Introduction

Beginning with a Best American award-winning narrative, Kathleen Hill’s memoir explores defining moments of a life illuminated by novels, read in Nigeria and France and at home in New York. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author by chance reads Willa Cather’s novel, Lucy Gayheart, and is prepared against her will for death by drowning. And prepared for the teacher’s confessions to the class of a frustrated ambition to become a pianist, her regret for a life that will never be. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, the author gives Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism. And loses her American innocence when she visits a nearby abandoned slave port and connects its rusting shackles with the students sitting before her. Reading A Portrait of a Lady, also in Nigeria, she ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer’s cautionary fate, remembers her own adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. A few years later, this time in a town in northern France, haunted by Madame Bovary, by Emma’s solitude and boredom, she puts aside Flaubert’s novel and discovers in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest the poverty and suffering she had failed to see all around her. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author’s friendship with the writer, Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust’s masterwork, an undertaking that takes six years to complete. Faced with Diana’s approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading after all may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

The author is reading, one afternoon a week, to her friend, Diana Trilling, who is going blind:

We had begun, rather self-consciously, sitting side by side as usual on the sofa. But before long, as we gradually fell under the spell of words and silence, I found myself in a chair on the other side of the room, facing Diana across a distance. Perhaps we said the light would be better if I sat there, but the light had nothing to do with it. A listener needs room to be alone in the expanding world of the story. And a voice telling a story requires space if it is to assume the anonymity of a voice crying in the wilderness, requires at least the illusion of speaking beyond time and place. It must not be burdened too emphatically with individual history. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Chapter 1 “The Angle of a Landscape”

Why does this book begin with an account of the narrator’s learning to read? Do you remember how you learned to read? Was it all at once? Or do you remember learning to read as something very gradual?


Chapter 2 Lucy Gayheart

1. Why do you think this chapter begins with a long description of Miss Hughes and the disciplined way she conducts her music appreciation class? Comparisons to the other teachers? From where do you think Miss Hughes derives her authority? Why do her students obey her? Listen to her?

2. How is Norman de Carteret introduced? How important is it that he’s an outsider? Remember that the setting is a junior high school where the power of “the group” is very strong. Who is the “we” in this story? Where does the narrator stand?

3. The narrator begins reading Lucy Gayheart as she sits across the table in the library from Norman. Why do you think this is? What is the meaning of the sleepy gaze they share?

4. How do Miss Hughes stories about her blasted hopes of becoming a pianist intersect with Norman’s tragedy? How do they prepare for the end of the story?

5. Are Miss Hughes lessons to the children about music or about morality, about how to live in the world? How to connect with suffering? Does she make a connection between art and morality, between art and goodness?



Chapter 3 Things Fall Apart

1. Why do you think the narrator begins by laying out her expectations and opinions surrounding an American living in Nigeria?
.
2. When did you first notice that her ideas about the way things would be in Nigeria began to be challenged by reality? What did the assassination of JFK and the Nigerian assumptions about its causes teach her about her own national history?

3. How does her understanding of her place as an American in the world begin to change? When did she begin to understand how Nigerians might regard Americans? What does she learn about what is remembered? And who remembers?

4. What is the “long shadow” thrown by the narrator’s reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart? How is her rereading of some books written by Europeans set in Africa – Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Isak Denisen’s Out of Africa – effected by virtue of thinking of them as possible texts for her classroom?

5. What do you make of her adolescent fear that she’ll never have any life other than reading? That she’ll live only through books.

6. The epigraph for this section is: “The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.” How does it apply?

Chapter 3 The Portrait of a Lady

1. What do you make of the narrator’s initial dislike of Isabel Archer? Why does she feel this way? How does the narrator understand the word “innocence” as applied to Isabel? As applied to herself? And how does she see it as typical of the privileged American abroad?

2. Do you find it strange that she’s trying to learn about marriage in general, and more specifically about her own recent marriage, by reading about a really terrible one?

3. What do you think of the analogies she makes between the abuse of power as found in colonialism and the abuse of power – the manipulations and urge to control – also at work in many marriages?

4. What do you think she learns about herself by reading Isabel’s story? About herself in her own marriage? About the difficulties of knowing another human being?

5. The narrator ends us musing on the ways marriage is like travel. Do you agree with her comparisons?



Chapter 4 Madame Bovary by Flaubert

1. The narrator is living in northern France for only a few weeks before she turns sharply away from the novel Madame Bovary. Do you feel sympathy with her for turning away? Have you ever felt that a novel is interfering with your finding the life you want? Is making your life more difficult?

2. Why does the narrator become so overwhelmed by Emma Bovary’s point of view? Why does she begin to look at things through Emma Bovary’s eyes?


Chapter 5 The Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos

1. The narrator literally stumbles over Bernanos’ novel. Do you think it’s significant that she didn’t “choose” this novel? The way she didn’t really choose most of the other novels discussed in this book?

2. At first she seems to have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that what she had thought of as “a year in France” turns out to be so different from what she had in mind. Then, as she reads on in The Diary of a Country Priest, she begins to worry that she has remained aloof from the people in Avesnes. How does her understanding of the “unlived life” alter in the course of her reading of Bernanos’ novel? What does the diarist, the country priest, have to do with it?

3. The miner - who dies in the street on a rainy night, the same night she first opens Bernanos’ novel - seems to the narrator to open a door to the novel. What does the novel tell her about the region in which she finds herself living? She stumbles on the people who in the novel are called “the poor.” Why is that she can’t bear to look? As before in Nigeria she couldn’t “look” at the relics of the slave trade? Or has to distance herself from Norman de Carteret when tragedy strikes? What do you make of these refusals? Have you ever felt the same?

4. Four sections of She Read to us in the Late Afternoons have to do with reading a novel while the narrator is living outside her own country. Why you think this is? Are there any reasons why a novel might become more critical to you, more of a companion, while you are living someplace new? Outside of your own groove? What do you think the narrator finds in The Diary of a Country Priest that sustains her? What do you make of the last words of this section, quoted from Bernanos’ novel:
“Grace is everywhere.”

5. What do they mean to you, Proust’s words that serve as the epigraph to this section: “Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it does not constitute it.”

Chapter 7 In Memory of Things Past by Proust

1. It would seem by accident that the narrator meets Diana in Venice. Then by accident they encounter each other again in the coffee bar. What role do you think “accident” – or chance - plays in this book, whether in terms of the novels that the narrator reads or the travels she undertakes.

2. Diana and the narrator become close friends very quickly. Why do you think that is? What role does friendship play in this book? With Norman? With Sheila in Nigeria? With the Oswalds one night in Avesnes? How does reading Proust deepen and intensify the intimacy between the narrator and Diana? Allow them to talk about their lives?

3. Time as it unfolds in the reading of Proust’s novel and Time as it relates to the afternoons of reading that are passing one by one stands at the center of this chapter. The gingko leaves reflect the passage of the seasons, the books pile up on the table, one by one. But the narrator never mentions her sorrow in the face of Diana’s increasing frailty, of her approaching death. Why do you think that is? And what of the narrator’s own passage through life? How do you think we mark our own passage through time? Is it different for everyone? And what does reading have to do with it?

4. What new understanding does the narrator come to in terms of the “unlived life”? She and Diana talk throughout their friendship about what it means to live, what it means to love. What it means to accept another person. As a young person the narrator had been afraid that reading would consume her life and she would never really “live.” How does she understand the role of reading in her life by the end? What is its connection to life?

Weblinks

»	Author's web site
»	Publisher's book info

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book