When Joan says to Chloe, “Ballet isn’t about you” (page 180), what does she mean? If ballet requires losing oneself, how does it also lead to selfish behavior off-stage?ġ3. What does he mean by this? How does it play out in his family’s life?ġ2. “I think things can be true even if they didn’t really happen,” Jacob says on page 144. How does Sandy shape her daughter’s future? What effect does her behavior at Disneyland have?ġ1. Throughout the novel, characters wonder why Arslan chose Joan to help him defect. Is Joan’s aggressive pursuit of Arslan out of character for her? Why does she do it?ĩ. On page 54, Jacob tells Joan, “Every family has a mythology.” What is his mythology for their family? How does Joan’s secret endanger it?Ĩ. And how does the perfectionism required of ballet dancers play into intent and control?ħ. What role does intent really play in their lives? How does this connect to the notion of control?Ħ. The dancers have been taught that “going through the motions” is preferable (page 42). Jacob wants to live “an intentional life” but doesn’t really know what he intends. Control is the key to everything.” (page 8) What does Elaine mean by “control”? Which characters in the novel lose control, and to what effect?ĥ. The key, she has said to Joan, is control. “Elaine ingests a steady but restricted diet of cocaine without apparent consequence. How does she use these leaps to fill in the story?Ĥ.
Shipstead skips forward and backward in time throughout the novel. Who is the main character? Is that person also the hero?ģ. What does “Astonish me” mean, as a metaphor in the novel?Ģ. The story proceeds with a quiet insistence that is matched by the inevitability of its denouement. Shipstead’s prose moves fluidly through settings as varied as a ballet rehearsal and a suburban backyard, and her characterizations are full. Their meeting leads to the creation of a ballet that will unite Arslan, Harry, and Harry’s girlfriend, Chloe, who is also a dancer, but that threatens to leave Jacob estranged from his son. Their son, Harry, reveals a gift for and a love of ballet, and his talent is such that eventually he comes in contact with Arslan. But Joan marries Jacob, a childhood friend, and moves to suburban Southern California, abandoning her glamorous life of concerts and parties in New York City. Early in her professional career, she had helped Arslan Rusakov, a famed Russian ballet dancer, defect to the West while his troupe was performing in Toronto, after which the two had an affair. Shipstead’s second novel (after Seating Arrangements), set mostly in California and New York in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, concerns Joan Joyce, a ballerina who abandons the dance world when she becomes pregnant.
0 kommentar(er)
