Katharine Ashenburg is joining us!!!

Katharine Ashenburg


Great news! We are truly honoured to welcome Katharine to our November meeting to discuss her first novel Sofie and Cecilia. Katharine is no stranger to the Canadian writing community having published several non fiction books and worked as a journalist at several prestigious publications!

Here are the book club questions we developed for the meeting.  
    How many people come home from a holiday abroad and write their first novel over the next decade? (We should note you were a published author and have had a very successful career). Thank you! In our humble opinion your novel was impeccably researched.  Can you briefly describe your approach?  We understand you travelled to Sweden several times , read every book you could access that was translated or written in English about the subject and wrote various scenes in a non linear fashion.  How did it all unfold?

2.      Based on your public appearances, reviews etc what has pleasantly surprised you about your Canadian reading audience’s response to a Swedish based historical novel dating back almost one hundred years? What has been the reaction to your novel outside Canada particularly in Sweden?

3.      Your themes have been described as the lasting bonds of female friendship and complexities of an imperfect marriage that still works at many levels.  We think it is fair to say no marriage is perfect. What message are you trying to convey to modern readers particularly younger women about sticking it out in an imperfect marriage that includes flagrant infidelity Cecilia endures from Lars and Nil’s complete lack of respect of Sofie’s potential and creative drive. How would you want older female readers to describe these marriages to their daughters and granddaughters?

4.    The Northview Road Book Club has read several books about the inner workings of famous marriages including Loving Frank by Nancy Horin and The Paris Wife by Paula McLean. Wedded bliss does not come to mind when we remember those books. In your opinion, what draws the female audience to this genre?

5.      If you were asked to write a Canadian version of Sofie and Cecilia for a CBC miniseries what two marriages would you select to replace the Larsson /Lamm marriages?

6.      How does an older widow interpret the intellectual flowering and serenity you gave Sofie and Cecilia in their widow hood? If the book club wanted to explore this theme further what novels or nonfiction books would you recommend?

7.      You mentioned in an interview with the Canadian Jewish News that the Cecilia’s concerns about the rise of Nazism in Sweden were added in a later stage of the writing of the novel based on some additional research.  Here is an excerpt from the interview:

·        Writing Emma’s worries into Cecilia made her more real – it darkened and deepened her. The advantage of the novelist is that she can take a fact and embroider it into a fictional scene. In this case, it is a fact that the innocent folk dress Emma tried to revive had come to the attention of some of the nationalistic, pro-Nazi elements. They felt that only people born in a particular village – that is, no Jews or foreigners – should wear that village’s local folk dress.

·        That led to a scene in the novel in which Cecilia, ironically the champion of the local dress, is pressured to not wear it at a traditional fiddling competition she and her husband had founded.

·        “We worked for decades fanning those small, weak flames back into life,” she thinks about the folk arts she had fostered. “And now I watch as they are added to a bonfire that threatens to consume us.”

8. How can Cecelia’s response to this development be applied to modern day events where increased polarization seems rampant?  Where do we draw the line between curiosity or celebration of other cultures and cultural appropriation? How does a majority culture in for example North America respectfully learn about minority cultures that may be protective of their expressions of art and culture?