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

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

 

 Animation summary (full novel)

Interview with Tim O'Brien about his book

Written by Pere Vila

THE AUTHOR

Tim O’Brien was born on October the1st, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota. He is an American novelist noted for his writings about American soldiers in the Vietnam War. O’Brien was the son of a schoolteacher and an insurance salesman who had served in World War II. When he was ten, his family ―including a younger brother and sister― moved to Worthington, Minnesota. This place had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and his development as an author. The town is on Lake Okabena, in the southwestern part of the state, and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in The Things They Carried.

After studying political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army. In later talks and essays, O’Brien has described how conflicted he felt when he was drafted. He said he often felt restless and shaped by its conservative civic culture. Opposed to the Vietnam War, he spent the summer of 1968 working in a meatpacking plant, while he worried about his draft notice. O’Brien has recalled feeling pulled in two directions: toward his anti-war convictions on one side and, on the other, toward family expectations, hometown loyalties, and fear of being a coward if he refused to serve. In his public lectures, he uses this period to illustrate the moral pressure many draftees experienced as they decided whether to enter the Army, resist the draft, or leave the country. He had been opposed to the war and intended to go to Canada while in training in Washington. Instead, he returned to the army base out of fear, and the following year he was sent to fight in Vietnam.

During his tour of duty, he walked with his platoon to the village of My Lai, where a massacre of unarmed villagers by another platoon had occurred in March 1968, unbeknownst at the time to O’Brien and his fellow soldiers. Years later he would return to Vietnam and revisit My Lai, and write about his experience in a powerful essay for The New York Times, called “The Vietnam in me”.

When he returned to the U.S., he studied intermittently at Harvard University and worked for The Washington Post (1971-74), as an intern and reporter. He collected his newspaper and magazine articles about his war experiences in his first book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, by turns meditative and brutally realistic; it was praised for its honest portrayal of a soldier’s emotions.

The Vietnam War is present in many of O’Brien’s novels: Going after Cacciato; the already mentioned If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home; In the Lake of the Woods; The Things They Carried; Tomcat in Love; etc.

Among other prizes, O’Brien won the 1979 National Book Award; The James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, in 1995; The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, in August 2012; and in 2010, he received The Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College.

 

THE STORY

The Things They Carried is a collection of interconnected short stories about the experiences of a small company of young American men serving in the Vietnam War. The book blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. It is told mainly from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged narrator named Tim O’Brien (the same name of the author), who is looking back on his time during the war. The first story, the one we read, gives its name to the entire book and is a kind of introduction to the main characters and everything they carry, both physically and emotionally.

The story begins with the letters sent by a girl, Martha, which lieutenant Jimmy Cross was carrying. These letters appear throughout the story, as a reference to the past that Cross has left behind and which is very different from the reality he lives in Vietnam. Then the narrator goes on to detail what some of the soldiers carried. First, he details what they carried according to psychological needs, for example: Kiowa carried his father’s New Testament and his grandfather’s old hatchet; Henry Dobbins, in dangerous situations, carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter; Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers and 6 or 7 ounces of premium dop… All this mixed with the detailed description of the weight of their weapons, ammunition, helmets, bulletproof vests, mine detectors, radios, flares, etc.

Little by little, learning how things weigh, we get into the activities and routines of one platoon of 17 men in the Vietnam War: like marching in a line through the meadows and rice fields to the coordinates of an ambush; or how they chose by lot who would enter the tunnels that the Vietnamese strategically built to hide; or how they dug the holes in which they had to spend the night. Until the story reaches a turning point: The death of Ted Lavender.

Everyone is affected by the death of their comrade. While waiting for the chopper to evacuate the dead man, they smoke Ted’s drug, as a kind of tribute and release from the pain of the loss. Then they entered the village of Than Khe and burned everything, shot the chickens and dogs, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage.

Lieutenant Cross feels responsible for Lavender’s death and takes his position more seriously: he burns Martha’s letters and photos. Henceforth he would shut down the daydreams, he would not tolerate laxity, he would show strength, he needed to distance himself from his men, and reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead.

 

STYLISTIC KEYS OF THE AUTHOR

Metafiction: O’Brien frequently addresses the act of storytelling itself, drawing attention to the artificiality of narrative and the author’s role. He often affirms that a story isn’t true in a literal sense but that it is true in the sense of capturing a particular emotional or psychological reality.

Fragmentation: His stories often lack a traditional narrative structure, jumping between time periods and perspectives. This fragmentation mirrors the fractured nature of memory and the disorientation experienced by soldiers in combat.

Repetition and Motif: O’Brien uses repetition and recurring motifs to emphasize key themes and create emotional resonance. The image of the weight carried by soldiers ―both physical and emotional― is a prominent motif in The Things They Carried.

Lyrical Prose: Despite dealing with difficult subject matter, O’Brien’s prose is often remarkably beautiful and evocative. He employs vivid imagery and poetic language to create a powerful emotional impact.

“Happening Truth”: O’Brien frequently speaks of a “Happening Truth”, a truth that isn’t necessarily factual but is emotionally and psychologically authentic. This concept is central to his writing. He argues that stories can be true even if they did not happen exactly as told. The goal is not to report facts but to convey a deeper understanding of the human experience.

 

IN MY OPINION

This story is highly recommended to the times we live in, when wars spread so easily. We have in our hands an anti-war book par excellence. All the events narrated in the story lead us to reject wars, such as the death of Lavender and its consequences, that we have already seen above. This is a clear example of how brutal wars are. However, there are two more examples that I would like to comment on: one is Martha’s virginity, and the other what we could call Sander’s gift.

Martha’s virginity.  Throughout this chapter of the book, Lieutenant Cross reflects at least five times on Martha’s virginity. Is Martha a virgin or not?, Cross asks himself. We don’t need to know. What matters is what O’Brien (the author) wants to convey to us with this fact. Martha’s letters talk about teachers, classmates, writers, poets… She never mentions the war. She lives in another world. She lives immaculately, without having to do horrible things. She carries no stain, nor does she imagine the hell that Jimmy Cross is going through. She does not suspect how dirty war is, how it profanes the integrity of the soldiers, who are stained for life. Martha’s virginity is for Cross like a mirror, where every time he looks at it, he sees himself dirtier.

Sander’s gift. This is the episode where Mitchell Sander finds the dead body of a Viet Cong boy. Sander says: Here it is a definite moral. And he cuts off the dead boy’s thumb and gives it to Norman Bowker, who will carry it on his person from then on. Then they argue about the morality of this event, but it is really hard to see the moral here. However, if we look just before these events, Bowker is described as a good person, literally “a very gentle person”. Under normal circumstances, a good person would never accept a gift of this kind. But they are in a cruel war, and Bowker accepts the gift. So, the moral is that no matter how good a person you are, in a war to survive you have to do horrible things. And they remember the old TV series Have gun, will travel, where if you have a gun, use it and you will be able to move forward, survive. So, we see how war brutalizes good people.

 

TO FINISH

Tim O’Brien work has helped redefine the war narrative, moving away from traditional heroic portrayals and focusing instead on the psychological and emotional toll of conflict. His innovative use of metafiction and his exploration of the relation between truth and storytelling have inspired countless writers. His commitment to honesty, vulnerability and emotional depth has earned him a place among the most important American authors of his generation. He forces readers to confront the complexities of truth and the enduring power of stories to shape our understanding of the world.

O’Brien’s legacy is not simply about writing about war, it is about writing about what means to be human: to remember, to grieve, to search for meaning in a chaotic world, and to understand that the stories we tell ourselves and each other ultimately define us.

 

QUESTIONS

-What things would you carry (in an emergency, in an epidemic, to a desert island…)?

-Are they fair wars and unfair wars, or are all the wars unjustifiable?

-How can an Indian become a Christian? How is possible for a person fit two contradictory behaviours or beliefs / faiths?

-Would you justify SIW in order to avoid going to war?

-What do you think it’s better for a country, a compulsory military service for everybody, or a professional army? Expose your reasons.

 

VOCABULARY

(There are unnumbered military terms in the text: we’ll try to explain them in our session.)

foxhole, canteen, major, killer, magazine, swabs, slingshot, bad news, draw numbers, rabies, spools, fatigues, sniper, frisking, smokestacks, wiggy, talons

Civil Peace, by Chinua Achebe

 Audiobook

Analysis

Deep analysis

BIOGRAPHY

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, a city in the South East of Nigeria, the region that for a short period of time was Biafra. He was an Igbo, one of the multiple ethnicities of Nigeria. His father was a protestant missionary (one of Chinua’s first books was Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan). His family were decidedly pro-British while Nigeria was a British colony, even as they were poor –they lived in a zinc house. Chinua was baptised Albert, after Queen Victoria’s Consort. When he discovered what colonization was really about, he became anti-colonialist and changed his name to Chinua, which in Igno means “prayer”.

During the decolonisation in the 1960s, Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria, and a civil war ensued. Chinua fought for Biafra, but the state lasted only three years. The civil war wasn’t only about the independence of a region: in Nigeria there had been several coups d’état and massacres between ethnicities, mainly between Hausa people, Muslims, in the North, and Igbo people, Christians, in the South.

He studied at a Nigerian University and then he worked as a college teacher.

Politics and politicians with their corruption disappointed him, and he emigrated to the USA, where he taught at some universities. He went back to Nigeria for some time, to return to the USA for good, where he died at the age of 82.

His most famous book was Things Fall Apart, in 1958, written in English, although his mother tongue was Igbo. For this book, he was called the father of African literature.

He won the Man Book International Prize in 2009 and he was awarded the Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize with a very important sum of money for an art prize.

There is also an annual event related to him: the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.

 

SUMMARY

This story takes place after the Biafra War, in 1970.

One of the main difficulties after a war is to restore the legal and social order, and that means to dissolve or assimilate the defeated army; or, at least, to collect all their weapons. In these circumstances, groups of soldiers go on fighting and resisting, or most usually they become bandits. So, sometimes stealing and fighting get mixed together, and eventually it is difficult to know if they are rebels or only bandits.

In our case, the protagonist of the story, Jonathan Iwegu, was happy because the war was finished, because he was discharged and now could go back home. He also felt lucky because he had come out sound and safe of the war, and with his wife and three of his four children also alive. And their house, almost just a cabin, was intact, although a big and modern building near it was destroyed by a bomb. Furthermore, he was able to recover his old bicycle.

He was an optimistic man, and in every unexpected situation, he uttered: “Nothing puzzles God”.

Using his bicycle as a taxi, he earned some money, and this bit of money was, for him and in these times, a small fortune. His little house needed some repairs, and with a few coins and a bit of help, he was able to fix it and leave it again like new. The children helped their family collecting and selling fruits, and the wife cooked some food for take-away breakfasts. They could even open a bar for soldiers: they prospered. And one day, he could change his Biafra money for the only now legal Nigerian money. He got twenty pounds. So all went extremely well. 

But that very night, some problem knocked at their door. It was a group of soldiers turned into robbers and they wanted Jonathan’s money. Jonathan and his family shouted for help, but nobody answered their call, although he was a good neighbour. The bandits insisted at the door knocking even louder and stronger. They threatened the family, yet they said they were “good” thieves, good people. They asked for a hundred pounds because they believed they were rich people. Eventually, after a negotiation, they agree to go away with the twenty pounds deo-gratia (or egg-rasher) Jonathan got that very day.

The next day the family went on with his daily routines as if nothing had happened.

Jonathan was an optimistic man.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about Nigeria and Biafra?

-Jonathan’s favourite sentence for unexpected events was “Nothing puzzles God”. Do you have one of your own? What is it?

-If you miss some money: what would you prefer, that it was stolen from you, or that you lost it accidentally? Are there “good” robbers, or are all the robbers bad?

-Do you consider yourself an optimistic person, or rather a pessimistic one? Do you have a “cornerstone” to determine this quality in a person?

VOCABULARY

biro, rummaged, retailed, plane, palm-wine, windfall, sandpaper, demijohn

Happy Endings, by Margaret Atwood

 Audiobook

Analysis (video)

Themes in ths story

Written by Glòria Torner

BIOGRAPHY

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). When she was seven years old, her family moved to Toronto, but she still spent much of her childhood in the northern Ontario and Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research in forests. Her love for nature influenced her writing. She became a voracious reader of literature: pocketbook mysteries, Canadian animal stories and comic books. She did not attend school full-time until she was twelve years old.
Atwood realised she wanted to write professionally when she was sixteen. She studied and received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1961, where she published poems and articles in the college literary journal. Later, she studied and obtained a master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962.
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but they divorced in 1973. She had a long-term relationship with the Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, living together in Toronto until his death in 2019. She wrote about her lover, Gibson, in the poetry book, Dearly.
She is a prolific writer. Since 1961 she has published eighteen novels, eighteen books of poetry, eleven books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, two graphic novels and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her autobiography, called Book of Lives: A Memoir, was published in 2025.
In addition to writing, she taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities.

The main themes in her literature are:
Dystopian and speculative and science fiction.
Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin are historical novels, and the MaddAddam trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster.
She published her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1985. This novel tells the story of Offred, a woman living in a sexual slavery, in a repressive Christian theocracy in the future. She recounts her daily experiences of her life as a “Handmaid”, forced to bear children for the higher-ranking members of Gilead society. As most women cannot conceive children, Offred and some other young women, who live without freedom and under oppression, provide children for influential families.
This book, criticised as immoral in Christian societies, was adapted into a film in 1990, and an acclaimed TV series based on the novel was co-written by the author in 2017. In 2019 she wrote a sequel, The Testaments.
Afterwards, in The Heart Goes Last, the writer imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a community that functions like a prison.
The theory of Canadian identity and memory. This theory has garnered attention both in Canada and internationally in her principal work of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. She postulates that Canadian literature, and by extension Canadian identity, is characterised by the symbol of survival.
Gender, identity and feminism. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, published in1969, is an early example of feminism, a topic found in many of her works.
Animal rights. Surfacing is an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, and in Cat’s Eye, the narrator recognises the similarity between a turkey and a baby survivor.
She writes about other themes: religion and myth, climate change, power politics. Sometimes, several themes are interconnected within a single novel.
She has won, among other prices, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2008, the Pen Pinter Prize, in 2016, and two Booker Prizes, in 2000 and 2019.
 
HAPPY ENDINGS

This short story was first published in 1983 in the Canadian collection Murder in the Dark, and in1994 it was available in the United States in Good Bones and Simple Murders.
It is a short story structured into eight sections: six varying, interlocked narratives and two brief sections, one at the beginning of the story, and the other one at the end.
In the first section (I think), Margaret Atwood decides to use the interrogative pronouns “Who” and “What,” following “The 5Ws”: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and one more, “H” How?” Many journalists use this framework to communicate the most relevant information of the story in a newspaper article. And these three sentences are used as an introduction by the narrator who addresses readers directly as you, and comments on the craft of storytelling during and after the narratives.
The six variations are written using these five plot elements. I’ll use this structure in the first one, but I think it is not necessary in the other ones.
Exposition: John and Mary fall in love and get married.
Rising action: they have good jobs, buy a beautiful house, and have two children.
Climax: they have some friends and a stimulating sex life.
Falling action: they retire and enjoy their hobbies.
Resolution: they die.
In this second storyline, Mary falls in love with John, who doesn’t love her, he only uses her for sex, but she hopes that he will come to love her. One day, John is in a restaurant with another woman, Madge. When Mary’s friends tell her he is cheating with Madge, Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find and takes them with half a bottle of sherry. She leaves a note for John, but she thinks he’ll discover her, take her to the hospital, and later marry her. But this fails to happen. Mary dies and John marries Madge.
Now, in the third structure, John, an old man, who has a steady respectable job, is married to Madge. He is having an affair with Mary, a young girl. She has sexual relations with him, but she doesn’t love him because she prefers James, who is the same age as her, has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. One day, James discovers John and Mary in the bed. James shoots the two of them and commits suicide. At the end, Madge marries Fred. It is a love triangle.
In this fourth storyline, Fred and Madge are happy together. They have a nice house near the seashore. One day, a tidal wave approaches their home. Despite the loss of their home, they are grateful to have survived the calamity that killed thousands. They remain together. This ending is very similar to the first one.
In the fifth storyline, Fred has a bad heart and he dies. Afterwards, Madge devotes herself to charity work. However, the narrator address directly to the reader in 2n person, and tells them that these details can be changed. You can choose: Madge could have different endings: cancer…
In the last storyline the narrator suggests that the story can be changed again, making John a revolutionary, and Mary a secret agent who starts a relationship with him in order to spy on him. This story is very similar to the first story.
The last section has two brief remarks: the narrator observes that the endings of different plots are the same: death is the only true ending that comes to all of us, and therefore to all characters. But the beginnings are more fun. Plot is fundamentally, just one thing happening after another. Intentionally, she forgets “where”, “how” and “why”.

Conclusion
Margaret Atwood writes a story about writing stories with six different scenarios, always with a relationship between a man and a woman. Plain stories without poetry and sensibility. Too much pessimism! And with an unreal title!

QUESTIONS
-Do you think plot is only “one thing after another”? What do you know of Todorov’s Five Stages of Plot?
-According to a theory, girls usually prefer bad boys to goody-goody ones. Do you think it is a real fact or it is something conjuntural?
-What is happiness? What is for you the best/most original definition of happiness? How do you know if you're happy or you aren't? How do you know when other people are or arent happy? Is happiness an invention of the consumer society?

VOCABULARY
live-in, tepid, run-down, higher, underwater, stoned, brawling

Skin, by Roald Dahl

 Audiobook

Film (Tales of the Unexpected)

Prezi presentation

Creative writing with Roald Dahl

Study guide

Chaïm Soutine famous paintings

A VERY BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
 
Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales; he was the son of a rich Norwegian family who had migrated to Great Britain. Roald was named after the poles’ explorer Roald Amundsen.
In his book Boy: Tales of Childhood, he narrates his childhood, his time in the school village and in a boarding school. According to him, it was an unhappy time.
As a teenager, he attended Repton School, near Derby. In the same book, he reports about the cruel and violent atmosphere of the place, with its hazings and its physical punishments.
When he was 18, he started working for the Shell Petroleum Company, and, after four years of training in Britain, he went to Kenya and other places in Africa as its employee. From his  job in the Shell Co and his years in the RAF, another book resulted: Going Solo.
The second year he was staying in Africa, WWII started, and he had to join the British army there. He applied for flying in the RAF, and after a very short training, he piloted a plane and fought in different battles in Africa and in Greece. In one of his raids, he had a crash that left him some time blind and wounded; but once he had spent some months in hospital, he went flying and fighting again.
When the war was finished, he was given a post in the British Embassy in Washington, and later he worked for the British Intelligence. Here he met C. S. Forester (author of Captain Hornblower –in Spain, the film adaptation was called “El hidalgo de los mares”, with Gregory Peck as the star). Forester encouraged him to write his experiences as a pilot in the war, and from that moment, Roald Dahl became a writer.
After the success of narrating his RAF experiences, he started to write fiction, usually stories for children and short stories for adults. Who doesn't remember Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Witches?
His short stories were adapted for a television series under the name of Tales of the Unexpected, of which our story Skin is a famous one.
He also wrote a novel, My Uncle Osvald, and the scripts for James Bond’s You Only Live Twice, and for Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang.
He died at 74 of a rare cancer.

SUMMARY
This is one of the most typical stories by Roald Dahl: a tale of the unexpected. A bit of horror, a bit of thriller, sophisticated atmosphere and surprising ending.
A man called Drioli sees a picture in an art gallery and all of a sudden remembers its painter, Soutine, and the golden age in Paris where they had lived the bohemian life of the romantic artists. The painter was at that moment a young refugee from Russia and had a great talent, but he couldn’t sell any of his pictures: they were too modern. Drioli was a tattooer, and Soutine was in love with Drioli’s wife, his model.
One day, Drioli had a lucky strike (he tattooed a lot of drunken sailors) and got a lot of money from them. Now, the only thing he wanted to do with it at the moment was to celebrate this success, and the only thing he could imagine for a celebration was getting drunk. So the three of them had a party and got really boosted. In the middle of their intoxication, Drioli had a wonderful idea. He was so enthusiastic about Soutine paintings that he wanted to have something by him, and it came to his head to have a drawing tattooed in his skin made by Soutine. But Soutine didn’t know anything about the art of tattooing, and Drioli had to teach him how to use the needle. The motive had to be, of course, a portrait of Drioli’s wife, and the best part of his body where to do it was his back. The painting exhibited the Soutine's art to perfection. Once done, Soutine loved his work so much that he signed it with delight.
Then, a lot of things happened: there were two world wars and Drioli’s wife and Soutine died.
 
Now, we are just after WWII, when Europe was totally devastated, and Drioli, as almost everybody, was poor and hungry. Drioli was passing by a famous art gallery in Paris and saw Soutie’s picture in its window. Suddenly, he became aware that he was, at last, a renowned painter, and that his paintings were highly valued in the art market… and that he had a painting by him on his back!, in his skin! But he could get money from it! The thing was, how?
How could he sell the painting?
Someone from the gallery proposed him to be a sort of mobile picture, a live painting walking and exhibiting himself in a luxury tourist resort, bed and meals paid for life. The manager of the art gallery proposed to him that a surgeon stripped him of his back skin and replaced it; the other one said that would kill Drioli, but the manager assured he knew expert surgeons who could do the operation without any risk.
What did Drioli decide to do?
Sorry, but we aren’t going to give away spoilers.
 
QUESTIONS
-Do you have a tattoo? Are you pro, or against, tattoos? If you have a tattoo, or you know something about it, can you describe the process? Can a tattoo be art?
-And what about piercings? Do you have to be legally an adult (18 y-o) to have a piercing or a tattoo?
-Who decides if a painting is really a work of art? And how? Is there something really objective in the decision? How can you question this decision without appearing a simpleton?
-When a nude is art and when it isn't?
-What do you know about Chaïm Soutine, the real painter?

VOCABULARY
hedgehog, brooding, boozy, scowling, Kalmuck, peeking, jabs, impasto, collops, paw, flunkey, wings (of a nose), lacking
 

The Untold Lie, by Sherwood Anderson

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth

 Summary and analysis

Excerpts of several analysis

Audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio.
He was the third of seven children. His mother died in 1895 and his father started to be absent for weeks, so Sherwood had to take several jobs to support his family. Anderson's talent for selling was evident, and he was very successful in this type of business.

In 1898, he signed up for the United States Army, and his company was sent to the war in Cuba.

He met Cornelia Pratt, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio businessman, they got married and had three children, and he ran a number of different businesses.
In November 1912, Anderson had a mental breakdown, left his wife and their three children and decided to become a creative writer. He divorced Cornelia in 1916; later he got married to Mitchel, they divorced, and he got married again to Elizabeth; they divorced in 1932, and he got married again to Eleanor Copenhaver.
In 1916, Anderson's first book, Windy Mc Pherson's Son, was released, and in 1919, his most famous collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio. In 1923, he published Many Marriages, where he explored the new sexual freedom. Dark Laughter appeared in 1925, and it was his only bestseller.

Anderson died in Panama in 1941, during a cruise to South America. He was buried in Marion, Virginia. The writing on his gravestone reads "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure".

SUMMARY

Ray Pearson, an old man, and Hal Winters, a twenty-two-year old boy, were employees in Wills farm. They didn’t have a lot in common: Ray was married and had six children and Hal was single, although he had had some scrapes with women. Besides, Hal was considered a villain, an outlaw. He had two brothers, and was the worst of the three. People said he was “a chip off the old block”, because his father had fits of anger when he was drunk. His father died in a tragic accident on the rail tracks: being drunk, he drove his cart with two horses against an upcoming train, and they -cart, horses and driver- were ran over and got crushed to death. Hal was a good-for-nothing one; he had even robbed his father, and once, they had gone to the street to settle their differences with fists. 

But now he was working for Wims, because near Wims farm was a school, and he had a crush on the schoolteacher. Everybody thought that he would get the young woman in trouble.

As Ray was older than him and was married and had children, Hal decided to ask advice from him: he had got Nell, the teacher, in trouble, so what did he have to do? Did he have to marry her, or abandon her? You know there and then people's opinion about marriage was a kind of cliche: when a man got married he lost his freedom.

Hal didn’t give any answer because he didn’t know what to say to him. He went home thinking about the question. Walking there, he met his wife. Following her along the track, he experienced very opposed feelings: on one hand, he was absorbed by the beauty of the autumn landscape, and on the other, he felt a kind of rage against his sharp-featured, sharp-voiced wife who gave him sharping orders.

So Ray went on a little confused and felt again the beauty of the country. When he was young he also had got his wife in trouble, but he thought he didn’t cheat her, because she had wanted the same. Then, he remembered his projects of youth, his lost illusions…, but he also remembered his children clutching at him. However, for him at that moment, children were only “accidents of life”.

By now he knew the answer to Hal’s question: he shouldn’t pay for anything, he wasn’t the only one “guilty”, because what Hal had wanted, Nell also had. Ray had to prevent Hal from making the error of marrying, because marriage was a bondage. So he met Hal with his idea bursting out of him, but he got a shoking susprise when Hal told him he had already decided to marry Nell, because he knew she was no fool and she also wanted him.

And Ray Pearson had to laugh his head off. Of course, the piece of advice he had decided to tell Hal would have been a complete fraud... because he loved his familiar life.

And now perhaps we understand why the narrator says this isn’t the story of Windpeter Winters, nor the story of Hal Winter, but, although it doesn’t seem to be, the story of Ray Pearson.

Anderson has written the story just as if he was telling us a tale aloud, as ordinary people told stories sitting by the fire, full of digressions and without a straight linear time.

QUESTIONS

-Is marriage a bondage? Where does that idea come from? Is it a sexist idea?

-Is is possible a frienship between people of very different ages?

-To what extent is the saying "a chip off the old block" true?

-People say giving advice is very easy because it's free. In your view, what do we have to learn about giving and getting advice?

VOCABULARY

frame house, reprobate, raving, humdrum, devilment, husking, chapped, shocks, ear, puttering, chores,