The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald) or Where the Air is Clear (Carlos Fuentes)

Remember you only have to read one of the books, there will be a group to discuss each on the night.

At the end of every meeting we vote for two new books to discuss for the meeting after next. It would be great if you could prepare your own suggestions to nominate on the night. This could be any kind of book e.g. novel, non-fiction, biography, but ideally it should be less than 400 pages long.

June's books:

The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald): The Rings of Saturn--with its curious archive of photographs--records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.

Where the Air is Clear (La región más transparente) (Carlos Fuentes): The debut novel by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. It became an "instant classic" and made Fuentes into an immediate "literary sensation". The novel's success allowed Fuentes to leave his job as a diplomat and become a full-time author.

The novel is built around the story of Federico Robles – who has abandoned his revolutionary ideals to become a powerful financier – but also offers "a kaleidoscopic presentation" of vignettes of Mexico City, making it as much a "biography of the city" as of an individual man. It was celebrated not only for its prose, which made heavy use of interior monologue and explorations of the subconscious, but also for its "stark portrait of inequality and moral corruption in modern Mexico".

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We will be meeting again in July, when we will be discussing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.