So who is it that the narrator has followed? The deathless man? The mora? Someone else? What evidence leads you to your conclusion?
Is there irony in the fact that the narrator has promised not to tell the wife, yet she is telling us the whole story?
What are your thoughts on the ending of this novel? Is it a satisfactory ending? Why/why not?
Now that you have finished the novel, look at the last page where there are questions for a book club. Some of them are very good. You may want to address one or more of these here. If your version doesn't have the questions, find someone who does have the questions.
6 comments:
I'll agree that this book is technically well written, though I didn't care for it on a personal level. I found myself not getting connected to the story or characters in the book. I felt that the scenes with the deathless man caught my attention but it never really went to a place were I actually felt satisfied with it. While I also understand why an author would want to tell a story from several characters perspectives in no real order, I'm just too lazy to keep track and the book doesn't make me go out of my way to put things together. Overall an okay read, but I'm happy to move passed it.
The narrator has followed Fra Atun. This completely shocked me while reading because from the beginning I thought that she was following the deathless man. Natalia followed him through the hills/mountains, through woods, and even through a river to figure out why this man had taken the coins that were put in the burial site. She ended up following him into a town that had been abandoned years ago by the way it looked. She eventually found a light in a house and went inside to where it was shinning. I think Natalia was just as shocked as I was to find out it was Fra Atun and not the deathless man. He tells her he takes the coins because he plans to do something that will be worth something some day. He said it doesn't do any good for them to sit in the ground and not do anything. All he does is takes them in hopes to help somebody some day.
I do think that there is irony in the fact that the narrator has promised not the tell the wife but tells us the whole story. This is because the narrator is keeping the story to themselves but, releases the whole thing to the readers aka people that will never really know if the story is true or not and people that don't personally know the narrator. It's ironic in the sense that it is the complete opposite of what you think the narrator would do by telling an unknowing audience a story that won't necessarily make any sense to them. However, I do have to say that if I were writing a book, telling stories to an unknowing audience who can't tell you if those stories are right or wrong, seems like such an exciting thing to do. You wouldn have to head on face any negativity and for all the reader knows, everything you say is true.
As a whole, whenever I finish a book, especially for English, I feel somewhat satisfied. However, the ending of this book left me in question and wonder. I thought the story of the tiger's wife would be more prominent, and directly related to that. I feel the ending left more questions than answers, and for so much build on that particular story, there was not a solid, satisfying ending. Overall, though, the book did accomplish what it was supposed to do, and that was for Natalia to learn more about her grandfathers past, and the circumstances surrounding his death.
Personally, I wasn't exactly satisfied with the ending of this book. There were so many questions that I wanted to be answered. I found it to be a little more difficult to get into this book than the first one we read, just because there was so MUCH that was going on. From the stories of the past to stories of the present with several different characters being the focus of those stories, I just found it a little hard to follow and had to do a lot of re-reading in order to understand what was going on. Plus, even with all the re-reading that I did, I still feel like I missed a lot of the key points of the novel and didn't quite get what was going on until reading the prompts of the questions. There was just a lot of information and it took a lot of concentration for me to really understand what was going on in the novel and how it tied together. Even with the ending that was provided, I felt like there were too many ties that were still loose, leaving me unsatisfied.
In regards to the book-club questions at the end of the novel, I'll give my opinion on question 7, which asks: "Did knowing more about Luka's past make him more sympathetic? Why do you think the author might have chosen to give the back stories of Luka, Darisa the Bear, and the apothecary?" My answer to the first question is yes, I do feel sympathetic for him, but that doesn't mean I condone his way of coping- i.e., beating his wife. To answer the second question, I believe that the author chose to give the backstories of each of those men because they were crucial in developing Natalia's grandfather's experience with the tiger, the tiger's wife, and Galina as a whole.
This book was a little hard to get into and so the ending to me, was not satisfactory. Of course, I have unanswered questions which occcurs a lot in books I read unless it's a series or trilogy but over all it wasn't bad. I just really think maybe books with tiger's as animal symbolism are not for me (Life of Pi). Part of the ending was satisfying due to the fact that I think the narrator found the answers to her questions. Overall, it was a pretty well-written book, I probably won't remember the name of it next summer but oh well.
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