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    Clara Callan: A Novel
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    Clara Callan: A Novel
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    Clara Callan: A Novel
    Ebook488 pages7 hours

    Clara Callan: A Novel

    By Richard B. Wright

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for New York. It's a time when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and people escape from reality through radio and the movies. Meanwhile, the two sisters -- vastly different in personality, yet inextricably linked by a shared past -- try to find their places within the complex web of social expectations for young women in the 1930s.

    While Nora embarks on a glamorous career as a radio-soap opera star, Clara, a strong and independent-minded woman, struggles to observe the traditional boundaries of a small and tight-knit community without relinquishing her dreams of love, freedom, and adventure. However, things aren't as simple as they appear -- Nora's letters eventually reveal life in the big city is less exotic than it seems, and the tranquil solitude of Clara's life is shattered by a series of unforeseeable events. These twists of fate require all of Clara's courage and strength, and finally put the seemingly unbreakable bond between the sisters to the test.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061740459
    Unavailable
    Clara Callan: A Novel
    Author

    Richard B. Wright

    Richard B. Wright is the author of nine novels, including The Age of Longing, In the Middle of a Life, and Weekend Man. He lives with his wife in Saint Catharines, Ontario.

    Read more from Richard B. Wright

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    Reviews for Clara Callan

    4/5

    273 ratings17 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Getting to know these two sisters and sharing their lives was the most important part as well as the most enjoyable part of Wright's book. The sisters, Clara and Nora, are from a village in Ontario bound by the typical social mores of the 1930s. The story is told through their letters after the younger one goes to work in the glamorous world of radio soap opera. Clara, a teacher, remains at home. I loved the gentle writing, the look back at life in the 1930s. It's hard to believe the author is male yet was able to portray the women so perfectly.
    • 5/5
      This book was recommended to me. I got it from the library and didn't put it down until I finished it. Later, I bought the book because I thought it is worthwhile having it in my home library. The book is written as series of letters between two sisters who live far way from each other and lead very different lives. The author succeeds in exposing the sisters' emotional sides and unique life stories through a close look in their letters. The book is a testament of the lifelong bond between sisters. I recommend this book strongly.
    • 4/5
      i really liked this. i liked the letter format. clara was a little boring about her boyfriend but she was in love. i love the review done as a letter. why didn't i think of this?
    • 5/5
      Engaged. Engaged is the word I would describe how I read Clara Callan. I think I read it in four days. Despite its name, Clara Callan is actually about two women, sisters in fact. Clara is the elder, living in their deceased parents house in a small rural town outside Toronto. She is a no-nonsense serious schoolteacher who loves to play the piano, read and  write poetry; a perfect candidate for spinsterhood and self righteousness despite the fact she no longer believes in God. Since it is the 1930s and Clara is so mysterious, she is also fodder for constant gossip and worry in her village. Meanwhile younger sister Nora Callan has flown the coop to America and the Big Apple to seek fame and fortune as a radio star. Despite their vasts differences the sisters remain close, sharing letters to keep in touch. Clara's journal rounds out the epistolary tale and fills in the gaps.Probably my favorite subliminal element to Clara Callan is how Wright weaves current events into to the story. Nora, being in show business, complains of a bratty young man hanging around a pretty brunette. The talented brunette would go on to star in a little movie about a wizard from Oz. Or the radio program designed to sound like a real newscast scaring the bejesus out of everyone. Or the new sensational book, Gone with the Wind. It is very tempting to put together a list of every book Clara reads or every song she mentions.The novel has a Bridges of Madison County kind of feel to the ending. I was a little disappointed with the tactic.
    • 5/5
      I really loved this book about 2 sisters from smaal-town Ontario. One, the younger, goes off to find fame and fortune as an actress in New York. The older sister stays behind to teach. The year is 1934. Nora does succeed as an actress in a popular radio show but Clara's life is eventful too. We follow their separate paths through their letters and Clara's diary entries. What astounded me is that the writer is a man and yet he convincingly portrays a woman's emotions. This book won both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2001.
    • 5/5
      A most enjoyable book!
    • 4/5
      I am so impressed with how beautifully Wright managed to write about the relationship between these two sisters---the audio voices were fantastic as the sisters read the letters they wrote to each other and Clara added in her diary entries. You could just feel their emotional well-being at the writing of each letter. Positioning of this story during the early 1930s---how much would we see changed if the book were written with today's background?
    • 1/5
      I once read a satirical website that boasted a recipe for the composition award-winning literature. It had dictums like "thou shalt sneer at conflict" and "thou shalt commit no plot". I thought it was hilarious, sinister, at the time, distant. Now that I have wasted hours of my life - gone, irretrievably gone like the wind - reading Clara Callan, winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction, I now find new bitter meaning in "suckitudinous" fiction.Clara Callan has no real plot. The titular character lives in rural Ontario in the 1930s. She is a school teacher living along, unmarried. An odd woman (incidentally have also recently read The Odd Women, a much better read) she loses her belief in religion, is victim to a random, senseless act of violence by a tramp, goes to New York (where sister Nora resides) to get an abortion and returns to Ontario to become more and more eccentric until she meets the man of her dream: a Catholic, married man who regularly cheats on his wife with the odd women - unmarried women who have given up on finding marital bliss, trapped in a mundane experience, alone, unprotected and perfect for him to stalk and meet in movie theatres. From beginning to end, it's just one long series of events - meaningless violence, meaningless disbelief in God, meaningless sex, etc. The book is told through letters of Clara to her sister Nora and her friend Evelyn and her diary entries. Sister Nora is a radio actress in New York, a minor celebrity, and is very Sister Carrie. My problem is that it was absolutely dull. Certainly things happen, but there's no connecting theme. Does Clara change at all? I think not. There's no evolution of character. In the beginning, she sees the town drunk wearing her deceased father's donated coat and delights in the sight. In the end, she attends his funeral; distinctly out of place amongst the poor, lewd man's rough, unkempt acquaintances. Even after all that's happened to her, she is still the same and sees things around her the same way. No forward motion. No development.And all the references to the 1930s (this book was a piece of historical fiction published in 2006) are corny. Old King George died, handsome King Edward abdicated for that crass American woman, that book Gone with the Wind was published and filmed - it was so tacky. I'm reading the volume of Anais Nin from the same period and the way she references things that we now consider to be historically important is altogether different. The feeling I get when I find familiar things that Anais encounters at the time (Otto Rank for example) is vastly different from the same type of thing in Clara's letters - it is not forced or ostentatious or jarring.And honestly, people with interesting lives don't give vague summaries of current affairs and weather updates in their diaires. In fact, interesting people living dull, sequestered lives don't write mundane drivel either - like Emily Dickinson, for example. This establishes that Clara Callan has the prize-winning combination of being an uninteresting person living an uninteresting life. If you're determined to read this, then I have to offer this Rushdie-ian advice: if dullness be your drug, make your will.
    • 5/5
      Dear Clara,I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading your journals and letters from those four years during the 1930s. You provided a nice overview of events during the Depression, just as background, as well as what life might be like for a single lady living alone in small town Ontario. But more importantly, you showed the struggle to find personal happiness and our place in this world.I liked your voice, and your mistakes, and your dignity in the face of difficulties. Your loving but realistic relationship with your sister, the big time radio actress living in New York City. I hope more readers discover your wonderful story.In appreciation,raidergirl3
    • 4/5
      Letters & diary in 30's - interesting history
    • 4/5
      Sue lent me this book last summer. It's a series of letters written to and from Clara who lives in a small Ontario town near Toronto. The letters tell the story of two sisters in the 1930s; a teacher who stays where she grew up and an aspiring actress who moves to New York.This book won the Giller and Governor Generals prizes. I enjoyed reading it. I could really relate with her trips into Toronto. It was like reading a soap opera. But I don't think there's any great thoughts or messages in it.
    • 4/5
      What we may think of as simpler times weren't really all that simple, at least not to those living in those times. So Canadian writer Richard B. Wright makes clear in this absorbing 2002 novel. Set during the years from 1934 to 1938, Wright's characters wrestle with confusing new technology like party-line telephones, home entertainment delivered via radio, long-distance air transportation and the conversion of coal furnaces to oil. And as for personal relationships, well they were certainly as complex then as now.Clara Callan is a young school teacher, introverted and unmarried, in an Ontario village a few miles outside of Toronto. Her younger sister, Nora, more beautiful and outgoing than Clara, has just moved to New York City and very quickly become a star on a popular radio soap opera. The entire novel is told through Clara's diary entries during those years and in letters exchanged between the two sisters and with a few other characters.Clara's quiet life is disrupted when she is raped while walking along some railroad tracks. When she discovers she is pregnant, she enlists Nora's help, without telling her how the pregnancy happened, in getting an abortion in New York. Wright leaves hints that Clara might seek revenge against the man who raped her, as she seeks him out and stalks him, but then she meets a man in a Toronto theater and, for the first time in her life, falls in love. Of course, Frank turns out to be married. And so this bland schoolteacher has another secret she must hide from the nosy people of her village, made all the more difficult when she gets one of those party-line telephones.How this timid teacher ultimately becomes the bravest, if not the wisest, resident of her village makes fine reading.
    • 4/5
      Set between the wars in north-east North America, this is to some extent an "historical" novel, by which I mean that there are lots of references to historical events whose notoriety has endured (Hitler, Mussolini, The Depression, communism & anti-communism, the Hindenburg disaster etc). However it is also a study a social conventions of that era and, more importantly to me, an apparently realistic story of a person's life. I liked the diary+letters style of the writing, perhaps because I am a regular diary and letter writer myself. The contrast between Clara and her sister was also an interesting focus which kept me reading. This won't make it to my Favourites list, but the fact that I didn't find the 500 pages too daunting is a testament to its success.
    • 5/5
      It is the story of two sisters born in a small village in southern Ontario whose ways part when they are both in their thirties. One goes to New York to try her luck in the radio soap opera business, the other one stays as a school teacher in her village.The entire story is told in the form of letters and journal pieces and is set against the background of the historical events of the late thirties in America and Europe.
    • 4/5
      Clara Callan ist Lehrerin in dem kandadischen Dorf, in dem sie aufgewachsen ist und immer noch lebt. Das Buch beginnt 1934, Clara ist 31 Jahre alt. Ihr verwitweter Vater ist vor kurzem verstorben, ihre Schwester Nora nach New York gezogen. In den Briefen Noras und Claras sowie anderer Personen und in Claras Tagebucheinträgen wird Claras und Noras Geschichte über die nächsten vier Jahre erzählt. Clara lebt ein unspektakuläres Leben, ist innerlich jedoch reich. Begleitet wird das Buch durch Bezugnahmen auf die Literatur, Politik und Musik der damaligen Zeit, wodurch der Kontext gut vorstellbar wird.Das Buch ist ausgesprochen lebhaft erzählt. Jede der Personen wird vollkommen glaubwürdig und plastisch dargestellt. Einen Punkt ziehe ich ab, da es irgendwann doch beginnt sich zu ziehen - andererseits ist ja das echte Leben auch nicht immer spannend. Das Buch ist wirklich toll zu lesen.
    • 4/5
      Winner of several awards in Canada. Two sisters travel different ways in the 1930's; story told in letters and diary entries. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book was cruising along at three stars, I didn't think it was that good, but afterword wrapped the story nicely. Not enough likeable characters the trip through the era was fascinating 1930s era New York, Italy and Ontario and even a glimpse of Hollywood. If it weren't for the afterword the novel would be pretty uneven.