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 it 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

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