The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

In this programme we introduce a book that was first published in 1995 but which seems even more relevant today. It is The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. Born in New York in December 1946, he is the New York Times best-selling author of nineteen novels and eleven collections of stories. He was previously a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

The publisher’s introduction to the book reads:
“When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident, nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling point of racism and prejudice threatens to spill over.”

Reading Circle members who discussed this book all agreed that it was difficult to believe that this novel was written 30 years ago, as the issues of immigration and environmental damage with which it deals are so very topical.

Here are this month’s book recommendations from Reading Circle members:

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows – Guernsey under WW2 occupation, an easy read.
• The Women, by Kristin Hannah – Post Vietnam war in the USA.
• One Life by Barbara Winton – about her father Nicholas Winton who arranged trains for Czech Jewish children to escape from Prague in the late 1930s.  Now an acclaimed film, starring Anthony Hopkins.
• The Seven Husbands of Elizabeth Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid – the life of a Hollywood starlet.
• Austria Behind the Mask, Politics of a nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai –  Mixing personal memories with high political drama, Paul Lendvai reveals the knotted web of forces which have driven Austria to its current perilous state. (Chosen as the next book for our Reading Circle).
• Vienna, How a city of ideas created the modern world by Richard Crockett – the city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But, with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact.

Music played:
• Illegals in My Yard by Fernando Mora
• El Immigrante by Calibre 50