"מועדון הקריאה של ג'יין אוסטן" הוא אחד הסרטים האהובים עליי. ראיתי אותו מספר רב של פעמים, ותמיד רציתי לקרוא את הספר שעל בסיסו הוא נוצר. בזמנו קניתי את הספר באנגלית, אך לא שרדתי מעבר לאמצע הפרק הראשון. נזכרתי בו לאחרונה לאחר שהצטרפתי לקבוצת פייסבוק בנושא ג'יין אוסטן, והחלטתי לתת לו הזדמנות נוספת, הפעם בעברית.
חמש נשים וגבר אחד יוצרים מועדון קריאה כדי לדון בספריה של ג'יין אוסטן. כל דמות בוחרת לה ספר ואחראית על האירוח והדיון בו. כל פרק עוסק בדמות אחרת ובספר אחר. עלילת כל אחד מהספרים מצטלבת עם אופיה ועם חייה בעבר ובהווה של הדמות שבחרה בספר הספציפי הזה.
הסיפורים ארוכים מאוד ולא ממש נעימים. רובם די מדוכדכים ומדכדכים. ההקבלה לספרים של אוסטן מעניינת אבל תופסת חלק לא גדול מהספר.
ספר נחמד אבל הסרט הרבה הרבה יותר טוב ממנו. בסרט חתכו את כל הסיפורים הארוכים והוסיפו קצת "פלפל" שלא מופיע בספר.

I do love Fowler's work. But I have to say I found this book a disappointment.

The story concerns the members of a Jane Austen book club--five women and one man--who meet to discuss the books. The structure is thus roughly divided into six months, and each month one of the people leads the discussion while Fowler interweaves that person's life story into the discussion, often punctuated by quotes from Austen's books. The prose is good, with a few eye-blinks (My favorite line, from the Jocelyn section: "We are not the saints dogs are, but mothers are expected to come a close second." One of the eye-blinks, during Prudie's section: "Lisa was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likable became a plausible path to that." To what?)--but the tone, overall, stays the same.

Kelly Link is acknowledged as a beta-reader; when I read the third section, and found yet again the tone was still the same, I realized the tone, the structural weaving, all made me feel like this story was somehow channeling Kelly Link. There are times when Link, at least to my eye, seems to impose a monotone voice on her wonderful structural experiments.

The real problem, I realized, was arrived at during that same Prudie section, when we had quotes from Mansfield Park interspersed through the text. Sometimes the quote seemed to echo back from the text, most of the time it didn't, but either way, every single quote, all of them known so very well I could peg them immediately, forced my mind back into the far more vivid imagery, characters, varying tone, of Austen's work. These constant plunges back into MP finally unmoored me from this story and I kept struggling against the urge to put this book down and reread MP; I realized, after yet again consciously disengaging myself from MP and resolutely finding my place on the page that the club people had yet to come to life for me, subsumed as they were by Austen's novels constantly reinvoked.

Was it that sameness of tone? Was it the fact that we get glimpses, and only glimpses, into the subsidiary women far more than the men? Was it that I was unable to perceive a meta-structure, a direction? I don't know, but finally it felt as if this book was cleverly following the patterns of fireflies while a glorious fire snapped and fooshed and radiated heat right behind them, constantly engaging not just my eye but all my senses while I tried to keep my eye on the fireflies.

I did enjoy the book discussions, but always found them far too brief, and that suggests to me that maybe I would have liked this book a lot more if I hadn't been so familiar with Austen. If, say, this had been The Virginia Woolf Book Club as it's been years since I read Woolf's fiction, preferring as I do her essays. The book discussions gradually became more interesting to me than the backstories, and I found myself wanting to argue with the characters instead of read their backgrounds. I could see that Fowler was trying to show us how their backgrounds informed their opinions of Austen.

She gives us a heads-up on her theme right with the very first line: Each of us has a private Austen, echoing Martin Amis's wonderful quote: Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors--all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself . . .

Ah, the quotes. Finally, these were the best part of the book for me.

At the end, Fowler gives a precis of the novels (leaving out Lady Susan which I found odd, as Northanger and Persuasion were also unpublished by Austen during her lifetime, so that can't be her criteria) and those, frankly, drove me nuts. In that playful tone she reduces complexities to bald statements. Henry then falls in love with shy Fanny. She refuses the advantageous match and, as punishment, is sent back to her parents. "As punishment." No, that's not right. Not even remotely right, it skews the story and reduces Fanny to a mere victim and the Mansfield family into mere villains. Blech.

Fowler includes some of the responses to the novels recorded by Jane in her own time, which are all given at the back of one of the Chapman edition books. But then she provides those quotes from prominent people through the years since the books were published--all of them interesting, even if I have no idea who David Andrew Graves or Susan M. Korba are. Doesn't matter. Their opinions don't make me want to know anything more about them, but are interesting in the sense of showing how different people react differently to the books. Like Mark Twain's brutal dismissal (Every time I read "Pride and Prejudice" I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.) The last quote is a lovely one by J.K. Rowling.

The best of a lot of good quotes, for me, was that by Rebecca West, published in 1928 according to Fowler. And it kind of sums up the problem I've blundered about in this literary China shop in my attempts to formulate above. I will type it all out here:

Really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane Austen ceased. To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. There are those who are deluded by the decorousness of her manner, by the fact that her virgins are so virginal that they are unaware of their virginity, into thinking that she is ignorant of passion. But look through the lattice-work of her neat sentences, joined together with the bright nails of craftsmanship, painted with the gay varnish of wit, and you will see women haggard with desire or triumphant with love, whose delicate reactions to men make the heroines of all our later novelists seem merely to turn signs, "Stop" or "Go" toward the advancing male.

Well, I'm very disappointed with this book... I had known before I read it that this book wouldn't be all about Jane Austen, but rather of the lives of the members of Jane Austen book club. However, the thing that disappoints me so much is that this book seemed to only use the name "Jane Austen" to make her fans interested and want to read the book... Well, I kinda feel tricked into reading it actually =)

Well,at first i was quite satisfied with the beginning... because it argues about Jane Austen's book and still shows the personality of the character quite equally... However, the more I read it, I got the impression that the writer kind of forget about Jane Austen, and only write her name or her books just every now and then without anything that goes with it...

Well, that would not be a big problem if the story itself is good and the characters are developed with good care... However, they are just empty characters with good enough background but are not developed well enough... I got the impression that the writer had good ideas of what to make of her characters but maybe because there are just too many characters or what, she failed to express her ideas... Therefore, the characters seem shallow despite the goodness of their backgrounds and personalities...

Well, personally I think this book would have been good had the writer be patient and write the characters with more care... Because it seemed like she was in a hurry to get her book published... I believe that it's the way she wrote it and not the ideas themselves that make it failed to charm me.

تبدأ أحداث الرواية في مدينة ساكرمينتو في ولاية كاليفورنيا حينما تقترح جوسلين القيام بنادي خاص لقراءة روايات جين أوستن لاخراج صديقتها العزيزة
سيلفيا من عزلتها بعد طلاقها من زواج دام اكثر من ثلاثين عام ومن هنا يجتمع ست شخصيات يجمعهم حبهم لجين أوستن
برودي، اليغرا ،جوسلین،برناديت ، سيلفيا، (غريغ)
الرجل الوحيد بين خمسة نساء مهوسات باوستن من خلال قراءتهم للروايات يجتمعون كل شهر مرة واحدة تنوعت شخصيات العمل انهم ينتمون الى خلفيات اجمتاعية متعددة ومن هنا تبرز شخصيات أبطال الرواية
العمل مثل خطان متوازيان : قصص جين أوستن و حيوات عضوات و أعضاء نادي قراء جين أوستن و بين الخطين تتداخل شخصيات العمل و شخصيات قصص جين أوستن
يتناقشون حول قضايا أساسية مثل المرأة والحب

رأيي : السرد رتمة بطيء ومافيه أحداث كثيرة وينتهي مثل العادة نهايات سعيدة وتداخل الشخصيات مع القصص لم يعجبني يخرج من الواقع الى النص والعكس مع ذلك اكملت القراءة

اولش زیاد برام جالب نبود.پر از اسم و ماجراهایی که هی تو ذهنم قاطی میشد و چون خیلی از کتابهای آستین رو نخوندم،احساس میکردم توی جمع نادرستی قرار گرفتم.
وسطهای کتاب خیلی جالب شد برام.در کل کتاب خوبی بود.همه ی کتابخون ها عاشق داشتن یه باشگاه کتابخوانی ان.
زاویه دید کتاب برام جالب بود.انگار من هم توی این جمع نشستم و دارم حرفهاشون رو میشنوم.
در نهایت وجود یه دختر همجنس گرا به صورت شفاف توی کتابی که ترجمه شده تحول خوبی بود.من تا جایی که یادم هست کتابی رو نخوندم که انقدر واضح از روابط همجنس گرایی حرف زده باشه.

So disappointed. I wanted to like this but could never get into any of the characters or the stories they told. They are a mismatched bunch who all come together to read Jane Austin. Perhaps there should of been more Austin and less of these characters. Each book was suppose to relate or have particular meaning to one of the present day characters....or at least I think maybe that was the point? I really don't know as I never felt any type of flow. We learned odd stories of each characters past, that I didn't really see made them any more interesting, nor related to who they were in the present. I didn't really get the sense that very many of them connected to each other, nor I to them.

Glad it was a quick read, but not one I would recommend. Rather slow, disjointed and blah! Only went up to a 2 star as some of the Austin comments made me want to read her!

لعلي وقعت في فخّ كلمة نادي القراءة مما دعاني للإكمال
رواية تحكي عن اجتماع ٥ نساء ورجل لقراءة أعمال جين أوستن، و تحليل ما يقرأونه، وكيف تتقاطع أفكار الكتب مع حيواتهم.
الرواية + الفلم مباشران جداً،. ولا دهشة فيهما، ولا جديد.
السرد رتمه بطيء ومتوقع، وينتهي مثل العادة نهايات سعيدة.
لم يعجبني لكني أكملته وشاهدت الفلم.

Don't waste your time. Why can't I just stop reading a book once I've started it. Do you think I have a disorder?

The part that I really, really liked was at the very end of the book, the questions for a reader's club discussion posed by each of the characters. These are lovely :)

The story itself is told from the 'us' point of view, which is original and funny.
In each chapter, we learn some facts about one of the character's background, get a glimpse of the discussions of the Jane Austen book club, and learn something of the character's present situation. All of this is interspersed with many other stories; I liked the fact that there are so many stories, but not so much the stories themselves. Not all of them are in good taste, like that story where somebody tortured ants: it's a funny story, but it still is cruel (and I hate ants, by the way, and they steal chocolate and do even worse things, but still). And nothing Jane Austen herself ever wrote is in bad taste, and I guess the title of the book attracts many Jane Austen fans, doesn't it?
Also, there was not enough discussion of Jane Austen's books, for my taste, or the comments made by the characters seemed superficial.
And I only really enjoyed one of the storylines, and partly because there are dogs in it :)

So, bottom line: a fun read, but somehow not as great as one might imagine from the title. If you've read all the negative reviews and won't expect much, you'll most probably enjoy some parts of it. But that's not necessarily a must-read.

Don't let the title fool you; this isn't really a book about Jane Austen. In fact, Jane Austen and her novels only serve as the structural frame for this story; the outlining that allows the characters to meet, to interact - and the glue that binds the plot together. The core of this novel is really just the six book club members, their separate lives and their joined meetings. This is a story of widely different people, their outlook on life, their actions and their interactions.
As the story unfolds small tragedies and bitter regrets are revealed, heartfelt longing and burning wishes are explained, and each book club meeting offers a delicate glimpse into one of the six main character's crowded minds. Secrets that never have been told and feelings that never have been said out loud shape each character and the way they relate. Fowler seems to be showing how the past influences the present.

"Each of us has a private Austen."

The six main characters enter the book club with different views and individual perceptions of Austen. They each experience her novels differently and they hardly ever agree on anything. Every reader reads something of themselves into the novels; and there is a beautiful connection between each character's lifestyle and their opinion of the books. Fowler is actually making a lovely point; that we ourselves define our reading experiences - and that no book is ever read the same way twice. But "The Jane Austen Book Club" also testifies how a mutual love for reading can bring people together and create long-lasting bonds of friendship and love.

"“You've done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?"
"Oh my Lord, yes." Bernadette's hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. "I guess I would. I've had about a hundred of them.” "

Can a book be friendly? If so, that is how I would describe this book. Reading it felt so incredibly comfortable - it is extremely funny, heartwarming and above all: cozy. The perfect book for a rainy day or a distressed exam period. A rare kind of light entertainment.
While Jane Austen is not the main focus of the novel, it is still interesting to follow each discussion of her novels; to hear the appreciation for her writing and see the way it can affect people. As the plot develops the book club discussions fade to the background - but several hints of Austen's storytelling are still to be found in the six plotlines.
"The Jane Austen Book Club" is really a tribute to readers of all books and genres; it is a delightful tale of how big an impact a book can have on you, and how a love for reading can be shared.

I blame myself for going in with sky-high expectations, but The Jane Austen Book Club never quite took off for me. It’s an interesting conceit, but maybe one I would’ve preferred to see Fowler tackle later in her career, once she’d really hit her stride.

My full review of The Jane Austen Book Club can be found on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

This book was really a disappointment to me. After all the hype I thought this would be a really great book. And its not. Its an ok book, but not a great book.
If you are looking for a great book about friends and book clubs, then you should read "Angry Housewives Eating Bon-Bons: A Novel (by Lorna Landvik). That is so funny and sad and poignant and touching. Everything this book was not.
My husband is reading this book as well(He is a TRUE Jane Austen fan) and he asked me last night if ALL women were as catty and nasty as the women in this book can be!!!
And when I thought about it last night, I couldn't even remember what most of the book was about and I HAD JUST FINISHED IT!!!!
It was a quick read and that was about it for me. It had some good moments, but it mostly fell flat for me and the end...well, the end was SO...well....I don't even have words to describe it.