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

The Toys of Peace, by Saki

 Short film

Audiobook

A review

Summary and analysis

BIOGRAPHY
Saki was the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro. According to the legend, he named his alias after a word he found in the Rubáiyát, by Omar Khayyam, translated by Fitzgerald, “saqi”, meaning “cup bearer”, a servant in charge of liquors, and therefore of cheerfulness. Nevertheless, some people said it came after “sarcasm”, because of the tone of his journalistic articles.
He was born in 1870, in Burma, now Myanmar, then an Indian province, and thus a colony belonging to the British empire. His father was a police officer working there. Hector was the youngest of his three children.
When he was two, he lost his mother in a very tragic accident: in a visit to Great Britain, a cow knocked her down, and days later she died from her injures.
The father, being a widower now, decided to leave his children in Great Britain under the care of two aunts. According to Ethel, Hector’s sister, they weren’t very affectionate (to put it midly), and later Hector took his revenge using them as inspirations for some of his characters.
When he was twelve, he was sent to Bedford, a boarding school.
After finishing school, he decided to go to Burma with his father to work also as a policeman. But  he contracted malaria there and, after a year, had to go back to England.
There, he decided to became a writer. His family supported him in this project, and after six years, in 1900, he produced a historical book about the Russian empire.
We don’t know much about his private life, and after what happened to Oscar Wilde, he carried an even more secluded life.
He had a stroke of luck when the editor of the magazine The Westminster Gazette commissioned him to write a series of short sketches about famous contemporary figures. It was then when he adopted his well-known pseudonym.
In 1902, he was sent as a reporter for The Morning Post in the Balkans, where he spent six years.
Back in London, he published a pair of novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came, as well a kind of political fiction, A German Invasion Fantasy. However he showed his greatest talent in his short stories, first published in magazines and later collected in volumes such as Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis, and Beasts and Super-Beasts.
He volunteered to serve at the First World War, even as he was forty-four and had previously malaria. They offered him a position in the rear, but he preferred to serve in the front as an ordinary trooper. He was killed by a German sniper in 1916 and his body was never recovered.
One of his most famous paradoxical remarks was “to have reached thirty is to have failed in life”.

SUMMARY
Eleanor, Eric and Bertie’s mother, wants to accommodate their education to the pacifist ideas of the National Peace Council. Its proposal is to change the war toys children usually play with with “peace toys”. The Council believes that this way children will become less aggressive and less warlike.
In order to start her experiment, she asks her brother, who usually comes to see the family at Easter bringing some toys for his nephew (an eleven-year-old boy) and his niece (a nine-and-a-half-year-old girl), to bring this time “civilian” (that is, non-military) toys this time. He also would have to explain them how they work,  since they would be new for the children and very different from the usual ones. From what we can see in the story, war toys don’t require any instructions.
So, uncle Harvey arrives with some figures representing important and valuable contributors to social progress, as politicians, philosophers, reformers, pedagogues..., and some curious objects as pocket dustbins or similar useful urban items. The children don’t show much enthusiasm, but listen to the uncle’s explanations. All in all, they don’t seem very convinced.
Then, uncle Harvey leaves the children alone with the toys for a while, expecting they will know how to play peaceful games; but when he comes back, he founds out that Eric and Bertie have a lot of imagination and that they are also able to turn the tables.

QUESTIONS
-What do you think are the best way in schools or at home to promote the ideal of peace between nations?
-Do toys have a real influence in children's education? Do governments have to issue rules about toys? What kind of rules?
-Is war a natual human instinct?
-Toys for boys and toys for girls... how can we avoid being sexists with toys?
-What do you know about these people: John Stuart Mill, Robert Raikes, Mrs Hemans, Rowland Hill, John Hershel, Hogarth, Madame Du Barry, Madame de Maintenon, Marshal Saxe...?

VOCABULARY
upbringing, Dreadnoughts, hot houses, wahs-house, ballot-box, sewers, calico

Zelig, by Benjamin Rosenblatt

 Audiobook

Review

Summary

There’s no much information availabe about Benjamin Rosenblatt. We have to suppose he was a Jewish who lived in New York. We know he was active writing in the beginning of the 20^th century because it was then when his short stories were published. On the Internet you can find only three short stories by him. 

Our story, “Zelig”, is about a character of the same name. He and his family (wife, son and grandson) lived in Little Russia, that is, in a region in Ukraine. But as things didn’t go well in Russia, his son, a widower, took his child, an eleven-year-old boy, and migrated to the USA. Zelig chose to remain in Russia, notwithstanding the hard life conditions.
In New York, his son seemed to prosper and asked his father to come to live with him, but Zelig didn’t want to leave his country. However, one day, Zelig’s son got ill and he asked his father to come there to help him and his grandson. Reluctantly, Zelig travelled there with his wife, got a job in a cloak-shop and helped his son, who was no longer able to work. But he missed his homeland and longed to go back, even though he knew that conditions there with the pogroms was worse than ever. He was a huge man, a bit crazy, all the time lost in this thoughts, who rejected to belong to any community. He also paid a lot of attention to his money, and, according to the cliché, he was very mean.
But Zelig’s son didn’t recover from his illness and died. So Zelig had to take care of his grandson, who wanted to study at the university, pay for it, and forget about getting back to Russia.

Kew Gardens, by Virginia Woolf

 

Audiobook

Analysis

Written by Nora Carranza

BIOGRAPHY

Thinking about Virginia Woolf:

One of the most relevant writers of the 20th century; she renovated English literature of her time; extensive work including novels, stories, articles, and essays; defended freedom and liberation of women; lover of men and women; influenced intellectual and artistic society; opposed moral conventions; loved her husband and he loved her deeply; introduced the modernist movement in writing; expressed the stream of consciousness and the complexity of the human mind; recognised, forgotten, and restored thanks to feminist criticism. She suffered, from adolescence, deep and long depressive crises, and finally threw herself into the River Ouse.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (London, 25 January 1882 – Lewes, Sussex, 28 March 1941). Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent writer and intellectual; her mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, born in India, belonged to a distinguished family. Both parents were widowers with children from previous marriages, and together they had four more children, including Virginia. One of them died young; the others maintained a close relationship.

Virginia and her sister Vanessa were educated at home by their parents and tutors. Moreover, the house was visited by prominent representatives of Victorian cultural society, and the young girls had free access to Sir Stephen’s splendid library. Unfortunately, misfortune and tragedy came early in Virginia’s life. It seems that both sisters suffered sexual abuse from their stepbrothers. When Virginia was thirteen, Julia Stephen died—another strong emotional blow that provoked her first episodes of mental instability and depression.

Some years later, Stella, the beloved stepsister, died. Eventually, Sir Stephen also passed away. These losses caused further suffering, deepening the difficulties for Virginia to lead a normal life or work during certain periods. It was a serious emotional situation that doctors of that time could neither understand nor treat. The symptoms accompanied Virginia Woolf throughout her life. Despite her literary success, social influence, intense cultural activity, lovers, and a loving and stable marriage, depression was always threatening her days.

After Sir Stephen’s death, the siblings moved to a house in the elegant Bloomsbury neighbourhood. It soon became a meeting point for artists, writers, economists, and philosophers, giving rise to the celebrated Bloomsbury Group. The group had a significant impact due to its progressive ideas about politics, art, feminism, and its opposition to Victorian conventions.

In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer, editor, and member of the group, who played a fundamental role in her life, offering deep love, understanding, and emotional support. The couple founded Hogarth Press, publishing not only Woolf’s works but also books by innovative authors in literature and psychoanalysis.

In 1925, Mrs Dalloway was published, her first fully recognized novel, although she had already written other works.

That same year, Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West, a writer and gardener, married to the politician Harold Nicolson. Their relationship lasted throughout the 1920s, a fruitful period for both authors. Woolf produced To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), as well as several essays. The two women remained friends until Woolf’s death.

In 1929, her most relevant essay, A Room of One’s Own, based on lectures delivered at Cambridge University, was published. It clearly expresses her feminist ideas: women must find their own voice, not imitate men. The difference between sexes is not a problem, but a richness.

The arrival of World War II, with bombings (Virginia and Leonard lost their house in London), and the Nazi threat increased her emotional struggles.

The couple had a cottage, Monk’s House, in Sussex. After finishing her last novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf fell again into a profound depression she could not overcome. On 28 March 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home, leaving two letters: one for Vanessa and another for Leonard. Her body was found days later.

Nowadays, her condition might be considered bipolar disorder. Perhaps today she would not have needed to take her own life.

Letter for Leonard

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

 

Novels

The Voyage Out (1915)

Night and Day (1919)

Jacob’s Room (1922)

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Orlando: A Biography (1928)

The Waves (1931)

The Years (1937)

Between the Acts (1941)

Essays and essay collections

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)

“Modern Fiction” (1925)

The Common Reader (1925)

“The Art of Fiction” (1927)

“The New Biography” (1927)

The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)

Three Guineas (1938)

Other works

“Kew Gardens” (1919), a short story

Flush: A Biography (1933)

Freshwater (1935)

KEW GARDENS

Perhaps the title of this short story evokes in some reader’s mind the images of those huge, prestigious, magnificent Royal Kew Gardens, full of devoted visitors. The reader may have anticipated a story with refined, sophisticated protagonists, wandering through the different and varied arrangements of flowers and trees, discussing elevated subjects.

Far from that scenario, the tale concentrates only on a single oval flower-bed and a few quick passers-by, during a hot summer afternoon.

The whole splendid nature of Kew Gardens is concentrated in a small piece of land. The behaviour of the visitors is demonstrated through four plain, chatting couples.

The universe of the oval flower-bed presents hundreds of stalks with colourful petals at the tip, moved by the summer breeze. The light falls upon a pebble or the shell of a snail, or a raindrop.

The detailed description shows the rich life of nature in that little portion of the gardens.

Then, moving irregularly, like the blue and white butterflies going from bed to bed, a man and a woman approached, followed by their children. The man remembered how fifteen years ago, in that place, he proposed to Lily, but he was refused, and finally he married Eleanor and then they had children. Simon wanted to know if Eleanor minded thinking about the past. Why should she mind? She remembered a kiss someone gave her on the neck when she was a little girl. She has kept the vivid significance of that kiss.

They continued walking, while the inhabitants of the flower-bed faced important decisions. A green insect, moving its antennae, seemed in deliberation; the snail, moving slightly in its stained shell, studied its way in front of a dead leaf, analysing its possibilities to reach some goal, rolling on the loose earth, defying difficulties…

Two men advanced to the flower-bed. William, the young one, showed a calm expression; the elder one kept talking incoherently, passing from one subject to another, from dead spirits to an electric battery, or to the forests of Uruguay he visited years before. William, whose face showed great patience, tried to distract the old man and made him move on.

The next couple followed closely the previous one, two elderly women, described as low middle class, both intent on establishing if the old man was eccentric or out of his mind. While restarting their trivial conversation, they reached the point where the oval flower-bed stood, and there, looking at the flowers, one of them considered that a seat to have their tea should better be found.

In the flower-bed, the snail had no rest, so finally he decided to creep beneath the leaf, inserting its head inside that kind of cool brown dome. Simultaneously, a young man and a young woman came near, talking about the Gardens’ prices. They stopped, and together, his hands over hers, he fixed her parasol into the earth. Their hands, their slow words, seemed to express something—who knows—a dubious, uncertain moment. He pulled the parasol, impatient to find where to have tea, like everybody. She walked down the path, asking where to have one’s tea, but soon forgetting her tea, and remembering somewhere, down there, there were flowers and birds and a Chinese pagoda.

More and more men, women, children passed the flower-bed, their movements, voices, desires, dissolved in the hot atmosphere and the colours that the flowers transmitted to the air.

Brushstrokes of one July afternoon, in the famous Gardens near a busy, noisy, large city.

 

QUESTIONS

-Do you have a garden? According to the cliché, taking care of a garden is the image of quiet happiness. Do you think so? What do you prefer, a garden of flowers or a garden of vegetables?

-Sure you've been sitting looking out of the window, or on a bench, watching people and inventing their lives. Where do you usually sit to look at the world? Do you have any anecdote while contemplating?

-In the story there's a lot of nostalgy? Are you a nosltagic person? What do you miss the most of your youth? Would you like to be youth again? Under what conditions?

VOCABULARY
pebble, straggled, ponderous, nimble, taking stock, cranes, gear

The Reencounter, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Original edition

Analysis

Written by Aurora Ledesma

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the twentieth century, as well as an important figure of literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and in the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived childhood. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. Singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel Satan in Goray was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A. in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but when he moved to New York, he left them, and then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her. He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before. Singer worked for the Yiddish newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish; and from German, some books by Thomas Man.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer’s has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbara Streisand. He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

He died on the 24th of July, 1991, in Surfside Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried at Cedar Park Cemetery, New Jersey.

SUMMARY

The story appears in Singer’s 1982 anthology The Collected Stories, a selection of forty-seven works spanning his career and blending Jewish folklore, mysticism, and modern irony.

This is a story of ghosts and the afterlife, a theme that our author Isaac Bashevis Singer loved so much.

Dr. Max Greitzer is abruptly awakened by a phone call informing him of the death of Liza Nestling, a woman who was deeply significant in his life. She had been his great love. Despite the years of separation, the news shocks him, reminding him of their tumultuous thirteen-year love affair,which ended twelve years ago without any communication since. 

Greitzer gets dressed and heads to the funeral parlor in New York City for the service, arriving early. At the parlor, the receptionist escorts him to view Liza’s body in a dimly lit room. Liza lies in a simple coffin. Her face, covered with gauze, is completely unrecognizable, her hair has lost the shine of her youth, and her face, full of wrinkles, is covered by thick makeup. A hint of a smile appears on her lips. How can they do that?, he wonders.

The door of the room opens and a woman, who resembles Liza, enters. At first he thinks it’s Liza’s sister, but then he realizes that this woman is actually Liza herself. This surreal situation reveals a shocking truth: both are now dead and experiencing a strange afterlife together.

They grapple with the absurdity of the situation, wondering how they can remain conscious and aware of everything without their physical bodies. They discuss their pasts, including Liza’s marriage and challenging life, experiencing a mixture of amusement, irony and sadness as they reflect on their deaths and the lack of emotion they feel in this new state. As they float outside, observing the familiar world below, they wonder what life after death means.

They feel liberated from earthly pains, but realize a significant emptiness where their desires once resided. Finally, they begin to rise together, without a destination, gazing down at the earth. Now they embark on a hopeful journey into the unknown reflecting on immortality and the disappointments of life.

SOME REFLECTIONS

The Reencounter is a modern ghost story that prioritizes irony over traditional horror. The author shows us his preference for afterlife stories and he does so with a magnificent sense of humor that hooks us all. The narrative critiques the futility of immortality and treats it with sarcasm and philosophical resignation, as Max says, “of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest”.

This story is interesting and engaging to us, because we wonder what will happen to us after we die. Death is one of life’s greatest mysteries because we do not get to understand it until we are dead.

QUESTIONS

-Do you like visiting cemeteries? What can you tell about any you have visited?

-Do you believe in afterlife? In your opinion, what is there after we’re dead?

-In your view, is it possible a communication between living people and dead people? Have you ever player Ouija, or used the services of a psychic?

-According to you, what important things have to be said in a funeral, or written in an obituary?

-Are all philosophic works sheer nonsense?

-What do you know about Yiddish?

VOCABULARY

rouged, awry, eulogy, wreath, stingy, astral