Dear Book Lovers,

BAIN’s next Book Club will be on Tuesday, November 11th.

Come enjoy your afternoon coffee with us, and participate in a lively discussion with other BAIN members (feel free to join us even if you don’t manage to read this month’s book–it’s totally fine).

As we said during our last meeting, in the upcoming one we will select 3 books to add to our reading list for the months of January through March. So, please bring suggestions of titles we can read. We are open to all kinds and genres of books (fiction and non-fiction) that present interesting topics and could make for a lively discussion. Please bring your suggestions along with a short summary or description (either your own or from a bookseller like Amazon, etc.) to help us all decide which books to select.

Meeting Details:
Book: The Tunnel (1948) by Ernesto Sabato
Day: Tuesday, November 11
Time: 3:30 p.m.
NEW Location: Café In Boca al Lupo (fair warning: this place has excellent desserts so make sure to leave some room for postre!)
Address: Bonpland 1965 – Palermo (click here for map)
RSVP: loucrie@yahoo.com (Julia)

This month we will be reading The Tunnel (1948) by Ernesto Sabato.

(*This novel by Argentine Ernesto Sabato is quite short (ca. 120 pages), so those who want to practice the Spanish might venture to read it in the original as well.)

An unforgettable psychological novel of obsessive love, The Tunnel was championed by Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham Greene upon its publication in 1948 and went on to become an international bestseller. At its center is an artist named Juan Pablo Castel, who recounts from his prison cell his murder of a woman named María Iribarne. Obsessed from the moment he sees her examining one of his paintings, Castel fantasizes for months about how they might meet again. When he happens upon her one day, a relationship develops that convinces him of their mutual love. But Castel’s growing paranoia leads him to destroy the one thing he truly cares about.

The book, as always, is available electronically. (Click on title above for the kindle version on Amazon).

If you have a physical copy of The Human Stain to lend, please bring it to the meeting.

Please feel free to join us even if you don’t manage to read the book.

For those who like to prepare in advance, here’s what we’re reading next month:

December 9th: The Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it’s not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past–a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it’s not the secret of Coleman’s alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman’s secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth’s eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation’s fate as by the “human stain” that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I Married a Communist

If you have any questions about the titles or meetings of the Book Club, please contact me at loucrie@yahoo.com

Hope to see you there!

Julia