Late June 2009
A pleasant evening in the garden/patio/car park at the Bear last week to discuss 'A Blinding Absence of Hope'. All present bar Will. Not the greatest success in the history of the book club in terms of its popularity. The underpinning problem was the bleakness of the book, a general view being that we had been looking for/hoping for an uplifting ending and/or message of positivity for the future - which failed to materialise.
There was a general admiration for the authors attempt, (in some ways successful), to create a book out of essentially no material i.e. someone sitting alone in a darkening room for eighteen years doing nothing. This resulted in divergent views with some wanting to know what happened to the central character afterwards, whilst others (I think the majority) took the view that the book could only work as a concept if it did focus solely on the experience of being in the prison and creating a 'part two' about life afterwards would have destroyed the integrity of the concept. Similarly, there were a number of related topics that it would have been interesting to find out more about (e.g. the Polisario rebellion, the nature of life in Morocco under the royal dictatorship), but again a recognition that this book was probably not the right place for elucidation.
The writing style was recognised as pretty good, without ever sending anyone into raptures of praise as other books have done.
There was some discussion about how honest and valid some of the story's central tenet and claims actually were. For example, some of the content implied that there was an underpinning low level of light in the cells. If there was no light, how would any of the prisoners have managed to enter daylight with such apparent ease for the funerals?
As always, there were some interesting spin-off discussions, most notably:
strategies for handling desperation i.e. the approach advocated in the book of denying existence outside the immediate as opposed to using positive memories to sustain hope for the future
Experiences of being effectively 'imprisoned' which encompassed experiences of that nature arising from Chris's past illness and Ras's life in a submarine.
All in all, only Mark T. was really positive about the book (and then not hugely), with the other extreme being myself who found it so depressing I could only facing reading the first 40% and then the last 10% to see if it did have an uplifting ending (hopes dashed) - why would anyone read a book to depress themselves?
4.59
