Events
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Start: 6:30 pm
Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this month's selection, The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson's most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody's talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children's book illustrator, appears to be Katri's opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has somthing Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna's life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions. Ruth Rendell said, "I loved this book. It's cool in both senses of the word, understated yet exciting, and with a tension that keeps you reading. I felt transported to that remote region of Sweden and when I finished it I read it all over again. The characters still haunt me."
Start: 7:00 pm
He is the author of twenty-one books in twenty-three years, one of those 'books' being a seven-volume work on violence. Most of the other books are 'big' books, big in every way—subject matter, ambition, passion, scope, imagination, intelligence, size. William T. Vollmann has won a National Book Award (for Europe Central) and numerous other honors and awards. He makes this welcome return visit for his newest book this evening, the non-fiction work Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries, and Venus Figurines (Ecco). "Vollmann, who has tackled an astonishing array of subjects in fiction and nonfiction, here explores female beauty—its creation and consumption—with a spotlight on highly stylized traditional Japanese Noh theater. Because male actors wearing strictly codified masks perform all Noh roles, men, ironically, are both the creators and purveyors of female beauty. From Noh, Vollmann explores other far-flung performances of feminine beauty, including revered geisha, L.A. transvestites, a porn model, Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings, and legendary Norse women, and even dons his own cross-gendered mask with the help of a makeup artist." – Terry Hong, Library Journal. Free admission. The Northwest African American Museum is at 2300 South Massachusetts Street (www.naamnw.org). Our special thanks to NAAM for aiding and abetting while we are in transition (moving) mode.
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