From the editor: As we’ve started to include Book Reviews within Rendez-vous, we thought we would check in with the AWCB Book Club and see what they’ve been reading. Included below is a list of their books for the rest of the year, and two reviews for the first two books on this list, submitted by members of the Book Club.

Are you interested in joining the AWCB Book Club? They meet on the fourth Tuesday of each month at 1:00 pm to discuss the selection for the month. Contact Rita at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you would like more information.

Changing Places, by David Lodge

Review by: Liz Bostock

Written in 1975, Changing Places, is the first in a trilogy of campus novels. It is a funny and coolly detached tale about academic life. I first read it over twenty years ago and remembered it as a book that made me laugh out loud. Second time round, it didn’t disappoint: a fact to which my fellow passengers on Eurostar to London this weekend will no doubt testify.

David Lodge, born in 1935, was the Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham in the UK, but retired in 1987 to concentrate on his writing. He has written many novels and works of literary criticism. In Changing Places, Lodge's combination of comedy, rich storytelling and literary allusiveness make it a novel of many layers.

Inspired by his experience of teaching in California, the novel centres on two academics: Englishman Phillip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in the West Midlands, and Morris Zapp, an American from the State University of Euphoria (California). The Professors participate in an exchange program that sees them swap politics, lifestyles and wives. Small World (1984), the second book in the trilogy, develops Zapp and Swallow's story, while Nice Work (1988) completes the trilogy with the story of industrialist Vic Wilcox and his unlikely relationship with Marxist, feminist and post-structuralist academic Dr. Robyn Penrose. Small World and Nice Work were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Lodge once wrote: ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round’. This is certainly the case in this novel. The story involves a degree of wife-swapping with the professors staying for periods with their counterparts’ wives. The children don’t seem to get a look in. For me, perhaps as a result of growing up in of our child-centric generation, this didn’t quite ring true.

However, the novel is not without a tender poignancy. The theme of being far from home is one that will be close to many of our hearts. Lodge writes that each of the two men ‘is connected to his native land ..... by an infinitely elastic umbilical cord of emotions, attitudes and values – which stretch and stretch almost to the point of invisibility, but never quite to breaking point’. I rather like this image which has stuck with me.

This academic comedy of manners pokes fun at the academic world that Lodge himself inhabits. The novel is written in a highly self-conscious way with individual chapters alluding to different story-telling techniques: one chapter consists of newspaper cuttings; in another there are letters and there is a film script in the chapter ‘Ending’. Indeed, Philip Swallow, realizing with some alarm that he is to teach a Creative Writing class, writes back home for a book in his bookshelf entitled Let’s Write a Novel. It is part of a series, including one called Let’s Weave a Rug. The self-parody is ruthless and the book is quoted:

The best kind of story is the one with a happy ending: the next best is the one with an unhappy ending and the worst kind is the story that has no ending at all.

I will leave it to you to read the ending yourself and decide which one Lodge chose!

I am British and I will be interested to see at the next ACWB Book Club, how Lodge’s very dry style goes down with an American audience. Zapp says English is ’a language of evasion and compromise... all modified, qualified, tempered’. The narrative is certainly very carefully considered; not a single word appears to be there by chance.

I enjoyed this novel on the basis that it is a great story, told with a precise humour that is sometimes cruel, sometimes touching. However, the novel is also a novel-about-itself, highlighting the many paradoxes between art and life. My summary would be to enjoy the story, and take as much of the subversive undercurrent of the novelist dissecting his own novel as he writes it as you want to.

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami

Review by Haifa Chakhchir

A narrator, a male in his thirties, tells this story in the first person all the way through. He lives in Tokyo, Japan and his wife has just left him. He has a dream that leads him to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, and a “Blackness” experience on the roof.

The book deals with a wide scope of human relations. For example, it portrays the relation of divorced parents with their adolescent daughter in comparison to a relationship with other adults. On the other hand, it outlines the relationship of a well-known actor with his ex-wife versus prostitutes. People he works with versus a school friend. The main character seems to be comfortable with machines like his Subaru car, while he finds relationships with humans more complicated.

Love is also analysed in this book. We get the feeling that the narrator finds it difficult to deal with separations, therefore, he does not fall in love so easily, because he does not want to get hurt anymore, he says.

This is the story of a man who has no story, of a man who tries to live through other people and share in their glamorous successful lives. We do not know how these people see him. What is the role that he plays in their lives? We wonder. We know that he is on a journey to discover himself. He keeps swinging between the darkness and the light, between the reality and the dream.

The book’s tone is monotonous. It lacks a beginning, middle, and an end. Yet it is a brilliant narration using witty expressions and sarcasm. It oscillates between two extremes; like driving, a Subaru car versus a Maserati. Like going out with a 13-year-old, versus with someone of one’s generation. It leaves a lot to the reader to relate and analyze, and to guess. I personally find myself in the place of the narrator. Through a life journey, there are moments where it is difficult to exist in the present, and subsequently to connect with people around. Sometimes the present is very painful and our mind drifts away for some time with the help of dreams and fantasies. The process helps us to deal with the pain, when we achieve this bliss; we are able to accept what is, as it is. We end up leaving the “Blackness” and living in the light of love and connection.