Harvard Club of Minnesota

Harvard Book Club

Discuss Murmur of Bees by Sophia Segovia

Note the meeting day of the week has been changed to Wednesday.

Publisher's Summary
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel - her first to be translated into English - about a mysterious child with the power to change a family’s history in a country on the verge of revolution.

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can - visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats - both human and those of nature - Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.

Book review:
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-translation-of-the-enchanting-mexican-novel-the-murmur-of-bees-arrives-right-on-time/2019/05/14/ea57859a-6ce1-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html

Titles suggested for the 2022 year

Patriotic Gore:  Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War/Edmund Wilson
Just the Plague/Ludmila Ulitskaya 
The 48 Laws of Power/Robert Greene
Memory Wall/ Anthony Duerr, also author of All the Light We Cannot See (Pulitzer Prize)- Also in 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land/Anthony Duerr

Also suggested titles:

Somebody's Daughter/Ashley C. Ford
So Many Books, So Little Time/Sara Nelson
Three Comrades, and The Black Obelisk/Erich Maria Remarque
HomeGoing/Yaa Gyasi
Catch 22/Joseph Heller
The Murder of Roger Akyroyd/Agatha Christie

Questions may be sent to Dorothy Marden marden@umn.edu

Noteworthy, the Classic Fiction Book Club has expanded to include non-classics and non-fiction and is now called the Harvard Book Club.

E-mail admin@harvardmn.org or phone 612-554-1378 to register.  Zoom info will be given when you register.