Book Review of Atonement by Ian McEwan

Bryana, Briana, Andris, Araseli

The novel Atonement by Ian McEwan is built on the meaning of the word itself.
Atonement means to give satisfaction or reparation for a wrong doing or to make
amends for something bad. Briony is the character in this novel that experiences
atonement.

As a young girl Briony has a very unfortunate misunderstanding of a situation
between her older sister, Cecile, and Robbie, their servants son. Cecile and
Robbie have an unofficial relationship with one another. The main things keeping
them apart are the differences in their social classes, as well as Cecile's
outright stubborn demeanor.

Briony finds a note of explicit content that Robbie has written to Cecile. As an
immature and young girl, Briony immediately assumes that Robbie has a sex craze
for her sister. Due to this delusion Briony tells a horrible lie to her family
and the police, causing Robbie to be arrested.

This novel is one that might be confusing at first because it is told from
Briony's point of view, with her looking back on her life and the situation. She
is somewhat of an unreliable narrator; she is 70 years old with a minor case of
Alzheimer's disease. This novel could even be considered a mysterious thriller; it isn't
exactly clear what is going on all the time and there a points where Briony can
be a very scary little girl.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

Sydney Bridges, Allison Janos, Thomas Henson, Ebere Anokute


The novel is written out in epistolary form, meaning that it broken down into letter form. It is written in first person by the protagonist, Celie. This novel is about Celie’s personal struggle and her journey to happiness. Throughout this novel, Walker has a way of taking you through Celie’s life not only by the words she uses, but her syntax. In the beginning of the novel, Celie is barely literate, and it’s shows in her letters to God. She spells words wrong and her grammar isn’t any better than a second grader’s. However, this does not stop her from writing. Celie takes the reader through her life starting with her childhood of abuse from her father and her husband. You can tell that Celie wasn’t appreciated by anyone except for her younger sister, Nettie. Nettie is bright and smart and aspires to be a teacher when she grows up. She encourages Celie to learn which is gradually reflected in the way Celie writes her letters. However, Nettie leaves Celie, but promises to write her. Celie never receives the letters.
The novel reaches it’s pinnacle when Celie gets a hold of the letters. By this time, you are able to notice the difference in the way Celie is writing, she has continued learning despite her loss in faith that Nettie was alive. The letters from Nettie reveal answers that Celie never would have dreamed of getting. After this new found information, Celie finds the self confidence to curse at her abusive husband for the way he’s treated her over the years. Years later, she is reunited with Nettie and has opened up her own Clothing store. In the end, Celie states that although she is old now, she has never felt younger in her life.

Overall, this heart wrenching novel takes the reader through the struggles of an african american woman, and shows how it's never too late for a woman to stand up for herself and demand freedom.

Book Review of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kathleen, Jessica, Alishya, Jesse)

Throughout the 1960s, American author Ken Kesey—figurehead of the 1960s counterculture movement and known today most notably for his piece de resistance and the subject of this book review, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—was notorious for throwing extravagant, well-documented parties known as “Acid Tests” known around the country as hotbeds of LSD (Acid) use, Grateful Dead music, fluorescent paint, black lights, and the anti-government, counter-culture, anti-conformity mentality that would eventually define a generation of writers and musicians. To many readers, this not-so-lofty, albeit entirely factual introduction of Kesey—and all could rest assured that I have not simply chosen to describe the most vulgar, unruly time of Kesey’s life to exaggerate a point or censure his character, but rather, that such “Acid Tests” are indeed an accurate representation of the life of Ken Kesey—engenders one question: is it really possible for such a boisterous, drug-addicted, radical man known for his bacchanalian adventures to join the ranks of Khaled Hosseini, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and other famous modern authors and contribute anything of merit to the literary world? Needless to say, Ken Kesey—the man who claimed to be neither a beatnik nor a hippie, for he believed himself too young for the former and too old for the latter—is on all of our tongues now and has become the literary gargantuan that he is because he defied such seemingly insurmountable odds and executed a novel that would define the triumphs and travails of an entire generation, cementing the foundation for the burgeoning “counterculture movement.” Though it may not exactly have the prestige of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Shelley’s Frankenstein, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those rare findings in literature: a laugh-out-loud funny, insightful, socially important work of unquestionable merit marked simultaneously by simple language, a manageable number of pages, and abounding symbolism, imagery, and allegorical elements that together make this work a thoroughly enjoyable and important read.

Using his own work experience in Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital—during which he experimented with several hallucinogenic drugs and often took the patients’ prescription drugs—as a spring board, Kesey demonstrates his uncanny ability to combine humor and levity with rich symbolic and allegorical value as he uses the dynamic interplay of several hospital patients and their administrators to gradually peel away at his anti-government message. Along the way, readers meet several quintessential literary characters comparable in their literary importance to Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, Holden Caulfield, and of course, my personal favorite, John Galt. Together, the complex characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest come to represent the destructive, dehumanizing force that bureaucracy can have on the individual, the ambiguity of the phrase “insanity,” and even the destructive nature of matriarchy and the misogynistic tendencies of 1960s society.

Set in a psychiatric hospital somewhere in Oregon, the novel begins with narrator Chief Bromden waking up to a typical day on the ward: three black aides mop the floor, cleaning the evidence of the lewd “sexual acts” of the night before Chief believes them guilty of. Though he is a behemoth of a man, standing at 6’7 with broad shoulders and chiseled features, all of the aides harass Chief, forcing him to take up their mopping responsibilities and calling him names such as “Chief Broom” and “soo-pah Chief:” all part of a normal day on the ward for Mr. Bromden. Seemingly incognizant of his own physical prowess, Chief is the object of much mockery throughout the ward, for he has mysteriously chosen to feign deafness and dumbness throughout his commitment in the psychiatric ward: though this may grant him access to the uncensored, unfiltered expressions to all of his peers, Chief stifles his own identity, self-respect, and expression for a seemingly arbitrary motivation to remain deceptively deaf and dumb. Chief, therefore, can be said to be massive and impressive physically, but lackluster, and even emaciated emotionally and intellectually. It is at this point that Kesey symbolically introduces a marked foil for Chief Bromden, and a superstar in the world of modern literature: Nurse Ratched. Described in the coldest, most inhuman of terms, Nurse Ratched is instantaneously characterized as a forced to be reckoned with on the ward: she is a machine of a woman, shiny and orange like polished steel whose only effeminate feature is her voluptuous bosom. The “Big Nurse”—a title which bears obvious allusion to Orwell’s Big Brother—exercises carte blanche authority over the ward, running her patients’ lives from behind the safety of her glass-encased Nurse’s Station. Almost immediately after the Nurse marches in, the humdrum events of this normal day on the ward are truncated by the unfamiliar clicking and clacking of iron heels on the cold tile floor outside accompanied by a sound even more foreign to the ward: raucous, genuine, wholehearted laughter. The heels and the vocal cords in question belong to the ward’s newest admitted patient: Randle Patrick McMurphy. Introduced as a man deemed insane for, pardon my French, “fightin’ too much and fuckin’ too much” with a penchant for gambling and a love of laughter, McMurphy is the antithesis to nearly every other man on the ward: he lives for the moment and embraces every opportunity for adventure without regard to the consequences, he is bursting at the seams with self-confidence and with hearty sexual drive, he is loud, animated, witty, and, in the words of Ken Kesey himself, has a tendency to “swagger” about the room, drawing attention away from the hitherto monotonous routine of ward life. With these three characters introduced—McMurphy, Nurse Ratched, and Chief Bromden—the stage is set for a dynamic struggle between the power-hungry Nurse and the discontented, resilient patients under the leadership of the crass, redheaded McMurphy. At the Nurse’s side is a cache of dehumanizing tactics—such as crippling, deceptive insinuation, divide-and-conquer warfare, unquestionable authority, control over all facilities, and a plastered smile and orange lipstick that collectively pall the entire ward and stifles individual expression in a metaphorically obscuring “fog.” McMurphy, determined to save his friends and fellow patients from the suffocating confinement of Nurse Ratched’s unyielding authority and forced conformation, enlists the help not only of Chief Bromden, but of the intellectualizing Harden, the thirty-one year old stuttering virgin Billy Bibbit, the aspiring rebel Cheswick, and other equally inane comrades in what becomes a dynamic power-struggle between the supposed “sane” and the supposed “insane;” between society’s exalted one’s and society’s rejects; between the, if I may broaden my focus and echo Karl Marx, bourgeoisie and the proletariat! When all is said and done, at the heart of Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s lies a counterculture novel employing a humorous twist to describe the degradative, confining nature of government and the urgency of individual self expression. By calling into question traditional interpretations of sanity, and completing the picture with misogynistic and sexual undertones, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not only an exceedingly enjoyable book, but a work of literature integral to the counterculture movement and to American history in general.

Book Review for: Waiting by Ha Jin

The novel, Waiting, by Ha Jin is a simple read that flows but has no surprising ending. It is a story about a man who waits eighteen years to divorce his wife, whom he agrees to marry upon his parents' wish. From this, the question arises of why one would agree to a marriage of which he has neither established a relationship with the bride, nor met her. A marriage can not be so simple. There must be love, patience, and sincerity, if one expects to endure the challenges that life tosses along way. Yet, the protagonist, Lin, acts on this suggestion without thinking it through, and as a result, he is obliged to remain in a relationship which he no longer wants to continue. Since Lin and his wife Shuyu have been married, he has not developed any feelings of affection for her. Eventhough Shuyu takes care of his parents, he does not look at her as his wife whom he wants to spend time with, but rather as his sister. Lin and Shuyu do not have a restrained relationship. In reality, there is no relationship between them. They do not communicate except when Lin returns home to ask for her consent to their divorce. The bare bedrooms in their house represent the emptiness between the two. There is a distance between Lin and his family, and he perceives this as "...the family didn't depend on him anymore and that it was time to move along with his own life. For better or worse, he should disentangle himself from this loveless marriage" (Jin 9). As Lin establishes a relationship with another woman at work, he doesn't see a reason to remain with Shuyu and feels as if he should free himself from all "ties and shackles". He only thinks about himself, and his girlfriend Manna presents the chance for him to discover a life different from his boring and dull marital life with Shuyu. This encourages Lin to take steps towards ending his marriage with Shuyu and starting a new life with Manna. However, the divorce process is more difficult than he thinks and is nowhere near favored in his village. Because his wife will not finalize the divorce, he must wait, allowing this want to drag along. Every year he returns home hoping that he will get a divorce, but the difficulty and unlikeness of this makes it seem as if Lin is waiting for something unrealistic to happen. Lin does not stop to think that the impulse he acts on towards getting a divorce and towards wedding Manna is similar to that which resulted in him marrying Shuyu in the first place. He does not allow himself to really consider the benefits and moreso, the consequences of the matter and later finds himself wanting to end their marriage. Is it possible that he will want to end his relationship with Manna if he jumps into it too soon? How deeply has he thought about this? How can Lin be assured that life with Manna will be better than life with Shuyu? And more importantly, what exactly is the protagonist waiting for? Is he really waiting to get a divorce or waiting to realize that he should not act according to his wants? Is he waiting for excitement or waiting to meet disappointment? On a deeper note, is it really Lin that is waiting for something to happen or is it really the women whom are waiting? Lin does not seem bothered or even annoyed when Shuyu does not follow through with the divorce, after many attempts. Instead, he tries to explain to his girlfriend that things like a divorce takes time, and there is nothing he can do about it as of the moment. Manna grows impatient waiting but hopes that one day Lin and she will join hands in matrimony. Lin's daughter Hua waits for her father's effort to form a relationship with her mother. Several notions can be inferred from the title. The book tells of the protagonist waiting all these years to divorce his wife, but it is quite the reverse. The female characters surrounding the protagonist are waiting for him to make a decision that will impact their lives. It is amusing that the characters do not become "antsy" by the wait but accept it. The book has no climax, nor is the ending unpredictable but I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something relaxing or tranquil. Overall, it is an interesting read.