Barat House Readings & Discussions
Each Thursday session will be held in Barat House, beginning at 7:30 PM. Light refreshments will be served. The final session will begin at 7:00 PM, at which a communal supper will be shared.
IMAGINING HISTORY
Historical fiction! An oxymoron satisfying neither our need for the truths of history nor our hunger for the beauties of literature? This Spring, the Barat House readers will explore five award-winning works of this genre. From the Roman Emperor Claudius to the creation of India and Pakistan, each of our authors imagines the human interior of some iconic example of received history in search of its instruction for our time.
March 11. I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
“Poetry is Poetry and History is History and you cannot mix them.” In I, Claudius Robert Graves imagines Livy, the Roman historian, responding emphatically, “indeed I can.” In his 1934 fictional imagining of the autobiography of this Roman emperor, Graves imitates Livy. We will explore together how it is possible to find insight from an imaginative reconstruction of the past into the inner life and limits of modern empire building. Discussion Leader: Thomas Taaffe
March 25. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall is a novel about the unconventional ascent of Thomas Cromwell to great power in the court of Henry the Eighth. Not “a man for all seasons,” but surely a man for his own season, the advent of mercantile democracy in 16th century England. Among the striking achievements of this novel is the way in which Hilary Mantel has invented the interior life of Cromwell in the light of a meticulously accurate rendering of the historical record. Discussion Leader: Laurel Peterson
April 15. Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier
Very little is known about the great Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, but Tracy Chevalier has created a compelling portrait of his mid-17th Century Holland, the life on its canals, its shops and their proprietors, its gossip, and its churches. The vessel of this historically rich novel is Griet, the poor young woman who at 16 becomes a maid in the Vermeer household. It is in her story that we experience the drudgery of the poor, the struggles of the artist, and the eruption of intimacy. Discussion Leader: Kevin Doherty
April 29. A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif
The regime of General Zia, dictator of Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 is rife with conspiracy theories. The death of Zia himself in a mysterious plane crash becomes the focus for the imagination of Mohammed Hanif. Seen through the eyes of a junior officer in the Pakistani Air Force, conspiracy is added to conspiracy. Hanif ’s fiction provides revealing insight into the history of our time, especially into the early relationship of America to radical Islam, in support of the Afghan rebels against the Russians. Discussion Leader: Van Hartmann
May 13. Midnight’s Children, by Salam Rushdie
Rushdie has taken the conflicts of modern India about race, class, language, and geography as the material for this magical narrative. He remythologizes the history of contemporary India and Pakistan since Partition to get at its truths, which are polymorphous, and in that form, hopefully liberating. Discussion Leader: Siobhan Taaffe
$65 for series (Students must register for entire series) Used copies of these books are available at a reduced rate on amazon.com or bn.com. OR contact your local library and reserve a copy for desired date.