Lost and Found Book Club

This month, the Lost and Found Book Club will read Barbara Gowdy's singularly beautiful, wondrous The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants. Join the L & F Book Club on Thursday, February 27th at 6:30pm in the Administration sitting room on the 2nd floor for a great discussion!

Search for available copies and/or place holds by clicking here.

Unlike many novels that are told from the perspective of animals--George Orwell's Animal Farm or Richard Adams's Watership Down, for example--the elephants here aren't used allegorically as a means of representing human corruption; rather, the book is an almost symphonic work of empathy that is not quite like anything else in modern fiction. Plunged into an alien landscape, we orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, "what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory."

The great Nobelist Alice Munro said, "The White Bone is inspired . . . a marvel of a book . . . the language, social structure, intellectual and spiritual world of elephants are as real as the fabric of human life. Absolutely compelling.”

National Book Award Winner Joyce Carol Oates had this to say about it: 

“The White Bone, a kind of tragic epic of African elephants narrated from the perspective of the elephants, undertakes to cross the boundary between species in an extraordinarily visceral, sensuous, and poetic rendering of language unparalleled in contemporary literature. You need not believe that elephants can think in language--in this case, a highly lyric English--to be enthralled by the author's imaginative immersion in her subject, a brilliantly inspired melding of research into the lives of African elephants and the creation of a distinctly original, indeed sui generis alternative world. Inevitably, in a time in which African elephants are being ravaged by poachers and their species endangered by incursions into their natural habitat, The White Bone is not a casual reading experience. It will linger long in the memory, like an intensely unnerving yet wonderfully strange dream.” 

Lost and Found Book Club meets on the last Thursday of each month at 6:30pm in the Administration sitting room on the 2nd floor. For more information or to join this intrepid group in rediscovering lost 20th century classics, contact Gregory at glowry@eolib.org.