did you like/dislike?
2. Were you previously aware of Britain’s campaign to get the U.S. into WWII?
3. Did you draw any parallels between the misinformation campaign that got us into Iraq and Britain’s propaganda to get us into WWII?
4. Did you find Ruth’s story compelling or simply a distraction from Eva’s story?
5. Do you think that the author, a man, was successful at writing the story from the perspective of two women? What did he get right or wrong?
FYI… Reviews of Restless:
The New York Times
The Guardian
The Washington Post
- cat
7 Comments
December 7, 2007 at 9:02 am
I found the book a bit plodding. The author seemed to be thinking a LOT about what the movie would look like (unnecessary descriptions, etc) and I couldn’t make myself believe a lot of the characters - Romer is quite plastic and the way the whole thing ended was pretty anticlimactic.
That said, I liked Ruth. I thought she was believable and her disbelief was a good touch.
I wondered if anyone was going to mention the Iraq similarities!
How would you have changed the ending of the story?
December 7, 2007 at 9:11 am
I’m going to take the last question first, I did think that he was very successful in writing women. I’m usually very good at telling whether the author of a book is a man or a woman based on the prose and I couldn’t tell with this book. There was a feminity, I thought, to the prose, especially the descriptions and voice of Ruth.
I didn’t think that I would like this book, but I did. I had no idea that British forces were working to get us into the war (although it doesn’t surprise me).
I think that the question about Ruth’s story detracting from Eva’s was interesting, because, to me, I liked Ruth’s part of the book better. I could never figure out why Eva’s was in the third person and not in the first person. If it was supposed to be a journal that Ruth was reading….why was it not in the first person? I think that it would have been more immediate and interesting that way!
I think, when I get right down to it…..I didn’t really like Eva. I thought that she was a little too confident, if that makes any sense at all, and very ruthless in her own way, especially in how she used her daughter.
I don’t know…how did you feel about Eva? Did you like her?
December 7, 2007 at 11:42 am
Hey Days !
I like your description of the author’s thinking about what the movie would look like. I think it describes his style very accurately. It did take me about 50 pages to get into the book and the story. I agree about Romer’s being “plastic” and Eva, too. Ruth was one of the more believable main characters in the book and I wish the story stayed more with her … chronicling her gradual discovery of her mother’s life. I think this is really better done in other books, like The Historian.
I don’t know how I would change the ending. I thought that having Romer basically kill himself was odd and it was never fully explained (at least to my satisfaction) why Eva thought someone was after her in the present.
December 7, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Interesting… I was totally bored by Ruth’s story and absorbed in Eva’s. I resented the interruption of Ruth!
I agree with both of you, though, that the ending was anti-climatic, and with Suz’s comment that the construct of the journal in the third person was clumsy. I didn’t think it was great literature, but I thought it was a compelling story anyway.
Agreed, Suz, that it doesn’t properly explain *why* Eva was worried in the present time.
December 7, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Ooh, Suz, good point. It was never explained WHY on earth Eva was such a threat (however-many) years past all that, was it? That part was pretty bad.
Oh, he’ll kill himself. Just wait and see.
I liked it in that it made me think about the politics we never see.
December 11, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Almost done with the book! Will post as soon as Ainsley and my raging sinus infection allow me to finish . . .
December 13, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Okay . . finished. Perhaps the reason it did take me so long to get through the book is because I felt like it dragged. I only started getting that urge to turn the page in the last third of the book, I would say.
As with Cat, I also really liked Eva’s portion of the story better and I had to remind myself to change my thought process when it went back to Ruth. I thought the two women were strangely similar - kind of rough around the edges, Eva more because of her life, but Ruth was kind of hard, too.
To go to the questions, I did like the book, but I felt like some of it could have been cut out or adapted in some way. I was not aware of Britain’s campaign until I read this - I really enjoy reading about WWII, but found myself in college just learning about Japanese internment camps and being so bewildered about why I had never learned about it in high school. I think, especially with WWII, there is so much to learn (and so much we don’t really “know” about.)
I think Boyd did a fair job writing from a women’s perspective. I think Suz, you were right, in mentioning the feminity of his prose. I think a woman would have described Romer differently, however, perhaps in more detail.
I also think that the worries Eva had in the present throughout the book were hinted at on the last page - I don’t think it was anything concrete and because Romer seemed shocked when she accused him of “still looking for her”, I think it was all in Eva’s mind. “Our common mortality, our common humanity . . . one day somone is going to come and take us away, you don’t have to be a spy to feel like this . . .”
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