The Bauer Confidential

This book review is sort of a two-fer.  It was my turn to select a work for the book club to which I belong.  Instead of searching the internet for a well-reviewed piece as I normally do, I decide to peruse The Book Club Cookbook, a compendium of popular selections from book clubs around the nation.  I really enjoyed flipping through this book, each novel is briefly summarized, then a book club who chose said novel is described which is followed by a recipe that relates to the selection provided either by a book club member or occasionally the author of the work in question.  I now have a list a mile long of books I’d like to read thanks to The Book Club Cookbook and an almost equal number of recipes I’d like to try, I would definitely recommend this particular cookbook if your a cookbook lover or even just a book lover, and especially if you belong to a book club because it will give you endless ideas.

Now on to this month’s book club selection, I chose The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty based on its entry in The Book Club Cookbook.  This is far-and-away the most literary work I’ve read in a long time.  Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter is one of Eudora Welty’s most respected works.  A relatively short novel, The Optimists Daughter is an a study in opposite characters.  Laurel, the genteel southern daughter of small-town judge, comes home to bury her father and butts heads with his second wife.  In addition to exquisite descriptions of the tension between the two women, Laurel recounts her childhood and delves into memories of the relationship between her father and mother.  The Judge’s first marriage, by his daughter’s account, is one of real love and companionship, while his second, to the much younger Fay, is a ridiculous embarrassment.  The harder Laurel looks at her parents marriage, the more she sees the betrayal of her mother and her mother’s memory that happened long before her death.

In addition to conflict and clashing wills, The Optimist’s Daughter is a story about coming home and loosing home.  Laurel has long been absent from the town of her childhood, moved to Chicago and widowed years earlier.  There are poignant moments where Laurel begins to feel that she will never be able to belong in her former home-town, with her father gone, despite deep friendships, she becomes a visitor, an outsider.

Though it was challenging, I really enjoyed this book.  At times I felt like I was back in a high school english class, thinking about symbolism and deeper meanings.  At least one person in my book club found passages of this book “hard” not because of difficult vocabulary, but rather the characters are so realized that your feelings about them become very strong.  If you’d like a book that will make you think about the meaning of love and loyalty, of home and memory, this is an excellent choice.  I found this quote, which is from The Optimist’s Daughter, and found on Eudora Welty’s grave, particularly meaningful: “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”