The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck at the Wikipedia

The Thing Around Your Neck: summary and analysis, LitCharts

Chimamanda website

Chimamanda independent website

Nigeria at the Wikipedia

Biafra at the Wikipedia

Tedx talk: We should all be feminists (very easy to understand and very funny)

Half of a Yellow Sun (trailer)

Presentation, by Adriana Cruz

BIOGRAPHY

Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie is a famous writer, teacher, novelist, playwright and feminist activist.
She was born in Agba village, Enugu (Nigeria) on the15th September, 1977. She grew up as the fifth of six children in Nsukka city. 
Her father, James Nwoye Adichie worked as a professor of statistics, and her mother, Grace Ifeoma was the first secretary of the University of Nigeria.
The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family's ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State, Nigeria.
She studied Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the Catholic University's medical students. At the age of 19, Adichie left Nigeria for the United States to study Communications and Political Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be near her sister Uche, who had a medical practice in Coventry, Connecticut.
 She got married to Ivara Esege, and they have one child.
From 2016 to 2019 he won several honorary titles as the Doctor of Humane Letters and the Doctor Honoris Causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland.
She was the author of many novels: Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (translated into 19 languages), and the essay We Should All Be Feminists. Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and Notes on Grief.
Adichie divides her time between the United States and her second residence in Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops.

 The Thing Around Your Neck

This book was first published in 2009, and talks about a woman named Akunna who gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle; but he molests her, and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut. She ends up meeting a man whom she falls in love with, but, along the way, she experiences cultural difficulties with him.
The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected. Although falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
The history based in Lagos and USA, and deals about prejudices and difficulties in accepting the pre-established cultural differences and prejudice of sex, ethnicity, macho and white dominant culture, and many difficulties to get a visa.

QUESTIONS

According to the family, what things do you have to get when you are in the USA, and what you don’t?

Personal question: What things do you usually buy as souvenirs when you go away?
They call “America” the USA. Is that correct?

Where is Maine? What kind of place is (or was) it? And Connecticut?
“They were desperately trying to look diverse” (where her uncle is working): What is your opinion about positive discrimination?
The story is told in the second person singular (you). Why?
In Maine they asked her about her hair: What is the best way to deal with “different” people?
Why did she leave her uncle’s house? Was he really her uncle?
How did her boss Juan treat her in her first job?
According to the protagonist, how is life back in Nigeria?
What were the brown envelopes for?
What stories did she want to tell her family about “America”?
What were the usual clichés about black people?
What things did her future boyfriend (the white costumer) know about Africa?
Why did the protagonist say white people were always “condescending” with Africa?
Talk about professor Cobbledick.
The fortune strips of paper she got in the Chinese restaurant were blank. What does it mean for the story?
Can you remember the story of her father in the raining day in Lagos?
She cooked dinner for her boyfriend: how did he like it?
What kinds of presents didn’t she like?
What do people think of them as a couple?
What behaviour and what decisions of her boyfriend didn’t she understand?
Why does she go back to Nigeria?
In your opinion, is she going to go back to the USA then?
What does the title mean?

VOCABULARY

visa, to get in one’s feet, self-tanner, gawp, Greyhound bus, community college, course syllabi, hawk, preemie, shantytown, maudlin, Jeopardy, root for, throw up, MSG, Nawal El Saadawi

Summer of '38, by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín at the Wikipedia: click here

Colm Tóibin In the Pyrinees: LRB

Summer of '38: The New Yorker

Colm Tóibín at the Vall Ferrera: El punt Avui

Brooklyn: the movie

Presentation, by Àngels Gallardo

Biography

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955.
Some of his family were members of the old Irish Republic Army.
His father belonged to the Fianna Fail party.
He studied in a private boarding school, after that, he studied in the College University of Dublin. When he finished, he went to Barcelona for three years, from 1975 to 1978.
He was a publisher from 1982 to 1985.
He was a good literary critic, teacher at Stanford University, University of Texas in Austin and Princeton University.
Also, he got a Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Ulster for his contribution to the Irish contemporary literature.

Summer of ‘38

This story is about the life of Montse. A man who works for the electric company named Fecsa asked her daughter Ana that he wanted to talk to Montse. He told Ana that he was writing a book about the war in his spare time and he wanted to collect information in this valley and the mountains.
Montse was a person that liked to have all in control and she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises.
The man that works in Fecsa Company was waiting for her at the front door of her building and he told her that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. The man said that he had talked to Rudolfo Ramírez, a general in the army, and that he said he would like to see her and if it was all right to see him.
She remembered situations that happened between them. She didn't forget the sweet smell of his breath, his eagerness and his good humour.
Rudolfo went away and Montse was pregnant. But Montse knew a man called Paco from the town festivals, and she married him five months pregnant with a girl whose father was Rudolfo. Paco took care of the daughter of Montse as if she was his daughter. The name of the baby was Rosa and she looked like Rudolfo.
Montse and Paco had two more daughters.
Rosa went to live in Barcelona, and she studied medicine. She holidayed with her own family in Santa Cristina.
When Paco was dying, Rosa looked after him.
When the man from Fecsa Company came again, she told him that she was not feeling well, and she didn't want to have lunch with him and Rudolfo.
At the end of the story, Montse showed several photos about her family before the war to her daughter Rosa.

QUESTIONS

There’s a feeling that the writer has a point of view of the place, the time and the situation a bit different from a native: Ana (not Anna), fecsa (not FECSA), maiden name (here is the same as married name), Rudolfo (not Rodolfo), Loyalists (not reds; and he never says the others were the fascists => does the author betray any political sympathies?), granja, Rosa travels to Barcelona to the village and back in one day... 

Talk about the characters:
            Montse
            Ana
            Rosa
            Oriol
            The man from fecsa (sic)
            Paco Vendrell
            Rudolfo
Explain the war situation in the village in the summer of 1938.
What things did Montse like in Rudolfo?
How do the village people behave to the soldiers in the summer? And from September on?
Explain Montse-Rudolfo’s courtship.
“It was the change of weather that changed everything.” What did she mean?
What did Montse do when she knew she was pregnant?
Describe the time Montse went to the Mass.
What options did Montse have if Paco didn’t marry her?
Explain Montse-Paco’s courtship.
After they were married, what kind of love did Montse have for Paco?
What kind of love did Paco have for Rosa?
What did Montse do when Rudolfo was in the village with the man from fecsa (sic)?
What do you think of the end of the story?

VOCABULARY

walk (sb) to, mix (sb) up, easygoing, fix, chart, dugout, no one any the wiser, makeshift, swagger, antic, mist, demurely, in the reaches of, withdrawn, stickler, impervious, outing, blow up

The Red-Haired Girl, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald at the Wikipedia: click here

Julian Barnes on Penelope Fitzgerald: The Guardian

Penelope Fitzgerald at The Paris Review

Penelope Fitzgerald at Sidney Review of Books

Penelope Fitzgerald's Archive: click here

Obituary at The New York Times

The Means of Escape at the Wikipedia: click here

The Red-Haired Girl at The New Yook Times

The Bookshop trailer

Presentation, by Àngels Gallardo

Biography

Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln in 1916 and died in 2000. She was a novelist, poetess, essayist, English biographer, and she won the Booker Award in 1979 with The bookshop.
She was the daughter of a publisher and her uncle was a theologian, a writer and a Bible scholar.
In her family, there were men of the Bible with a good academic education, so that it impacted her dedication to her writing. She began to write later in life, and she published her first book in 1975.
She was married to an Irish soldier and they had three children.
She worked in a dramatic art school until she was seventy years old.
A library and a boat house inspired her to write two of her novels.
Another thing was that she used to write early in the morning or very late at night.

The Red-Haired Girl

The story explains the life of five people who had studied in the atelier of Vincent Bonvin.
In 1882 they organized a party to go to Brittany because they wanted somewhere cheap and characteristic types, natural, busy with occupations and in plein air.
They were poor and they brought only the necessary luggage.
When they arrived there, they decided to begin with Sant-Briac-sur-Mer because somebody had recommended it to them.
After that, they went to Palourde on the coast near Cancale.
They didn't wanted to spend time as tourists, they only wanted to paint because they were artists.
They made reservations in the Hôtel du Port and their rooms and food were very simple.
In the kitchen of the hotel was working a red haired girl named Annik. She worked all day but she had a short time every day.
One of them, named Hackett, thought that this girl could be his model.
He asked her if she could be his model an hour a day and only when he finished he would pay her.
He asked her to borrow a red shawl because he wanted her to wear it while he was painting her.
During the next three days Annik stood with her crochet on the back steps of the hotel.
He looked for the contrast between the copper coloured hair and the scarlet shawl, and he accepted that she never smiled.
One of the artists received a telegram from Paris; it said that their professor Bonvin will come on a day to the hotel because he would be delighted to see his pupils in Palourde, and he wanted to look at their portfolios, but them were bad for him and he went away.
At the end of this story, Annik disappeared because she had been dismissed.

QUESTIONS

What can you tell us about art and artists at the end of the 19th century?
What information can you give us about Brittany?
Why did this group of artists decide to go to Brittany?
Describe Palourde.
Talk about the main characters:
            Hackett
            Annik
                        appearance (What did she look like?)
                        personality (What was she like?)
            Bonvin (and his relationship with Palourde: “Palourde was indifferent to artists, but Bonvin had imposed himself as a professor.”)
What was Hackett’s saying about catching a cough and what does it mean?
How did the group of artists accommodate (room, meals) themselves in Palourde?
Describe the Hôtel du Port.
What do Palourde people usually do after lunch?
What happened with the shawl for Annik?
Tell us about Annik’s portrait / painting.
“Oh, everybody wants the same things. The only difference is what they will do to get them.” What do you think about this?
“Once a teacher, always a teacher.” What’s your opinion?
Why, according to Bonvin, are Hackett’s paintings bad?
“It’s only in the studio that you can bring out the heart of the subject...” Do you agree?
When you paint, what do you want to paint: what you see, or the soul of what you see?
Faces are soul’s mirrors?
Who was Chateaubriand?
“Boredom and the withering sense of insignificance can bring one as low as grief.” Is this true?
In the end, what do you think Hackett is going to miss?
Is he going to become an artist? Why?

VOCABULARY

knickerbockers, wideawake, sightseer, intended, digs, down, taxing (tax), gibbering, small hours, boredom

Unseen Translation, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson at the Wikipedia: click here

Kate Atkinson website

Unseen Translation: review

Not the End of the World at the Wikipedia: click here

Not the End of the World (The Guardian): review

Kate Atkison and detective Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs)

Case Stories (trailer)

Presentation, by Dolors Rossell

Kate Atkinson was born the 20^th of December 1951 in York, the setting for several of her books. An avid reader from childhood, she studied English literature at the University of Dundee in Scotland, gaining her master's degree in 1974. She remained at Dundee to study postmodern American fiction for a doctorate. Though she was denied the degree because she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage, her studies of the postmodern stylistic elements of American writers influenced her later work.
Throughout the late 1970s and for much of the ’80s, Atkinson held various jobs, from home help to legal secretary and teacher, few of which enabled her to make use of her literary interests.
In 1981–82, however, she took up short-story writing, finding the brief narrative form an effective outlet for her creative energy.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year and went on to be a Sunday Time bestseller. Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, the surprising twists and complicated plots, and often eccentric characters.
Atkinson has criticised the media's coverage of her work – when she won the Whitbread award, for example, it was the fact that she was a "single mother" who lived outside London that received the most attention.
Atkinson now lives in Edinburgh
 
UNSEEN TRANSLATION
Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short stories mostly set in Scotland, and is an experiment in magic realism  (a style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements, often deals with the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality).  The collection was first published in 2002.
It contains 12 loosely connected stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surface of our consciousness. A world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality. Each of these stories shows that when the worlds of material existence and imagination collide, anything is possible.
Unseen Translation-summary:
Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a glamour model Romney Wright, a B-list celebrity more concerned with the state of her bank account than with her son's development. His father is the lead singer of the rock band Boak. Then an enigmatic young nanny named Missy introduces him to a world he never knew existed. Arthur's father is on tour in Germany and Missy is to take Arthur to visit him.
 
Reviews:
“Following the considerable success of her novels, what a pleasure it is to find Atkinson luxuriating in her original genre. Let’s hope she enjoys her return to it so much that many such inspired collections follow.”
I'm willing to bet that Kate Atkinson didn't colour inside the lines when she was a little girl. She's a born subversive, and her charming, alarming, crazy quilt fiction catches the reader off-balance.
The narratives are neither clearly connected nor totally distinct (Atkinson doesn't do anything conventionally). Occasionally she recycles characters:
Usually I prefer my "magical" and my "realism" well separated, like carrots and peas on a dinner plate. But Atkinson is so adept and her narrative voice so persuasive that after a while I began to enjoy the sudden shifts from ordinary life to fairy tale, from anxiety to horror, from a bad day to the end of the world.

Unseen Translation

(some helpful images)

QUESTIONS

What do you think it’s the relation between the title and the story?
Talk about the characters in the story
    Missy
    Arthur
    Arthur’s mother
    Arthur’s father
    Otto
What do you know about these mythological beings?
    Artemis
    Athene
    Aphrodite
    Meander
    Echo
    Pan
    Nymph
John Berger, in his book Ways of Seeing, says museums and galleries are modern churches because when you enter them you have to show respect, keep silence and touch nothing. In the story they say that museums are soporific. What are your experiences with museums?
What do you know about these places?:
    Natural History Museum
    National Gallery
    British Museum
    V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Missy said that a bit of stoicism is good. What is stoicism?
Explain the scene at the newsagents.
Tell us about the different ideas they have to name the girl just born.
What books do they buy for their flight to Munich?
What happened at the Bayerisher Hof?
What did Missy and Arthur do in Munich?
After Munich, where did they want to go?
How does the story end?
 
“The list of worse is endless. That’s not grammatical, by the way.” What isn’t grammatical?
 
“Fell in love with the master who had a mad wife in the attic and who became hideously disfigured in a fire?” What does it refer to?

 VOCABULARY

stags, avian, window shopping, tidal, stroll, smorgasbord, spoilt, mar, trouble-shooter, NHS, SAS, grating, stage school, tabloid, stuck (stick), Camelot, whorl, wanker, bet, elbowed, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, held off (hold off –the rain), hauling (haul), love-rat, cocoon, skim-read, as high as a kite, dawdle, china, porcelain, round-the-clock, kraut, sated, shot, nonchalant, primeval, scuffed, queue /kiú/, coiling (coil), tannoy