Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil

I hope you all had a wonderful Bastille Day! I spent mine in the company of the Literary Divas (aka The Royal We) drinking wine, eating wonderful food & partaking in fabulous conversation. I’m really missing Paris today because of everyone’s blog posts and Twitter updates, but if I can’t be in Paris, an evening with my lovely girlfriends is a pretty even exchange.

This month’s book selection was The Delinquent Virgin by Laura Kalpakian. It’s a book of short stories and it is the first time I have read anything written by her. My favorite stories were “Lavee, Lagair, Lamore, Lamaird,” “The Delinquent Virgin,” and “Change at Empoli.” I love her writing style and I can’t wait to read more of her works. (I think I’ll start with American Cookery. I’ve heard good things!)

Here’s a short synopsis of the book from Publishers Weekly:

Subtitled “Wayward Pieces,” this generally beguiling collection of nine varied short stories veers from lightweight entertainment to some solid explorations of the human condition. Kalpakian is most impressive in two stories in which she features characters who scorn mediocrity and determine to live on a higher plane. The supercilious, bitter professor in “Change at Empoli,” who has fled America and her bourgeois family to direct a program for exchange students in Italy, realizes belatedly, and to her regret, that her life has been organized around high-flown principles that are in reality heartless, cold and empty. Carefully orchestrated and developed, this is the collection’s best work. The cleverly titled “Lavee, Lagair, Lamore, Lamaird” is imbued with humor, but the message is similar: another heroine determined to rise above bourgeois values discovers to her humiliation that the French words drilled by her tutor, the aptly named “Miss Savage,” are almost as deadly as the WWI battlefields where she has volunteered as an interpreter. Kalpakian proves herself a social critic with a satirical eye, and Miss Savage (“Miss Brodie” writ large and antic) is a triumph of characterization. In “Right Hand Man,” Kalpakian gets male vernacular just right, as her down-and-out narrator discovers that he has more honor than a leading citizen of the community. On the other hand, the title story, a contemporary Christmas fable, seems best suited to a ladies’ magazine, as does “Little Women,” an implausible tale in which four members of a typing pool, all of whom disdain reading, easily recognize characters from literary classics. Two literary parodies, “How Max Perkins Learned to Edit” and “Moby-Jack,” are clever but slight. Most of the stories are located in familiar Kalpakian territory, either the fictional California community of St. Elmo (Graced Land) or Isadora Island in Puget Sound (Steps and Exes), and she conveys atmospheric details with assurance.

We also started our new poetry pick this month. The person in charge of bringing dessert is also in charge of bringing a poem for the next month’s discussion. Sarah chose two poems for us this month: To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell and Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond by E.E. Cummings. I can’t wait to read them in more depth and discuss them next month!

Bonne nuit! Bisous!