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Many of us had had at least a smattering of Latin in the distant past, but no one was proficient enough in it to appreciate the language.  (Me, Virgil defeated.  I could pick out words here and there, but I don't have nearly enough vocabulary to make out complete sentences.)  So we could only comment on the content, and the translation.  (Ferry for most people.  Dryden for me.)  

Four books, each treating a different aspect of farming - crops, trees, livestock and bees.  He provided, in poetical form, a great deal of facts - how to find good soil, how far apart to plant your vines, how to breed sheep to get white wool - most of which sounded plausible.  But really?  Bee kings?  And bee wars where the kings did battle with each other?  Was that the ancient Romans' interpretation of a mating flight?

But every so often Virgil takes a detour and sets off to describe some ancient myth, or not so ancient battle, or some praise-worthy contemporary.  It was written after the series of civil wars that wracked the Roman Republic after the death of Julius Caesar, but before Octavius had made the transition to Emperor Augustus.  Maybe all that death and destruction gave Virgil a hankering to write about the simple life back on the farm.  Or maybe the poem was meant as propaganda to usher in the empire.  Because, just as a community of bees needs its 'king', then surely a community of men needs the same thing.

A wild ride. Mysteries piled upon mysteries, but without the luxury of having any of them explained to you at the end. Reportedly, the English translation was heavily abridged - the original was published in three volumes. On one hand, the full text might have made more sense. But on the other hand, I barely managed to finish the book as it is.

Toru, the protagonist, is a cipher. A passive, passionless man who drifts through life, doing nothing of his own volition. (In the real world, anyway. In an alternate reality somewhere in his own mind he manages to have an affair and to kill a man.) He has no stories of his own, but absorbs the stories of those that he meets. And boy, are they doozies. Spies getting flayed alive in WWII in Manchuria, surviving (or not) the Siberian gulag.

I listened to an audio version, where the speaker did different voices for each character. And God did I hate the one he used for May Kasahara. All brassy Valley Girl. I winced when she had dialog. Or worse, when she wrote an entire letter.

I'd found a hold list already at the library for their few copies in English. And not many more in stock at Powell's. So, to leave those copies available for everyone else, I checked out the Russian edition, hoping that my rusty Russian was up to the task. And it was, sort of, at least for the first section of the short stories - Песни восточных славян - tales of modern life, but written in a fable-ish style, with short sentences and an easy vocabulary. But the stories had enough twists that I was often startled, wondering if I'd really read that last sentence correctly.

I really bogged down in the second section - Сказки и истории - with longer stories using more complex language. Here I really got lost, having problems even following the thread of each tale.

It got to be pretty slow going, and I was only about a fourth of the way through the book by the time the book club met. There I found that I was not alone in my problems in comprehension, with the people who had read the English version wondering if they had a poor and confusing translation. We spent a great deal of the dinner comparing notes on specific stories, trying to decide exactly what had transpired in it.

Update:
I checked an English edition out of the library and re-read the stories that I'd previously read in Russian. And found that there was nothing at all wrong with my reading comprehension.  Or with the translations.  The stories are weird.  The main difference with the second time around was that I remembered the twisty bits and could see them coming.

There were a couple of changes introduced in the English versions.  Raya would scrub the flat with bleach, rather than caustic cleaning powder.  It's what an American woman would have used.  But it'd be sort of difficult to swap bleach for baking soda.  And the radical black man was named 'Jim', instead of 'uncle Tom'.  It's possible that Petrushevskaya used that term ironically.  Or maybe she just didn't realize what it means.

Classics book group.

I read it as a collection of stories, sort of an ancestor of the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, with the barest of plots holding them all in place. But others saw it as a masterful tale of redemption, with Lucius seeing the error of his ways, renouncing vice and embracing virtue, and being rewarded with a return to human form, and wealth and family. I'm not buying it though. The final book felt abrupt and tacked on, as if Apuleius had taken an existing work of ribald tales, ripped off the ending and stitched in one of his own, extolling the joys of religion.

Nancy wondered if the novel was a subversive, and subtle, indictment of slavery, as it was (mostly) put in the mouth of a powerless beast of burden, and showed the abuse heaped upon him and on the slaves around him. I like this idea, but find it unlikely.