This is the second installment of the  Man Booker longlist book selections.

The first was Room by Emma Donoghue.

Today's selection

Parrot and Olivier In America by Peter Carey

First lines

I had no doubt that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before I was born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable -- slight, pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Chateau de Barfleur.

Publisher Summary Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States—ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution—Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier.

As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, between their picaresque adventures apart and together—in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

And with their story, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, imagery, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.

Written with Carey’s unmistakable narrative brilliance, Parrot and Olivier is a historical novel in the best sense of the term, in that it inhabits a historical era with utter accuracy and authenticity but in doing so holds a mirror up to our time as well.

Praise

“Another feat of acrobatic ventriloquism, joining Carey’s masterpieces, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang . . . Carey’s most marvelous invention is Tocqueville’s traveling companion, Parrot . . . It’s a brilliant alteration of history and a source of rich comedy . . . Outrageous and witty.”
 —Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Carey braids his story carefully, lovingly. It has all his telltale favorite elements—lawlessness, revolution, hope for the future, men driven by passion. At its heart, Parrot and Olivier is a western; the simplest story in history, sculpted down to a twinkle in a philosopher's eye: Man’s search for freedom.”—Los Angeles Times

Reading group alert -- history, humor, great characters, friendship, romance, adventure, intrigue. This book has it all for discussible conversation.

Author On the Bookcase
Laura Morowitz

I'm thrilled to speak to Laura Morowitz, co-author with Laurie Lico Albanese, of The Miracles of Prato. Art in a book -- love these historical novels centered around real-live artists and their lifes! It helps me learn about past artists and the history and politics that surrounded them.

The Miracles of Prato brings to life glorious Italy in the era of the Medici —as it tells the story of an illicit love affair between the renowned painter Fra Filippo Lippi and his muse, a beautiful convent novitiate named Lucrezia Buti. Lippi, the chaplain for Convent Santa Margherita sees in Lucrezia's flawless face inspiration for countless Madonnas and he brings the her to his studio to serve as his model. But as painter and muse are united in an exhilarating whirl of artistic discovery, a passionate love develops, one that threatens to destroy them both even as it fuels some of Lippi's greatest work.

Fans of Tracy Chavalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Luncheon at the Boating Party will be delighted. Fact, historical color, passion, identity, art -- great for book club conversations!

Laura chats about impetus of The Miracle of Prato -- the questions, the curiosity, the images, and the characters. By their research and fictional thoughts, Laura and Laurie came to understand this illicit love affair. Laura hopes when readers picked up The Miracle of Prato "they, too, will find Fra Lippi’s paintings, and study them until they understand."

Please tell us what questions you would have asked Lippi and Lucrezia, Laura. 

If you walk deep into the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, you will find a Madonna so breathtaking that you can almost understand why a man would risk everything he had to paint her.

This is the Madonna with Two Angels, by Fra Filippo Lippi (1465), and the model is Lucrezia Buti. One look at the canvas will assure you that he thought she was the most beautiful creature on earth, and that he was willing to give up everything – everything but his art -- for her. And he almost did.

Lucrezia Buti and Fra Filippo Lippi were real people, who lived and loved and died in fifteenth century Tuscany. And while thousands of visitors see her image each year, hanging in the Uffizi and the Louvre and on posters and street banners in the city of Prato, only a few know the seemingly impossible—unfathomable, really—tale of a nineteen year old Augustinian novice and a middle-aged, celebrated painter and Carmelite monk who had a carnal relationship and whose connection to each other is evident in the images he created of her.

This was the story we decided to tell in our historical novel, The Miracles of Prato. I am an art historian, and my co-author, Laurie Lico Albanese, is a novelist. Together we gazed at the paintings Lippi made during the years of their affair, and asked ourselves the questions that led to this book.

• What kind of woman was Lucrezia and what drew her to the painter
• What options, if any, did she have
• Why did he love her, and how did he love her?
• What did they risk and sacrifice for one another?
• How did their relationship make its way into the images Lippi created during and after the height of their love affair?

We started with what art historians and novelists always begin with: questions, curiosity, images, and characters. We scoured the art books for reproductions of Lippi’s magnificent altarpieces and frescos, learning all that we could about the arist’s idiosyncrasies, innovations and motivations.

We looked at the paintings of Lucrezia, and tried to feel the sorrow and the joy she must have experienced. And the shame, too. The confusion. The longing.

We went to the churches and the convents themselves, on our own inspired pilgrimage throughout Tuscany.

We imagined creating these works, from inception to completion, in the context in which Lippi worked: the small town of Prato, a carriage ride from Florence where the Renaissance was in full bloom and the Medici at the height of their power.

While we could learn much about Lippi, whose fame was celebrated in his own lifetime, and whose notoriety as both artistic genius and rough-under-the-edges lawbreaker was captured by the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari in his work, Lives of the Most Emminent Painters (1550),  finding a source for Lucrezia was impossible. Like most of the women of her place and time, she left behind no record, no trace of her existence beyond her reflection in the thoughts and images of men. Even the convent of Santa Margherita, where the recorded events played themselves out, is long gone, its doors closed forever in the eighteenth century. We had no answers, only an endless river of questions. Why did the young, beautiful and well-raised Lucrezia Buti do what she did? Was she mad with love for the artist, with his ferocious temper and his sensual, life-affirming paintings? Was she desperate—like so many women of her time and place—to escape a life without color, without physical intimacy, without the tiniest of luxuries? Did the scandal they caused give her a satisfying thrill or did it terrify her? Her actions in 1459, when she renewed her vows to the convent, would seem to indicate her desire to do penance and set things aright, while her behaviour in the 1460s—fleeing the convent to once again take up residence with the painter-monk—leaves us baffled.

Two paintings are all we had to bring Lucrezia nearer to us, and to our readers. Her portrayal in an altarpiece for the convent Santa Margherita (a work that remains, proudly, within the city of Prato) and the gorgeous Uffizi Madonna, for which she posed, her translucent blue eyes, her perfect nose, her sweet, sad smile fixed forever. No diaries, no poems, no letters. No works by her hand. Just these paintings.

We gazed at them until we understood.

When readers pick up The Miracles of Prato, I hope they, too, will find Fra Lippi’s paintings, and study them until they understand. And I hope the portraits of Lippi and Lucrezia that we created through our words will live vividly in their memory, alongside the beautiful paintings he left behind.

Thanks so much, Laura, for sharing some of your journey in exploring Lippi's art and the motivations of both Lippi and Lucrezia in their love for each other.

Author On the Bookcase
Michelle Hoover

Michelle Hoover, welcome to On the Bookcase! Michelle's book, The Quickening, is the story of two women stuggling to make a living in the upper Midwest in the early 1900s. For one, their hardscrabble life comes easily, while the other longs for the excitement of the city. Though they depend on one another for survival and companionship, their friendship proves as rugged as the land they farm. While the Great Depression looms, the delicate balance of their relationship tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and exposing the dark secrets they hide.

Mitchelle answers her own Q & A and then reveals her thoughts on the live Q & A sessions in book stores and libraries. The magical time when "the book does matter, at least for a short period of time. The story is taken to heart, and for a few minutes a room is caught in an act of creation that goes far beyond the author’s little self or what lies between the pages." 

What a beautiful sentiment! Read on for more of Michelle's thoughtful "answers." 

"By the time my first novel The Quickening was published this summer, I had years of practice with readings and years more experience as a university teacher, so I’d long ago lost most fear about public speaking.

But it wasn’t until the hours before my first solo venture at the wonderful Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley, Ma, that I realized I would not only be reading from the page but answering on-the-spot questions about the most personal of subjects—my own writing and my great-grandmother’s journal, the novel’s inspiration.

The novel itself is of course fiction, the story of two neighboring women trying to save their farms and families during the Great Depression, whether they help each other in this saving or the opposite. I wasn’t too worried about the Q&A. I’d responded to plenty of bizarre student drillings on books and writing without much pain. It was more a matter of wonderment: that I would be standing at the head of a group of folding chairs all facing my direction and every raised hand would be raised in curiosity of me. 

Q:  How long did it take you to write this book?
A:  Six years, seven months, two days. I think. I started when I was twenty-three, too young to realize that I was too young to begin a novel. That version now sits in the crumbling UMass-Amherst library and I wish the building would just collapse already so that students wouldn’t have to duck their heads to escape plummeting bricks and that my sorry “thesis” might find an appropriate death. When I rewrote the book in my thirties, I kept only thirty or so pages of the original, killed off five characters, two narrators, and at least 200 pages. I’ve had plenty of adult students at Boston’s Grub Street cry out in near despair about the years and sacrifices it takes to finish a good novel. I tell them to keep going. Now I hope I have a little more clout to back up my advice.

I don’t particularly like to be the center of attention. Still, a close friend of mine commented at yet another reading that, unlike most she attended, I looked genuinely happy at the podium. “You seem like you’re having fun,” she said.  I looked at her, amazed, only to realize I was having fun. I found the Q &A sessions an absolute kick in the pants.  Other than the blog entries and guest posts I’ve been asked to write, there’s a big difference for me in these live ramblings. I’m not chasing after people to notice something. I’m not acting the salesman. It’s a sad thing, but debut authors from small presses have to spend plenty of time on the virtual street corner shouting out the benefits of their fictional potions, and sometimes that’s all the book becomes: shouting for wares. 

Q:  Why did you write this book?
A:  I wanted to represent a certain temperament, the kind I grew up with--one of reserve, work, and strength.  I tried for a kind of raw beauty too, though beauty aimed at directly usually becomes its opposite. "Why are we reading,” Annie Dillard asked, “if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed." I wanted to show that bareness and mystery of the Midwestern plains. And of course I wanted to save those seventy-one years of living that made up my great-grandmother’s journal. I wanted to capture all her stoicism and grief after my great-grandfather’s death, as well as the happiness in their life-long marriage and what they were able to grow together.  

In bookstore Q&As, the audience has already arrived. True, they may not shell out the dollars for a book, but writing isn’t really about cash. Of course, I’d like to earn enough to buy myself a semester off to write. I’d love for my favorite bookstores to make loads, as well as my publisher. But as long as my audience enjoys their thirty minutes or so in those seats, I’m a happy camper. And if just one person tells someone else about it, all the better. Borrow the book from a friend. Better yet, make sure both of you leave it heavily damaged so a person can tell someone’s come close to devouring it. Or check the book out from your local library—that sacred place where commerce ends. Just be sure to leave the plastic cover well intact.

Q:  What lasting effect do you want your book to have on readers?
A:  I hope my characters trouble them and that readers feel immersed in a place and time only to wake after the last page as if from a dream. I’d like to make people think of the Midwest and our history there in a deeper way, and then tie this history to today’s difficult economic and political climate. Though we are likely not as isolated in our losses and loves today as my great-grandparents were, we still experience these things deeply. We need books to reflect our experience and to do so without blinking so we don’t feel alone in our craziness. Aristotle claims that a well-written tragedy purges an audience’s fears. Others have written that good storytelling grows our sympathies for others, however unlike us they are. I could never claim with any certainty that my novel does either, but I can still hope it does.

Here’s the real wonder of Q&A sessions: That the ones who raise their hands are genuinely curious about the book and the making of it. I haven’t been paid a dime for their attentions and many are outright strangers. And the sessions are not at all about me (thank God) but about this object that sits on the table and what it takes to make such an object come alive. The audience is a sign of something I’ve believed in all along: numbers in the seats don’t matter, not when the author’s ego finally shuts its trap. But for the dozen or so who arrive, the book does matter, at least for a short period of time. The story is taken to heart, and for a few minutes a room is caught in an act of creation that goes far beyond the author’s little self or what lies between the pages. It’s the highest of human endeavors:  willing something about ourselves and outside ourselves to exist.

I'm on my book tour now -- fourteen events in fourteen days in the Midwest. We'll see if my view of the Q&A has changed by the end. I hope it doesn't."

Thanks so much for extending your Q & A with us. Such lovely thoughts on the joy of reading and book discussion! 

Learn more about Michelle.

Teaser Tuesday and Room by Emma Donoghue Giveaway.

Room is one of the 13 books selected for the longlist of the 2010 Man Booker Award. I will featured all 13 in upcoming posts.

Here are the beginning lines of Room.

"Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. 'Was I minus numbers?' " -- Room by Emma Donoghue (US Release: September 2010)

Publisher's summary To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

Praise for Room

"Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days." -- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

I read Room in two nights. excellent reading group pick. Topics to be considered when discussing -- parenting, identity, isolation, language, imagination, fear, family, reality vs make believe. Room, Ma, and Jack are destined to become classics.

Anyone can play Teaser Tuesday, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers! 

What is your TT, today? Let me know and you will be entered in the Room Advance Reading Copy giveaway! Open to US addresses only. Giveaway closes August 6. One lucky random winner!

Thanks to Hachette Book Group for supplied ARC of Room. 

Caitlin from Chaotic Compendiums won A Secret Kept by Tatiana de Rosnay last week!