Summer reading
Sayers, Valerie
P?:i;n:+v78a;:yF?w'.it53ty5.t:&;~q:P3.~H63tirJiY.t+'..:1`S.iR Summer reading Valerie Sayers born, London-bred Monica Ali, is al-most unaccountably ebullient, given the measures of grief and...
...The qualified candidate must be experienced in pastoral ministry with a master's degree in theology, or appropriate field...
...The novel's distinctive, splashy prose and insistent rhythms—Mda rarely delivers a sentence whole when he can break it down into two or three emphatic fragments—make reading The Madonna of Excelsior a charged, often exhilarating experience...
...First he must escape the sacked city and deal with the guilt that his flight causes...
...ith a beefed-up Brad Pitt kicking off the summer movie season as Achilles in Troy, what better time to re-visit the ancient epics...
...Benedicta Cipolla A former correspondent for Catholic News Service in Rome, Benedicta Cipolla is a freelance writer in New York...
...Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale 268 Park Street, New Haven, CT 06511 email robert.beloin@yale.edu Program information available: www.yale.edu/stm Commonweal 25 June 18, 2004...
...Her biracial daughter, Popi, will join with Niki's black son Viliki to lead the local struggle for South Africa's liberation...
...Mda's characters, both pre- and postapartheid, are rendered with broad satiric strokes, but his sympathy and especially his political optimism seem closely related to Monica Ali's narrative hopefulness in the face of brutal history...
...When her beloved first-born son dies, her fatalism seems sure to endure...
...the first novel by the BangladeshCommonweal 24 June 18, 2004 facing male artists—whether they be priests or novelists—who portray naked women, and his commentary on the subject is droll...
...With a review of who's who among gods and mortals fresh in your mind, CAMPUS MINISTER YALE's Catholic Chapel & Center seeks a Campus Minister to share leadership in the life of this vibrant and expanding Catholic community...
...Leadership and participation in sacramental preparation, liturgy, and retreats is also required...
...Robert Beloin St...
...All three explore the ways family life and religious belief can both reflect and deflect the oppressions of their surrounding cultures...
...As Nazneen reads of her countrywomen's woes, and as she witness-es her London community's burgeoning Islamic pride, she must choose how she will define herself as wife and as post-9/11 Muslim...
...The obvious choice is to turn to Homer, and perhaps, in response to Hollywood's continuing interest in sexing up Greco-Roman adventures, many will...
...Rosetta Loy's narrative of uncovered memory reminds us that we must be honest about the past before we can be, along with Monica Ali and Zakes Mda, hopeful about the future...
...A Bangladeshi girl of eighteen who is flown to London for an arranged marriage with a man twice her age, Nazneen is a devout Muslim whose first instinct is to obey, to serve, to accept her lot...
...This is a deeply disturbing book whose conventional domestic surface (Isabella, the wife of an Italian professor, has an affair with his Jewish col-league Arturo) is probed—gently at first, then insistently—by the family's elder daughter...
...The position has a particular emphasis on working with undergraduates as well as social justice outreach and some ministry with graduate/professional students and faculty...
...Mda is well aware of the dangers Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Valerie Sayers is the author of five novels...
...Isabella's sister pities Arturo's plight and escapes with him—but she cannot forgive him, finally, for the act he commits to save himself...
...if you're ever in Rome, don't miss Bernini's moving statue of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of the burning Troy, at the Galleria Borghese...
...If this makes them sound grim or drily sociological, let me quickly add that all three are steeped in the pleasures of rich and complex narratives...
...The story's limpid prose, which circles memory to replay events in greater and greater detail, reflects the charmed lives of the Catholic family whose story it tells: the academic branch of the family, in Italy, and the leisure-class branch, in Switzerland, register the fate of Europe's Jews but do not intervene until it is too late...
...looks back at the Holocaust and the hounding of Europe's Jews with tightly contained fury...
...Indeed, Brick Lane (Scribner, $25, 369 pp...
...Most of this ambitious story (thick with detail and covering a long stretch of time) is told from Nazneen's point of view, in a sharp, stylish, and often funny narrative...
...The men were released on bond, the women jailed, the charges eventually dropped after legal machinations...
...I, however, think the better bet during languid summer days is to crack open that other, often-overlooked epic, Vergil's Aeneid (Vintage, $10, 464 pp...
...Start date: August 1, 2004 Candidates are encouraged to apply with CV to: Rev...
...All three of these striking novels bring to life families peculiar to their own cultures, each capable of nourishing cowardice and selfishness, courage and sacrifice...
...her epigraph is from Blake: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make some-body Poor...
...Loy has said that she is interested in contrasting the Jewish idea of justice and the Catholic notion of pity...
...Frans Claerhout, whose portraits of the fictional characters convey a joyful respect for their physical lives...
...Her narrative shakes us to the core with its quiet insistence on the complicity of so many Catholics in the deaths of so many Jews...
...The particulars of her world—from her little apartment, where so much of the action takes place, to a riot in Brick Lane—are rendered with exquisite precision, the characters with boundless authorial forgiveness...
...His novel is structured around giddy descriptions of the paintings of the real-life Belgian missionary priest, Fr...
...Salary and benefits commensurate with experience...
...P?:i;n:+v78a;:yF?w'.it53ty5.t:&;~q:P3.~H63tirJiY.t+'..:1`S.iR Summer reading Valerie Sayers born, London-bred Monica Ali, is al-most unaccountably ebullient, given the measures of grief and struggle doled out to its protagonist Nazneen...
...Along the journey to Italy, Aeneas must contend with Juno's long-held grudge against the Trojans, the menacing Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, and a trip through the underworld...
...Even today, though, I can remember the words that open this great tale of love, war,and the founding of Rome: Anna virumque cano in Robert Fitzgerald's classic translation, "I sing of warfare and a man at war...
...Vibrant spirituality, competence in pastoral counseling and ability to work collaboratively are necessary qualifications...
...If these two third-world novels look with hope and good humor to the future of the formerly oppressed, Rosetta Loy's Hot Chocolate at Hanselmann's (published in Italy in 1995 and recently released here in an elegant translation by Gregory Conti, University of Nebraska Press, $16.95, 183 pp...
...I read most of the first six books in Latin back in high school, though I am ashamed to admit my dead-language skills are no longer up to snuff...
...Forgiveness is also central to Zakes Mda's new novel, The Madonna of Excelsior (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 258 pp...
...Her story, which strikes a sublime balance between sympathy and satire, is interrupted regularly by epistolary sections in which her VALERRYsister, a barely literate but consummately energetic writer, reports on her own precarious situation in Bangladesh: she describes wife beating, rape, prostitution, destitution, and—in one harrowing subplot involving a friend—acid burning...
...Like Odysseus, Aeneas faces a host of tasks following the Trojan War, but unlike the Greek hero, the Trojan Aeneas is destined to found a divinely ordained empire...
...The Campus Minister will join the pastoral staff in ministering with and to the Catholic undergraduate, graduate, and faculty/staff populations at Yale University, and continue the Center's mission of promoting Catholic intellectual and spiritual formation...
...But the event has profound implications for the novel's fallen Madonna, Niki, a rape victim who has sought a complicated form of sexual vengeance...
...yet gradually her devotion to other women—her Bengali neighbors, her young daughters, and especially her sister in Bangladesh—leads her to question her own responsibility for her fate...
...At the story's heart is an absurd moment in South Africa's bitter history: in 1971, nineteen black women and white men in the Free State were charged with interracial sexual relations...
...hree recent novels I've found compelling braid politics, religion, and families so tightly that it's nearly impossible (and probably pointless) to pull out the strands...
...Book 4, the tale of Queen Dido's crazed passion for Aeneas during his extended layover in Carthage, is the one that really gets me, though I've always been a sucker for the dramatic rhetoric of tragic love...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
