The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Berthoud Ella & Elderkin Susan

Author:Berthoud, Ella & Elderkin, Susan [Berthoud, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

It is tempting, especially in youth, to go around forming instant and strong opinions about others. To judge, to pronounce, to label—such things can seem to an immature mind to be synonymous with strength and confidence. But having strong opinions must never become a mandate for being judgmental, which is the tendency to judge a thing or person based on one quality or attribute alone. A judgmental person will insist, for instance, that all criminals are terrible people, that all fussy eaters are bad in bed, and all teenagers are naive and judgmental.*

To stamp out your judgmental tendencies, we recommend you immerse yourself in the complex tale of Nazi guilt, personal shame, and retrospective horror that is Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a novel that explores the question of how postwar generations should approach the Holocaust and those implicated in its tarry atrocities. Michael Berg is just fifteen when he begins a relationship with thirty-six-year-old tram conductress Hanna. Their assignations, which often involve bathing together—a hint at a Lady Macbeth–style need to scrub away past sins—also revolve around books, for Hanna likes Michael to read to her (The Odyssey in Greek, War and Peace), something we wholeheartedly approve of (see: Loneliness, reading induced; Non-reading partner, having a). Only later, when Michael is a law student sitting in on a war crimes trial, does he recognize one of the faces on the dock. His first love was once an SS guard, complicit in the deaths of hundreds of women. And she has another secret of which she is even more ashamed.

Michael spends his whole life struggling to come to terms with what Hanna did—and what she has done to him. And while she suffers remorse, and even allows herself to be judged for shouldering more responsibility than she actually had, Michael’s decision not to reply to her letters from prison causes her pain. Thus Schlink brings the reader into the ethical fray. Do you allow yourself to be moved by Hanna’s suffering or continue to condemn her along with her crime? Herein lies your test. May this novel show you that holding strong opinions and being nonjudgmental do not by necessity cancel each other out.

If you lack the stomach for such heavy ethical questions, a gentler cure is available. If ever a novel—or novella—could trick you into dousing your judgmental fire, Ben Rice’s slim debut Pobby and Dingan is it. Kellyanne, little sister to narrator Ashmol, has two imaginary friends: Pobby and Dingan. As one would expect from any self-respecting older brother—especially one raised in the hard-bitten opal mining community of Lightning Ridge, Australia—Ashmol has no time for such childish things. Would you, after years of being instructed to set places for Pobby and Dingan at the table and being told you can’t come to the pool because, with Pobby and Dingan in the backseat, there’s no space for you in the car?

By the end of the novel, yes. Because when Kellyanne announces that Pobby and Dingan have died, and is made

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.