The Dinner by Herman Koch

Our book club read this month was Herman Koch's The Dinner. I had seen Goodreads friends who had read it and enjoyed it. I didn't realize it was a dark  'thriller'.

The novel begins slow, and well, is actually boring, the narrative voice telling how he and his wife are getting ready to meet another couple at an upscale restaurant. They are not looking forward to it.

We learn that the other couple is the narrator's brother and sister-in-law, and the brother is going to run for Prime Minister.  The brothers have a strained history and relationship. The narrator had a 'meltdown' in the classroom when he was teaching and was on medication.

There is a scene before the dinner where the narrator looks at his son's cell phone and is not pleased with what he discovers.

How would this evening, our dinner at the restaurant, have proceeded, had I indeed quit right then and there? from The Dinner by Herman Koch

There is a lot of description of the meal and the staff and how the sister-in-law is wearing dark glasses to hide that she has been crying.

And when we discover what it is that brought these parents together, you may wish you were not reading this book. It's too late--you have to keep turning pages. The crime is so horrendous! And the cover-up is even more disturbing.

The plotting is masterful.

But I wish I had not read this book!

Did I mention it is DISTURBING?

What would YOU do if your fifteen-year-old son had committed a crime? How far would YOU go to protect your child?

Maybe we don't take that seriously enough...How young they are. To the outside world, they're suddenly adults, because they did something that we, as adults, consider a crime. But I feel that they've responded to it more like children.  from The Dinner by Herman Koch

Would you rationalize your child's behavior? Hide the crime? Smooth the way without repercussions? Or make the child own up to his error, support their turning themselves over to the authorities? Would consider bribery or threats or violence? Or set a standard of morality and law?

So be forewarned--you will encounter some nasty folk, and if you pick the book up, be prepared for a slow simmer that comes to a roiling boil!

Diary of Helen Korngold, April 14-20, 1919

This year I am sharing the diary of Helen Korngold of St. Louis, MO. Helen was a student at Washington University and a student teacher.

April

Monday 14
Tired – arose 6 a.m. Helped Momma with Passover dishes. To school – Soldiers Peace Conference.  Home after basketball. Herbert came for Seder. We are crazy about him. Letter from Summer.

Tuesday 15
School. Home – Herbert was over for dinner. He’s such a peach. Too bad he had to leave for Springfield. We wanted him to stay over, but he couldn’t.

Wednesday 16
School. Baseball. Home – Aunt Beryl’s for dinner.

Thursday 17
School – Letter from Koloditsky – mushy. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

Friday 18
School – dancing – To Bonnie Young’s at night. Went with Morris Gates. Her cousin, Spiro, plays violin very well. Had a good time.

Saturday 19
School. J.C. Board meeting. Saw Susan Hauskay/Hawakays [illegible] with folks

NOTES:

April 14

An article in the April 14 Soldiers Peace Conference in the St Louis Post-Dispatch.




April 18 (Good Friday and a school holiday)

Morris Milton Gates was born on July 8, 1895, and died on December 1969. His World War I Draft Registration shows he worked at R. Gates Furniture Company at 804 N 7th St. Morris was in the National Guard. He was of medium height and weight with brown eyes and black hair. Morris appears on the 1920 St. Louis Census as 24 years old and a salesman, living with his family. In 1931 Morris married Ruth Gutfreund.

His father Rudolph was a German born in Poland in 1868 and died in St. Louis in 1946. He married Fannie Weiss, sister of Rose Weiss who married Charles Wolf and was mother to Helen’s friend Dan Wolf. Rudolph was a merchant of furniture on the 1910 St. Louis Census. Morris’ brother Sidney also worked for the family business. Morris also had sisters Jeanette and Ernestine.

Bernice Young’s cousin Bernard Spiro was born in 1898 in New York, NY and died in 1992 in California.

April 19 (school holiday)

Susanne Hawakays I have not been able to verify the reading of Helen’s handwriting to pin down this woman.

April 14
All year long, Helen mentions going to the Satellites, often with a boy. Once she wrote 'Temple Satellites.' Newspaper announcements show it was an acting group that performed an annual Vaudeville and Dance. It was under the direction of Mrs. Diamant of the Thyrsus Dramatic Society at Washington University.

June 1, 1919, St Louis Dispatch article

The April 20 St. Louis Post-Dispatch first page featured an article supporting women's right to work. Perhaps this kind of thinking influenced Helen into embracing a career and marrying for love later in life!

Helen Korngold Diary April 14-20 1919

This year I am sharing the diary of Helen Korngold of St. Louis, MO.

Helen Korngold, December 1919, New York City

Monday 14
Tired – arose 6 a.m. Helped Momma with Passover dishes. To school – Soldiers Peace Conference.  Home after basketball. Herbert came for Seder. We are crazy about him. Letter from Summer.

Tuesday 15
School. Home – Herbert was over for dinner. He’s such a peach. Too bad he had to leave for Springfield. We wanted him to stay over, but he couldn’t.

Wednesday 16
School. Baseball. Home – Aunt Beryl’s for dinner.

Thursday 17
School – Letter from Koloditsky – mushy. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

Friday 18
School – dancing – To Bonnie Young’s at night. Went with Morris Gates. Her cousin, Spiro, plays violin very well. Had a good time.

Saturday 19
School. J.C. Board meeting. Saw Susan Hauskay/Hawakays [illegible] with folks

Notes:

April 14


Soldiers Peace Conference article in April 14, 1919 St Louis Star

April 18 (Good Friday and a school holiday)

Morris Milton Gates was born on July 8, 1895, and died in December 1969. His World War I Draft Registration shows he worked at R. Gates Furniture Company at 804 N 7th St. Morris was in the National Guard. He was of medium height and weight with brown eyes and black hair. Morris appears on the 1920 St. Louis Census as 24 years old and a salesman, living with his family. In 1931 Morris married Ruth Gutfreund.

His father Rudolph was a German born in Poland in 1868 and died in St. Louis in 1946. He married Fannie Weiss, sister of Rose Weiss who married Charles Wolf and was mother to Helen’s friend Dan Wolf. Rudolph was a merchant of furniture on the 1910 St. Louis Census. Morris’ brother Sidney also worked for the family business. Morris also had sisters Jeanette and Ernestine.

Bernice Young’s cousin Bernard Spiro was born in 1898 in New York, NY and died in 1992 in California.

April 19 (school holiday)

Susanne Hawakays: I have not been able to verify the reading of Helen’s handwriting to pin down this woman.

April 14, 1919 ad in St Louis Post Dispatch

Books I Didn't Read or Finish

I didn't read them. Or I didn't finish them. This does not mean they are BAD books. I ran out of time, it was the wrong time, I was the wrong reader.

I was offered several books from publishers through NetGalley but had to pass them over when eye surgery meant a two-week vacation from reading. I decided to have my lifelong astigmatism corrected with my cataract surgery and I could not see with or without glasses until the second eye was operated on. I was falling behind in my reading!

Both books have received good reviews from my Goodreads friends.

One book was The Ash Family by Molly Dektar from Simon and Schuster. I read perhaps fifty pages. The writing is wonderful. I felt a dark story coming up and was not sure I wanted to go there at the time. From the publisher:

When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel.
At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.
Thrilling and profound, The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging.

Another book I had been offered was Saving Meghan by D. J. Palmer from St. Martin's Press. Being a thriller, which is not one of my favorite genres although I do read them now and then, I decided to forgo it as well.

From the publisher:

Saving Meghan is a riveting new thriller full of secrets and lies from author D.J. Palmer. 
Can you love someone to death?
Some would say Becky Gerard is a devoted mother and would do anything for her only child. Others, including her husband Carl, claim she's obsessed and can't stop the vicious circle of finding a cure at her daughter's expense.
Fifteen-year-old Meghan has been in and out of hospitals with a plague of unexplained illnesses. But when the ailments take a sharp turn, clashing medical opinions begin to raise questions about the puzzling nature of Meghan’s illness. Doctors suspect Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare behavioral disorder where the primary caretaker seeks medical help for made-up symptoms of a child. Is this what's going on? Or is there something even more sinister at hand?
As the Gerards grow more and more suspicious of each other and their medical team, Becky must race against time to prove her daughter has a deadly disease. But first, she must confront her darkest fears and family secrets that threaten to not only upend her once-ordered life…but to destroy it.

I was eager to read Stephanie Barron's historical fiction novel That Churchill Woman. Some years ago I had read several of Barron's Jane Austen mysteries and enjoyed them. I had read about Jennie Churchill in books about her famous son Winston Churchill and I had seen a television series about her life. I was pleased when I won an ARC on Goodreads.

I have read 188 pages of the 381-page book. I am going to be setting it aside for now.

Jennie's marriage was at once brilliant and a failure, Jennie supporting her husband's career and social life while engaging in a series of love affairs. Barron takes us into Parliament and Lord Randolph Churchill's career, as seen through Jennie's eyes. And in the background are Jennie's children. They adore their parents even if both are distant and uninvolved in their lives.

My disappointment is that the novel is not drawing me into a deep emotional connection with Jennie. There is lots of period detail about her costumes and the social scene and dark hints about Lord Randolph's sexual orientation. Jennie gives up her true love to remain in her marriage. And she puts her social obligations over being a mother, even when it breaks her heart. 

An example is the scene were Lord Randolph is involved with voting against Home Rule for the Irish. Jennie has come to listen to the debate and was with another woman whose lover is in Parliament. There is a long paragraph telling the other woman's backstory. There is a description of Lord Randolph's apparel. A few paragraphs about his speech and the reaction and Jennie's understanding of what this meant to her husband's career. The scene lacks the excitement and emotion that must have been in that room. A new government was formed out of that debate. I felt that Barron missed an opportunity to make history real.

Readers can glean a great deal about this time period and society from the book, and perhaps be motivated to learn more. Perhaps I will return to this book later. But I have seven other Advanced Reading Copies sitting on the table and another half dozen egalleys to be read! Time to move on.

Poems for the Very Young Child: Poems for Spring

I found a delightful children's book in a local antique store. Poems for the Very Young Child was compiled by Dolores Knippel and illustrated by Mary Ellsworth and published by Whiteman Publishing CO in 1932.

Today I am sharing poems under the chapter SPRING.

An Ancestry.com search showed Delores Knipple was a teacher in Milwaukee, WS who born in 1903 and died in 2006. She remained unmarried all of her life. Mary Ellsworth was a prolific children's illustrator, including the art for the first Boxcar Children series.

Lost Without the River by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic

Lost Without the River is Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic's bittersweet hymn to the place of her birth and childhood. The memoir is filled with observant detail of the land and the simple joys of childhood. It is also a nostalgic recounting her parent's hard life running a South Dakota farm during the Depression. Family and the church were the foundation of life, providing support and unity.

As Scoblic moved on with her life in the wider world, going to school, joining the Peace Corps, and working in New York City, she still felt anchored to the river and the home she knew, proving her father was right when he said his children would be "lost without the river."

The book is episodic, a string of Scoblic's earliest memories through her adulthood revisits of her home town. She withholds some information hinted at early on, to be revealed later for more impact when readers know her family better. Otherwise, there is little tension or drive to her tale. This is a book to enjoy when you need a peaceful read, the literary equivalent of floating down the river and watching the shore slip by, or perhaps sitting in a hammock under a spreading tree on a warm summer's day.

Memoirs are tricky things, especially if readers don't share a commonality of place or time. But they also allow us to see the world through another's eyes--the best also moving us to reconsider and recall our own experiences. After reading Lost Without the River I have a better appreciation for how the land shapes us, and recall my own river days.

I received an ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Barbara Scoblic is a hybrid. Still part country gal after living in New York City for more than fifty years. She was raised on a small farm in South Dakota. From earliest childhood she was alert to the beauties and vagaries of the natural world. She’d head for the woods or the fields, searching for the first flowers of spring. She’d watch as the light of an autumn day turned the color of the cottonwood trees from yellow to gold. 
 Concurrent with that appreciation of the natural world around her, she grappled with a growing impatience to see what was beyond the farm. 
 As a young woman, she succeeded. Her drive to break free took her first to Thailand where, as a Peace Corps volunteer she was the sole westerner in a small town. Then on an exhilarating trip with a fellow volunteer, she traveled throughout Asia, the Middle East, and then on to Greece.
Throughout her travels, she always carried her portable typewriter. At night she wrote letters, articles, and poems. Back in the states she described her experiences in a series for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Lost Without the River: A Memoir
By Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic
She Writes Press
ISBN 9781631525315
Publication Date: April 16, 2019
List Price: 16.95 paperback

*****

I grew up in Tonawanda, NY near the Niagara River. Dad's memoirs are full of the river. My family rented a "dock" on Grand Island when I was a girl. We spent many hours on the river as a family before we moved in 1963.

Along the Niagara River in the1950s

Dad and I on the Niagara River 1957

Organic Applique from Kathy Doughty of Material Things

Applique is my favorite quiltmaking technique. I learned early that it is forgiving and doesn't involve much mathematics and allows me to be as spontaneous as I want to be.

Detail from When Dreams Came True by Nancy A. Bekofske
Apollo 11 astronauts adapted from NASA photograph

Sometimes I follow a pattern closely. When I reproduce a Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton quilt pattern I am quite precise.

detail from Little Women Quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske
pattern design by Marian Cheever Whiteside Newton

With fusible applique, I sometimes cut the fabric without a template or pattern, as when I created my William Shakespeare quilt. I made a rough sketch and traced out the large pieces then snipped and built up the details with prefused fabrics.

detail of William Shakespeare quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske

Barbie Portraits by Nancy A. Bekofske

I was drawn to the idea of Organic Applique and hoped to learn new techniques and gain inspiration. Quiltmaker and author Kathy Doughty is well known in the quilt world. Her store Material Obsession in Sydney, Australia, is a center for innovation. She has a unique personal style and it shows up in this book. I really get a sense of her artistic vision.

"Designing is a creative leap of faith." Kathy Doughty, Organic Applique

Kathy Doughty at work

"Allow yourself to make choices, to experiment, and to make mistakes." Kathy Doughty, Organic Applique

First, Doughty inspires quilters to follow their vision and not be afraid of 'right' and 'wrong' choices. Don't hold yourself back, she warns. Enjoy the process and jump in.

"I thought it was all about being perfect, and perfect just isn't my thing." Kathy Doughty, Organic Applique

Doughty is MY kind of artist! When I started quilting 27 years ago my biggest challenge was precision. I have never been a perfectionist. I might rewrite and edit and scrap and rewrite but in my sewing I had to learn to cut on the line and sew a straight seam. I made all kinds of mistakes. Some I ripped out. But sometimes I would just applique something over the seam where I didn't get the full quarter inch and found it open when I was hand quilting!

Stolen Moments by Kathy Doughty, from Organic Applique

Doughty always loved quilts with personal signs and symbols. Her quilt Arrival reflects the time when Europeans first arrived in Australia. The Boab tree is her personal symbol in Stolen Moments--"it blooms where it is planted, just like me!"

She draws from various cultural needle art traditions, including Boro Collage, a traditional Japanese mending technique.

Overgrown by Kathy Doughty, from Organic Applique

Doughty's quilt Overgrown is the product of days lost in her studio, caught in the creative flow.

Chapters help the quilter with the basic ideas of design: Creating line, contrast, color, fabric choices, inspiration sources, fussy use of fabric design elements, scale, background choices. She also talks about how she stores and sorts her fabric stash.

Then she turns to the techniques needed: Needle-turn applique, fussy cutting, bias strips, basting (thread, pins, and glue), Broiderie Perse, Boro Applique, English Paper Piecing.

Doughty covers adding borders that pop, hand quilting (she uses perle cotton), and tools.

The next section addresses Design and Layout including inspiration and design concepts and tools.

Eight projects are included including applique, English Paper Piecing, paper piecing, and machine sewing.

Black Bird Fly: A Design Exercise helps the quilter with a free-form construction that is truly 'organic'.

I am very inspired by Doughty! I love her unbridled use of printed fabrics in such colorful abundance!

I was given access to an ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Organic Applique
by Kathy Doughty
C&T Publications
Stash Books
$27.95 softcover, $22.99 ebook
ISBN: 978-1-61745-823-1
UPC: 734817-113454
(eISBN: 978-1-61745-824-8)