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