The Board, by Elif Batuman

 

Audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in 1977 to Turkish parents in New York and grew up in New Jersey. She currently lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco. Batuman earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University, California.

In the international academic system, Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) corresponds to a research doctorate. It is the highest degree of education obtainable. Despite its name, it is not limited to philosophy, but encompasses almost all disciplines and certifies the ability to conduct original research and produce new knowledge.

Her debut book, the 2010 memoir The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection of essays drawn from her graduate studies, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Since 2010, Batuman has served as staff writer for The New Yorker, producing reported pieces and essays on topics ranging from ancient philosophy and insect behaviour to Turkish society and literary history.

Her honours include the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for Humour, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018.

She is a professor of literature at Stanford University. Her articles in publications such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s and The Guardian have made her one of the most admired and sought-after authors of her generation.

The Possessed (Los poseídos. Seix Barral, 2011), her first book, was published in more than ten countries.

 

SUMMARY

 

Elif Batuman is an author known for bending the boundaries between subject and author. In this story, she picks up Kafka’s irresistible gauntlet and mixes her voice with his. Each of Batuman’s books engages the ghost of a literary master: her essay collection The Possessed and her novel The Idiot, both borrow their titles from Dostoyevsky; her second novel Either/Or takes its title from Kierkegaard. Literature, for her, is a school of life, a continuous study of ontological limits and the discursive regimes by which humans disappoint one another. In The Board ─a brief, openly Kafkaesque story, published to commemorate the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death― the reader is implicated in the philosophical questions posed by the text. Batuman conjures an imaginary landscape that gives her the power to play with the fantastical, a fine pastiche that echoes the bizarre oppressiveness of Kafka’s fictional institutions, the helplessness of so many of his protagonists, and a Kafkian atmosphere that tends to linger an inch away from surrealism.

Needing to stay in the city, the protagonist of The Board has made an appointment with a broker to buy an apartment. When she arrives, she only sees a bush planted in the middle of the sidewalk which turns out to be the broker. They enter the building dodging a homeless man who asks her for help, but the broker rushes her to meet the seller. She needs the apartment and doesn’t want to antagonize the broker. They enter the building, climb the stairs to the fourth floor, and open the door to an apartment. She notices the luxurious details, but the broker quickly moves through the rooms until he reaches a linen closet that he empties to discover an air duct in the dark. They enter and see an iron staircase leading into the darkness. They go down further than they came up, until they reach what appears to be a moderately sized studio. Although it has no windows, she still thinks it’s worth it. In one corner there is a dog bed with an elegant cashmere blanket. She remembers the poodle from her childhood and feels good omens. But there’s no dog, it’s the seller in his bed. She tries not to show surprise and hides her discomfort. “I love your apartment, it’s just what I’m looking for”, she tells him. The two men talk to each other and then they ask her if she’s a serious buyer. She answers yes. “Then the board will consider your application”, the broker says. Immediately, a corridor that leads directly to the assembled board members is revealed. Here begins a hellish interrogation that lasts several hours. Without detecting any sign of friendliness on the faces of those gathered, the protagonist strives to respond appropriately. Until, in the end, she realizes that the board will not give her access to the purchase of the apartment, and she takes the way back. Here the author creates an open ending by leaving her hanging on the stairs studying what her next move will be.

 

The characters in The Board remain unnamed, vague, indistinguishable. The speaker is the woman looking for a place to live. The broker showing her the apartment is mistaken for a shrub. A heap of dirty carpets discloses a homeless man. The seller is an old man resembling a cashmere blanket elegantly tossed on a dog bed. In this wobbling world, unnamed characters morph from “heaps” to humans and no one is sure of what they see. Phrasing like “it was possible that” calls to mind the interior monologue of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, trying to understand how he became a cockroach. Part of Batuman’s brilliance lies in her capacity to contemporize the distancing syntax that Kafka employed to estrange humans from their own claims and statements of fact. In the story the unjust offenses are constructed by legalese that propels events towards their formal conclusion. But the conclusion disrupts the possibility of closure.

 

Three reflections

-Physical inaccessibility as a reflection of social barriers. Throughout the story, the protagonist tries to convince an absurd board to let her live in an almost inaccessible basement apartment. The final image connects this impossible architectural barrier with the invisible barriers of wealth, privilege, and belonging to a specific social class.

-The criminalization of subjectivity. Just like in Kafka’s The Trial, legal language and bureaucratic demands end up turning the protagonist’s simple existence into a sort of crime. The closing image underscores how the formal discourse of institutions has the power to judge and strip the individual of dignity.

-An ending without traditional closure. Instead of resolving whether or not the protagonist gets the basement, Batuman chooses an open ending that breaks away from traditional logic. The fantastic and absurd landscape at the end serves as a visual superstructure to make an abstract feeling understandable: The total helplessness of the contemporary human being in the face of collective rules they cannot control.

The final metaphor of The Board functions as a perfect visual and conceptual image of the clash between bureaucratic absurdity, social inaccessibility, and class structures. In short, we are faced with an enigmatic work, brilliantly written by a young author who shows us how modern systems dehumanize the individual.

QUESTIONS

-Think about an absord situation in which you’ve been involved and tell us about it.

-What do you think it is best for the individual / community: rent a flat or buy a flat? Give your reasons.

-Bureaucracy: is it necessary? According to you, how could a society lessen the amount of bureaucracy? Give some ideas!

VOCABULARY

ailing, wherewithal, stroller, reclaimed, vanity, smarting, loafers, Murphy bed, plush dog, poodle, tyre-kicker, batik, engrossment, gaunt, round-the-clock, weathered

The Amateurs, by Nadine Gordimer

BIOGRAPHY

Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, and died at 91 in Johannesburg, its largest city.

Her parents were Jewish; they had fled from pogroms in Eastern Europe, but she wasn’t educated religiously. Nevertheless, her parents sent her to a catholic school, although, after a time, she left school and was raised at home because some heart problems her mother thought dangerous.

At home she read a lot, and from a very young age, she started to write stories.

Later, she studied Law at Witwatersrand University, but only for a year, and so she didn’t complete her degree. But there she started to mix with Black people and to understand their situation, the meaning of segregation and later of apartheid.

When she was 25, she moved to Johannesburg. She married a dentist with whom she had a daughter. They got divorced and she got married again in 1954 to an art dealer. This marriage lasted until her husband’s death. They got a son.

But she didn’t stop writing or trying to publish her stories, and in 1949, she published her first collection, Face to Face. Then, two years later, the magazine The New Yorker issued one of her stories, and she continued publishing there for a long time. Although she also wrote some novels, she said that the 20^th century literary genre par excellence was the short story, because it’s a way to see an event “by the light of a flash”, and because every short story is “a discrete moment of truth”.

She was an activist against the apartheid, and some of her books were banned in South Africa. In 1960, they arrested her best friend, and the police shot Black people during a pacific demonstration in Sharpeville, a “Black location”. From that moment, she became firmly committed to Mandela’s African National Congress. She helped Mandela in his 1962 trial when he delivered his famous three-hour speech, “I Am Prepared to Die”.

In post-apartheid times, she was active in movements related to AIDS, and she was vice-president of International PEN.

As a curiosity, she rejected being nominate for the Orange Prize in 1998… because it was only for women.

Also, when asked about Israeli policies, she always said that they didn’t have anything to do with the apartheid system, and she was criticised for this opinion.

 

SUMMARY

The Amateurs is one of Gordimer’s first stories. It was published in the collection Face to Face. It has, like much of her narrative, some autobiographical details. Nadine, as a teenager, played the part of Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, in an amateur company.

In the story, a group of white do-gooders went to a Location, that is, a Black people slum (later called “townships”) to perform the Oscar Wilde’s play. At the beginning, they couldn’t find the place where they had to play, but they felt that it was a poor quarter. Then came a boy, a policeman, who led them to the right place. There was a bit of misunderstanding because it was thought that it would be a concert, instead of a play. All in all, they were placed in a poor room (not exactly a dressing room) where they could get dressed and put on their make-up. As they had seen what kind of audience they were going to have, they became aware that it would be a difficult play for them, that they wouldn’t understand anything, and so it wouldn’t be necessary to dress up too much.

In the first act, most of the spectators were teachers, or clerks or civil servants. As the actors and actresses realized they didn’t grasp the subtility and the irony of the text, they began to act out more histrionically in order to elicit more laughter from the audience.

The first act finished, the people who were outside the hall because they weren’t invited or because they didn’t feel like going in, entered the house and filled it up. Now there were all kinds of people there, even babies, and sitting even on the floor. So, there was a full house, although some people didn’t pay much attention to the play. The actors and actresses went on overdoing voices and gestures, and thus throwing away the spirit of the play.

At the end of it, they collected a very long round of applause, and a girl from the audience gave the players a moving speech thanking them and telling the Location youth to follow the example of the performers to improve their behaviour and to be useful to their community.

The company of actors and actresses left the place with mixed feelings: happy because they had made some people happy, and sad because they think they had betrayed the piece and cheated the audience.

It’s important to note that at no point does the narrator mention the characters’ skin colour. Nor can we find any hint about the time period when the story is set.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why do you think the narrator didn’t mention skin colours?

-In your opinion, is it so difficult to understand The Importance of Being Earnest? Do you need to have a higher education to enjoy some works of art?

-Overdoing the performance, did they cheat the audience? Or were they only being didactic?

-Oscar Wilde said: “It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves”. And “Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It’s their distinguishing characteristic”. In your view, philanthropy has good, or bad effects, on the people who get its “benefits”?

-Do you agree with Gordimer’s opinion about the Orange Prize and about Israeli politics?

 

VOCABULARY

props, drain, wash, knobkerrie, lean-to, straggling, shrilly, bustle, sideburn, drawing room, pouter-pigeon, long-hipped, colour bar, belched, hamming, splurged out, knocked up, tittered,

 

 

The King of Ypres, by John Buchan

 

John Buchan Society

A BIT OF HIS BIOGRAPHY
He was born in Perth (Scotland) in 1875. He was the eldest son of a church minister. He studied at Glasgow University and at Oxford, became a lawyer, got married and had four children.
His uninspiring life changed when he went to South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century to help with the post-Boer war reconstruction. As a result of his experiences there, he wrote an adventure book, Prester John (1910).
When he came back to London, he went on working as a lawyer –he wrote legal treaties– and also for Nelson’s publishers.
Then it came the WWI; he volunteered, but couldn’t go to the front because of a duodenal ulcer and had to do his tasks in the rearguard in the military intelligence recruiting propagandists. But his most valuable contribution to the war was his History of the War in several volumes.
As a politician, he was a conservative unionist, and he was appointed General Governor of Canada, and in this post, he signed Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939.
He died of a cerebral thrombosis in 1940.
As a writer he is a very singular case among the literary world: he wrote only for his own entertainment, he didn’t look for fame or academic distinctions, neither he wrote for the love of art. His idol was Walter Scott (a Scotsman as himself) and he tried to emulate his novels. So, his literary ambition was below what a literary critic is waiting for. Bucham is known mostly for Hitchcock’s adaptation of his novel The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). He wrote this novel when he was recovering from his ulcer; he said he was writing only a “shilling shocker”. He thought writing had to be only a delightful hobby, because if you wanted to make a profession of it, then it would become stale and tarnished.
Another of his novels was Hunting Tower (1922), about a Russian princess imprisoned with her jewels, bolshevists, robbers and some more people who wanted to get her and them.

 

SUMMARY

Peter Galbraith, a Scottish soldier, had a very bad week in the trenches of WWI. He suffered of a lot of discomforts and was in want of a long rest, but, although he was in the middle of the war, he hadn’t met any German to fight with. Then his battalion retreated to the Belgian village of Ypres for a pause.

There, he was expecting to get some rest, but as there was a lot of noise, he looked for a quiet place to go to bed and found a very deep cellar in which he slept soundly. But, when he awoke the next morning, he found out that his battalion wasn’t there, that they had forgotten him.

He was a bit confused, but most of all, he was hungry and thirsty, and while he was thinking how to get some breakfast, a man came out of a room of the house he slept in with the pockets full of booty. The man, a thief, tried to attack Galbraith, but he, a rugby player, beat him down and shut him in a cupboard. He started to feel that, as there were no more soldiers, there was a bit of chaos in the village, and marauders and robbers were at large.

He found a bar where he was hoping to get some refresh, but the place was a total riot. The landlord, seeing he was an English soldier, asked for help. Galbraith, using some amount of violence, restored the order emptying the bar of miscreants. Finally, he could order his breakfast.

With his hunger somewhat abated and seeing so much disorder, he decided to go and look for the mayor and ask to put the place under control.

In the street, he found more rioters: two men were attacking a woman. Galbraith rescued her killing one assailant and scaring away the other. As he told her his intentions, the woman, mademoiselle Omèrine, informed him that the mayor had run away. Then they met a priest, and the three organized a meeting with the woman’s father, the doctor, three old men and an old soldier with only an arm. They form a Committee of Public Safety and appointed Galbraith as the provisional mayor. The Scotsman organized patrols and beats and edicted some bans, and after a few days, Ypres became a safe city again... in the middle of a war. The few honest citizens still living in Ypres were very happy with Galbraith ways, and mademoiselle Omèrine gave him the nickname of le Roi d’Ypres.

He almost acted as a dictator, but he kept the law and the order.

But near Ypres the war went on, and one night, a German shell fell in a street and killed mademoiselle Omèrine.

Galbraith was very sad and angry with the Boches and became aware that his job was being a soldier and wining the war. Moreover, he wanted to revenge Omèrine’s death. He understood that he wasn’t really a mayor, that he was a deserter and that when his company found him, he would be arrested, tried and shot. So he decided to resign his post, but the Committee didn’t accept his dismissal at all.

Finally, the English battalion came back again to Ypres, a decorous and orderly village by then. Galbraith guess was right and he was arrested, tried but…, although they found him guilty, there was no penalty for him, and even his Commanding Officer congratulated him in secret for his services in Ypres.

In the end, Galbraith went back to the horrible trenches, but he would be very satisfied if he could kill fifty thousand Germans to make up for the death of mademoiselle Omèrine.

 

QUESTIONS

-Professional authors write worse / better than non-professional authors?

-Is it a real truth that an important proportion of young criminals become policemen when adults? Or at least, that outlaws when young respect law and order when adults?

-Do changes in our position in life modify our character?

-Do we need authority to behave rightly? Is man a wolf to man? Do we all have a beast inside?

-Against wars, is deserting the best option?

 

VOCABULARY

din, puddler, dottle, billets, come to grips, shelling, frowsty, pasty face, shivered, wroth, miscreants, émeute, fathom, wastrels, scragged, posse, beats, looters, rounded up, Draconian, dicing, upshot, cutting knots, catch it in the neck, Harry Lauder, chaff, riding roughshod over

 

dialectal words:

Wipers = Ypres

that yin = that one

ken = know

mair = more

the day = today

thae = those

sae = so

canny = careful

my lone = on my own

mitchy = very

speir = ask

nae doot = no doubt, sure

when rotters = a pack of rats

sodger = soldier

Angel's Laundromat, by Lucia Berlin

Comments on Berlin's works

Review of A Manual...

Another review

Guide to Berlin's stories

A video about her life and works

Written by Pere Vila

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936, Lucia Berlin led a largely rootless childhood because her father, Wendell Theodore Brown, was a mining engineer and the family moved nearly every year, from one mining town to the next, throughout North America. It was not until World War II, when Brown served overseas as a naval officer, that Berlin’s mother, Mary Emma Magruder, was able to settle temporarily with her two daughters in her native Texas. They spent the war years in El Paso, the town where Berlin’s parents first met when her father was a student at the Texas School of Mines and her mother was studying drama.

When Brown returned from naval service after the war, the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where Berlin spent her adolescence. She suffered from a variety of health problems throughout her life and was particularly plagued by a curvature of the spine, which eventually destroyed one of her lungs. The frequent displacements of Berlin’s early life, combined with the double scoliosis that prevented her from indulging in many of the pastimes of youth contributed to her cultivation of a rich interior life.

Berlin returned to the United States to earn a B.A. in Spanish and in English, and a M.A. from the University of New Mexico. It was during this time that she met her first husband, but he abandoned her when she was pregnant with their second child. She married and divorced two more times, and had two more sons with her third husband. She eventually raised all four boys on her own. A Manual for Cleaning Women, her first chapbook, was published during the late 1970’s, when Berlin supported her family by cleaning houses.

In the 1980’s Berlin lived in Oakland, California, and continued to publish stories in magazines. She collected many of these works in full-length volumes. The best of the tales from the first half of her writing career appeared in her 1990 collection entitled Homesick: New and Selected Stories, published by Black Sparrow Press. This landmark volume won an American Book Award, and Berlin was also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jack London Short Story Award.

In 1994, Berlin moved to Boulder to teach creative writing at the University of Colorado, and she soon established a reputation there as an effective teacher. Health problems forced her relocation to California in 2000, and she died on her birthday, November 12, 2004, in Marina del Rey.

 

SUMMARY

Angel’s Laundromat is the opening story in Lucia Berlin’s posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.

The story contrasts the working-class atmosphere of a run-down laundromat in Albuquerque with the narrator’s glamorous past, exploring themes of alcoholism, class, and shared human connection. Similar to other Berlin’s stories, the narrator jumps from one vignette to the next in rapid succession while sprinkling in some background history during the process.

The story opens by comparing Angel’s Laundromat to The Campus, a sterile, air-conditioned laundromat across town favoured by middle-class graduate wives who listen to soft rock. The narrator avoids this polished place. Instead, she travels across town to Angel’s, a gritty spot filled with Pueblo and Apache Indians, travelling people, and struggling individuals. This contrast highlights her affinity for the marginalized and the raw reality of working-class life. In the laundromat there is an Indian named Tony, an elderly alcoholic Apache who struggles to put dimes into the machine due to his shakes. He usually sits next to Lucia, the narrator, staring at her hands, so she too looks and sees “Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands”. There is so much psychological truth packed into just these sentences: discomforting self-awareness, recognition of the effects of time and aging, an insight about race, and lastly, the sense of being used up with work done. Like many of her stories, it is about lives that brush one another in passing. She and the Indian eventually joke and chat together, but one day he’s gone and Lucia can’t remember when it was that she realized she never saw that old Indian again.

But Angel’s Laundromat is also disjunctive, as disorganized and random as memories in places of washing and waiting, muggy places, tiny places that serve an underclass of people, students and bedsit dwellers, the poor, the old, the indigent, and she, “Lu-chee-a”, as the Indian calls her, is among them. It is in this sense that the story is both aimless and easy; it does not strain to be more than itself and in this way, it evokes the looseness of a certain sort of life, a life lived bumping around on the bottom no matter where you began. It doesn’t matter what you are, either a woman who once mixed with Prince Aly Khan, or a man who has been dispossessed of his status as an Apache chief, now you are there and that’s all there is.

QUESTIONS

-Try to find information about: Zuni belt, Lady Bird Johnson, AA, Good Hygiene, Hamm’s can, Muzak, Zero bar, Okies, Vina del Mar, Prince Aly Khan.

-Try to get the meaning of these jokes: "A guy is bending down tying his shoe and another guy comes along and beats him up and says: ’You're always tying your shoe!’" And "A waiter is serving ans he spills beans on somebody's lap and says: ’Oh, oh, I spilled the beans.’"

-Why do you think that group therapies (like Alcoholics Anonymous) are effcient? Or aren’t they?

-Do you think suicide has to be penalized? Give reasons.

-Have you ever been in a laundromat and used its services? Can you tell us any anecdote?

-In your view, what is the best way to retort clichés?

VOCABULARY

Suds, super, DUZ, leaf, dimes, passed out, pressing room, cots, cross my eyes, dog tag, busted

A Rose for Emily, by Wiliam Faulkner

 Audiobook

Movie (Angelica Huston in it)

Written by Glòria Torner

SUMMARY
A Rose for Emily is William Faulkner’s best-known short story and, therefore, the most frequently anthologised. And it is also his first short story published in a national magazine, The Forum, in 1930, and, one year later, collected in These Thirteen. It was written during a period of great productivity of the author (1927-1931).
This story, with a non-linear structure, is narrated in the first-person plural, representing the voice of the people who give their opinions on the events, and it is divided in five sections.
Section I. Flashbacks. The ending and the beginning of the story.
The story begins at the end, after the death of Mrs Grierson, at the age of 74. That day, all the village, Jefferson, came to her funeral with respect and curiosity. People knew she didn’t let anyone inside her house, for decades, except her old negro servant, called Tobe.
Her house was once splendid, but, over the years, the aristocracy of Jefferson she belonged to decayed slowly. And now, of this house only remained the traces of grandeur.
In the old days, after Emily’s father died, the town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, made an exception for her —he decided she’d never have to pay taxes on the house. But time passed, and different people came into positions of power.
Ten years after the death of Colonel Sartoris, when Emily was sixty-two years old, the new mayor didn’t see the necessity to honour the agreement and decided to send Miss Emily a notice that she’d have to pay the taxes. She refused to pay, and a group of aldermen paid her a visit. Miss Emily’s old manservant let them into the parlour. The house was dirty and dusty and Emily appeared both overweight and wasted away, “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue”. She didn’t invite anyone to sit. Instead of that, she remained in the parlour’s entryway and listened to the men explain their purpose. Against all their protests, she informed them and repeated that she has no taxes in Jefferson, and told them to see Colonel Sartoris. Of course, he was long dead.
Section II. Going back on the plot
Two years after his father’s dead and some time after her sweetheart had deserted her, the villagers were asking the authorities to do something because a terrible smell was emanating from the house. But they couldn’t get it, because there was no law requiring the cleaning of a house’s interior. Therefore, the neighbours poured quicklime around this nauseating house.
Section III. Homer Barron’s introduction
After her father’s death, Emily, about forty years old, was ill for a long and she reappeared as a lonely woman. Suddenly, her life will change.
Homer Barron, a contractor and foreman of a crew of workers, comes to Jefferson to build sidewalks, and he begins a relationship with Emily. She is in love with Homer, her ideal man. The women of the town gossip about this relationship because they consider him far beneath him. However, Emily always maintains the same attitude, haughty, arrogant and cold, towards the neighbours.
One day, Emily is seen buying poison. The pharmacist asks her several times if it is for rats, but she, simply, replies she wants arsenic.
Section IV. Emily’s hate and madness
The collective narrator, “We”, highlights gossip, social pressure and a lack of empathy. This voice describes now how is Emily and what happens in her house. As always, telling the story without order, villagers talk about out Homer Barron: “he likes men”, he is gone, he is back… Finally, it seems that they want to be married because she has bought the wedding gear, men’s clothes and, even, a nightgown for him to sleep in.
Her cousins visited Rose when she was seeing Homer. One day, after her cousins’ visit, Homer Barron disappeared and no one knew ever anything about.
The villagers don’t see her again, except, from time to time, when they catch glimpses of her silhouette through the curtains.
Section V. Final twist. The horror. The surprising truth behind the mystery
The story returns to the beginning, the day of the funeral. After the burial, the neighbours went up to her second-floor room. They had to break down the door and there they found Homer’s skeleton, lying in Emily’s bedroom, decorated like a bridal suite. Now with the sentence “a grey hair was found on the pillow next to Homer’s corpse”, we know that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
Finally, Emily has killed the object of her affection, so he will not abandon her, and she will live forever with her corpse.
The main themes
Isolation and Patriarchal Control: loneliness, mental decline, madness and decay through the sordid and sad life of Emily Grierson.
Tradition vs Progress: the story describes the deterioration of Southern aristocracy, the social pressure, culminating in the murdering of her lover, Homer Barrow. She refuses to accept changes.
Southern Gothic Element: death, necrophilia, the final image of her iron-grey hair near her pillow.
Symbolism: the house —the decadence; the Yankee north Homer Barron —the ideal man; Emily’s hair grey and other dark colours —sadness; the smell —the unpleasant part of the story and, of course, the rose —symbol of Emily’s faded dreams of love and marriage.
As many times in the story, we finish repeating the same sentence written in the story: “Poor Emily!”.
If we want to read an author similar to William Faulkner, we can choose Flannery O’Connor, with her story A good man is hard to find.

QUESTIONS
-There's a character in the story without much relevance, the servant. According to your opinion, why is it so?
-There's case of necrophilia in the story. Most of sexual paraphilias are taboo. Do you know any and what are they about?
-The story is about lifestyles that die. With every new generation something dies. What will die with our generation? Do you particularly like the phrase "the good old days", or you prefer to forget them?

VOCABULARY
frame house, scrolled balconies, eyesore, bemused, sluggishly, spare, horse and foot, teeming, slunk, lime, locusts, vindicated, riggers, cuss, kin, fallen out with, craned, imperviousness, blowing off, cabal, remitted, doddering, valance curtains

Second Best, by D. H. Lawrence

 Summary and analysis

Another summary

NOTES ABOUT THE STORY
Second Best is a story abut dualities, beginning by the title. Two rabbits, two sisters, two suitors, two dead moles. And everyone of these pairs are, in a certain way, opposites. One rabbit is wild and the other tame. Jimmy Barrass is an urban gentleman, with university education and Tom Smedley, a country lad, full of energy. Two dead moles, one by Anne’s hands, in a burst of anger, and the other, victim of Frances, killed by premeditation. Anne, a teenager country girl, is sensible; Frances, twenty-one and living in the city, is whimsical.

In the opening scene, the two sisters are sitting and talking on the grass in a field, and the nature is in full blossom. Anne is a beautiful plump girl, wise and practical. Frances is a student in Liverpool. They have just arrived from the city.

Anne, although several years younger, has the common sense of a mother.

While she is pulling a kernel out of its shell is she disclosing a secret?—, he talks to Frances about Tom.  She tells her that he has given her a wild rabbit, and yet she has already a tame rabbit. Here perhaps the narrator alludes to her innocence (the tame rabbit), and to the loss of it (the wild one).

Anne was hoping that Tom took her to a Feast, but instead he invited a servant from the rectory. Anne is angry and the narrator now mentions plants with thorns, as thistles, gorse, stubble…
Then a mole appears. At the beginning  both sisters see it as a beautiful creature. Anne catches the mole and plays with it. It’s blind, as love is —is it a symbol of Cupid? Frances tells her to kill the animal —it's a pest, but, for the moment, Anne doesn’t have the courage to do it. She wants to put it in her pocket, but you can’t imprison love and the mole revolts —love has no sense, it’s wild.

After that, Frances tells her that Jimmy Barrass, her would-be-fiancé, has comitted to another girl. Then the mole bits Anne; she bleeds and now does kill the mole: she has lost her innocence.
They cross a bridge and come to a field that shows all the summer splendour. Tom is mowing there. The air is full of intense smells.
They greet the vigorous country lad, well build and full of energy. And immediately, because he needs a woman, he fells in love with Frances —she wears a white dress, like a bride. Tom wonders is she would have the courage to kill a mole —to kill her romantic love.
Now it’s Frances turn, she has to make a decision —she also needs a man, and this new love has to be sensible. The next day she takes him a dead mole —she has killed definitively the love she felt for Jimmy, and offers herself, free of all constraints, to Tom.

QUESTIONS
-Killing animals. What has to be the human ethics about it? Is it ethically right? Always, or according to the case, to the species…?
-It appears that for Lawrence, being plump make you closer to nature. Do you think that our physical constitution has some influence in our character?
-Country people have a different way to see nature from city people. What can you tell about these differences?

VOCABULARY
turf, brimming, wilful, budding, kernel, fret her fat over, thistles, gorse, fallow, fidget, swaddled, crab-apples, stooks, moudiwarp, your rag out, cross, jawing about, winsome

Charity, by Joy Williams

 Summary and analysis (video)

Analysis of Joy Williams’s Stories

SOME DATA ABOUT HER BIOGRAPHY
Joy Williams was born in Massachusetts in 1944. Her father was a religious minister.
She studied at the University of Iowa (Raymond Carver was studying there at the same time).
She got married to Rust Hills, editor of Esquire, a men’s magazine, and moved to Florida, where she taught creative writing.
She wrote some novels (State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead), but she is best known for her short stories, where she displays her minimalist style. She was nominated once for the Pulitzer prize, and in 2021, she got the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
As an example of her minimalism we have her collection 99 stories of God. In her book The Visiting Privilege she has collected all her stories.

SUMMARY
The story starts in the dunes around White Sands Park. There, Janice and her husband (or partner) listen to a policeman telling them about the feelings he experienced being on a dune.
After this bizarre spontaneous explosion of sincerity, they went on driving through the Sands Park. Janice wanted to stop and get out of the car, but Richard wasn’t impressed by the place and refused to pull over. Nevertheless, after a while, he needed to stop to pee, and they pulled into a rest-stop. There, a couple with two children travelling on a van were holding a sign asking for money to get some petrol for their vehicle.
Janice decided she wanted to give them something, but Richard rode along. However, soon afterwards, he stopped to fill the tank at a gas station. There, while Richard was inside the shop, Janice changed places to sat on the driver’s seat and left the gas station —and Richard— behind. She drove back to the rest-stop where she found the family van. She told the woman, Rose, that she wanted to give some money for petrol. Rose, honest enough, accepted the offer, but told her it was better to go together to the petrol station to show Janice they would spend the money in petrol and not in anything else. It was a petrol station in front of the petrol station where she and Richard had stopped several minutes earlier, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Rose’s family appeared to be decent people, even as the children were a little bit naughty. The boy, Zorro, was a little bit too active, and the girl, Zoebella, too pertly clever. Still, their parents seemed to be good people. However, Janice’s first intention to give them only twenty dollars didn’t work —in an outburst of charity, she paid for the bill’s mechanic at the garage where they had the van repaired, she paid for the food at the restaurant where they waited for the mechanic finishing his work, and then, as the repair needed some days, she offered to take them to their place, although it didn’t lay exactly in her way home.
During the trip, they had a car accident because Zorro suddenly jerked the steering wheel and Janice coudn’t control her car. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but Janice was exhausted and deeply upset. They had to abandon the car and stay at a motel. Although Rose insisted that Janice needed some rest, they ended up together in the same room, the only one suitable to sleep in. But, all in all, in the end she fell asleep. She dreamt she was on the road alone hoping somebody would pick her up and take her home.

QUESTIONS
-They say you’re getting old when you aren’t able to feel enthusiasm. What is your opinion about it?
-What do you know about dog’s behaviour? Can dogs identify their names?
-“She distrusted speech as a way of expressing thoughts.” How else can you express your thoughts?
-When we’re generous, aren’t we selfish all the same (because being generous please our feelings)?
-Do you usually think things twice?
-Do you sometimes dislike somebody only for their clothes?
-When you give charity, do you try to check how they will spend it?
-Do you think people have a more beautiful appearence when they are “good”?
-According to a saying, blind people are more suspicious. What is your view?
-What do you usually borrow from hotels and restaurants when you leave?

VOCABULARY
wears, take a leak, ramada, rummaging, grille, brave, shot glasses, signed, low rider, retrieved, queasy, trading post, road runner, fitted beedsheet, pull over, misery lights, drummed out, blacktop road, stony wash, axles, sacred datura, bath crystals, swatted, scootch

Package Tour, by Maeve Binchy

 The Chemistry of Love

Written by Begoña Devis

BIOGRAPHY
She was born in Dalkey, Ireland, May 28, 1940. She studied History at University College of Dublin and worked as a teacher and as a journalist. She taught languages ​​at several girls’ schools, a job she combined with contributions to The Irish Times before deciding to dedicate herself entirely to literature. Binchy was known for her novels, short stories, and plays in which she reflected, with a sharp and biting wit, the reality of small Irish towns and their typical inhabitants. Throughout her career, Binchy sold more than forty million copies of her books, which were translated into thirty-seven languages, making her one of the best-known and most beloved authors in her country.
In 1978, Binchy won a Jacob Award for her play Deeply Regretted By. The National Portrait Gallery in London owns a 1993 photograph of the writer with Richard Whitehead (a Paralympic runner), and a painting of her with Maeve McCarthy (a famous Irish artist), commissioned in 2005, was exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland.
In 2000, Binchy announced that she would no longer tour to promote her novels, but, instead, she would devote her time to other activities, and to her husband, the children’s author Gordon Snell.
She was awarded prizes such as the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN Irish Award and the Irish Book Award. Binchy’s work has been adapted for television and films on several occasions. Among her novels, notable titles include Under the Dublin Sky, Tara Road, and Circle of Friends.
She died in Dublin, July 30, 2012.

SUMMARY
The story talks about a young couple in their twenties, Shane and Moya, who met at a Christmas party and intermediately liked each other. Over time, they discover they have more and more things in common; they both like being in good shape, they both have office jobs, their family types are also similar (Shane has a difficult mother, and in Moya’s case, the difficult one was her father), and above all else, they love having holidays abroad. They explain each other their exotic travels, and consequently, they began to think about having a very good holiday that summer. It would be the high spot of the year for them.
They collect brochures as early as January, and try to discover the secret message behind the sentences apparently very attractive. They worked out the jargon so as not to be deceived. The trip can be exotic but not so much expensive. Both of them hate the Single Room Supplement. Must people go off on their holidays two by two, like animals into an ark?, they think. Why is travelling alone penalised? It’s difficult to travel with other people; you can start the trip as friends and end up as enemies. Shane knew of a case like that.
But several months later they began to realise that that summer they would probably travel together. They admitted it one evening over a plate of spaghetti: they would go to Crete. The only knotty problem was the matter of the Single Room. They weren’t lovers yet, so Shane said that the most sensible thing would be to book a double room, with two separate beds. They were grown-ups, and to sleep in separate bed wouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, they both believe they will end up being lovers, even spending their lives together, but they didn’t want to be forced into it simply because they had to sleep in a double bed.
Their differences became apparent when, looking at a magazine about it, they decided what kind of suitcase to take. Shane chose a huge suitcase with wheels and a matching smaller suitcase. Moya chose two normal suitcases, easy to identify on the carousel, Both of them thought that the other must be looking at the wrong page. A cloud appeared between that happy relationship, but both of them decided to ignore it. However, another storm came in April, when Shane gave Moya a travel iron as a birthday present. Moya desperately wished it was a joke, but it wasn’t.

The truth was that Shane wanted to bring mountains of clothes, and spares for everything, to have a wardrobe like a sultan’s. That vision horrified Moya. She planned to bring only the bare minimum, which meant washing it regularly, and therefore spreading it around the room while it dried. That vision horrified Shane. They wish they had met on vacation, so they would have known these things from the beginning, and not to discover that terrible shock at the height of romance.
At first, they thought of booking separate rooms, which could avoid that horrifying visions to them. But it went deeper than that, it seemed to show the kind of people they were, and they eventually realised that it would be impossible to spend two weeks together, let alone a life time. So they transferred their bookings to separate holidays, and with separate hopes and dreams.

PERSONAL OPINION
I like that short story because is both simple and profound. In my opinion, the reflections you can do after reading are more interesting than the story itself.
Here the writer encapsulates the problems of living together. Why do couples divorce? Is it because of philosophical or existential issues, or because she can’t stand the coins falling to the floor every night when he takes off his pants, which drives her crazy? Or because she leaves her purse and wallet lying around day after day, and it takes her hours to find it, which drives him crazy? These are just examples, but I’ve always thought the latter outweighs the former. Another very common problem that also ends relationships is not talking about problems when they arise. They think it won’t happen to them, but when the time comes, they make the same mistake. Has this happened to any of us? I think so.
On the other hand, a holiday trip it’s a moment very well chosen by the author, because it is like an obstacle course that helps you to get to know someone you are interested in. «The couple that travels together stays together», you could say. Age is also very important here. When you are twenty is easy to fall in love and think you can spend your life with a charming person who you just met, but a trip —and in this case even just the planning for it— can ruin everything.

QUESTIONS

-Do you believe in love at first sihgt?

-Do you agree with the popular saying «out of sight, out of mind»?

-In your opinion, what is the difference between liking eomeone and falling in love with someone? Are there special signs which help you to tell the difference between infatuation and love?

VOCABULARY

bedsitter, stamina, glossy, haranguing, dalek, gear, holdall