Dog, by Graham Swift

 

SUMMARY AND COMMENTS

The plot is very simple: a 56-year-old father, remarried to a woman half his age, takes their baby daughter to the park in her pram; there, a fierce dog attacks another child, and he runs to the baby’s defence and fights the dog with a violence so extreme that in the end he kills it. Then he takes his child back home.

But the story has more issues than this terrible incident.

The protagonist is a self-made man who has made a lot of money, has had a family of three grown up and independent children, a divorce and some love affairs. Then, in his fifties, he got married to a young woman and had a child with her: a daughter whom he loves devotedly. It seems that, once he finished bringing up a family, he stars a new life, a new family and feels young again.

But perhaps the most important theme of the story is the man’s character. We can see that he has been someone who was able to control everything: money, love…, and that taking things in control was his worthiest feature. But now, when he has fulfilled his life (money, family, children) and he’s starting a new one, it looks like as he had lost this control, so he isn’t able to master his life any more: he can’t help adoring, doting on his child with a passion so intense that he even can’t refrain his fury when he kicks the dangerous dog. In the past, he thought he would be happy mastering money and feelings, but now he discovers that this breaking free of his emotions can make him happier.

QUESTIONS

What is for you the relation between money and happiness?

What do you think of giving allowances to your children? And what about the “social salary”, I mean, about the idea of the right to have a salary because you are a person, not because you work?

Do you think it’s a good definition of growing up, “gaining more and more control”?

Do you have a pet? Are you in favour to have a pet when you have small children? Is it a good idea walking the dog in a children’s park?

Do you think that it has to be forbidden to have potentially dangerous dogs?

Is it a good idea to consider your pet as a member of your family? Do you have a dog? What is its position in your household?

“People had dogs in order to have the illusion of mastery and control”. What is your opinion about this?

The scene in which the narrator kicks the dog to save a small child is a bit distressing. Why? Too much violence? But wasn’t he saving a baby from a fatal attack?

The narrator was all the time talking about control. Why do you think he lost control in the park? Was there any other motive besides from trying to save a child from a dog?

What do you imagine Julia’s reaction to the news is going to be?

 

VOCABULARY

utterance, feather-bedded, estranged, inveigled, entrancing, bumps, swerves, put her feet up, crocuses, dab, chunks, notch, graph, dire, threshold, toppled, full-tilt, heave, breed, headsets, bellowing, contraptions, stab, teeter, mauling, writhed, far-fetched, paean, grapevine

Mother's Son, by Tessa Hadley

SUMMARY, by Montse Puigvert

 

Christine, Thomas’s mother, works as a literature teacher at the university and lives on her own in a flat in London. She is working at home, as she usually does on Thursdays, when she suddenly remembers about what someone told her the previous evening while having dinner with some friends of hers: Alan, Thomas’s father, is going to get married to a young girl half his age, in fact she could be his daughter.

Immerse in her thoughts, she receives by surprise the visit of Thomas. He’s got himself in a bit of a mess and needs to talk. He usually doesn’t tell her about his worries, which means that something important must be going on. At first, she thinks it is concerning Alan’s wedding, but it is not, he’s actually happy about it. He’s having an affair with a girl she met at work called Annie, curiously the same name as his girlfriend, Anna. He feels so comfortable talking with this girl, she is very bright, but not as good-looking as Anna. He hasn’t told anything about it to his girlfriend yet, as he wants to be sure, rather than upsetting her for no good.

Furthermore, he is not quite convinced with his work as an assistant of a Labour member of parliament, whom he really doesn’t believe in. Due to that, he is thinking about leaving the job and going away by himself to live abroad, in Prague or Budapest.

He starts to be impatient to leave. Christine knows he is going to meet Annie without even telling her. Remembering the way he has talked about her before, she feels he is so infatuated.

She feels herself reflected on Annie and revives the relationship she had with Alan. They had an affair by the time he was married and with two children. For a short period of time, Alan left his family to live with Christine, and that’s when Thomas was conceived. The relationship hadn’t worked out because they quarrelled continuously and Alan missed his children. So he came back home, leaving Christine alone while she was pregnant. They only kept their relationship from time to time to manage things about Thomas. In one of those meetings, they had a huge discussion on how to educate his son. From that day, their relationship broke definitely.

In the following morning after Thomas went to see his mum, Anna visits her at the university and tries to know what’s going on. Obviously, even caring about her, Christine feels that her loyalty is towards Thomas’s confidence. That’s why she only tells Anna about his worries concerning his job, whether he was doing the right thing working on it. But Anna keeps jostling for more, in fact fighting for their relationship. Christine only adds what he said about the possibility of going on holiday to Europe, and supposedly on his own. Anna is very sad, and she will try to talk to Thomas to get the truth.

Deep inside, Christine envies the Anns for having this struggle over him, the game of pursuit and being pursued, and the feeling of possession, a possession which she, as a mother, had from the very first moment when Thomas was born and which is now no longer available for her.

QUESTIONS

-She had the news about Alan, she forgot them, she remembered next day, but then she only thinks about her place. Why remembering Alan make her meditate about her place and how she likes it?

-Why did she use Mondrian to decorate her flat?

-How do you know she liked her son’s visit?

-Can you make a summary of Alan’s love live?

-Why does the narrator give us information about the husband if the key history it’s his son’s?

-“Being good might be another kind of lie”: When or where can you apply that?

-Why does he prefer Annie to Anna?

-Christine longed those storms caused by her relationships long time ago. Why can anyone miss some herd times in their lives?

-Could that mother (stormy in her youth) be a good adviser?

-For our children, what is it better, a simple or a complicated life?

-Bearing a child is always a good experience?

-Could you say the Alan was a bit sexist, or he was a product of his time?

-What would you say to a child who asked you about death?

-Do you think parents can / have to solve love problems of their children?

-Is “being extra nice” a sign of a lie?

-Do you think Anna pays too much attention to her body?

-What is the meaning of the rotten egg at the end of the story?

-When you had a mess, is it a good idea phoning somebody to tell the about it to try to forget it?

VOCABULARY

bristling, thriving, entertained, slate, cost the earth, brogues, pull a sickie, cropped up, wagged, dummy, popped, slick, BFI, tame, pebbles, dabble, prig, mew, truce, patching, moody, jostling, swivel, rump, shallot, bleached

Buckets of Blood, by Tessa Hadley

 

SUMMARY AND OPINION, by Begoña Devis

Hilary and Sheila are two sisters, both daughters of a vicar's large and poor orthodox family. The memories of their childhood and youth are not exactly happy: endless queues to use the bathroom, scant food, a heater that hardly heats up, fear of his belongings being stolen by his brothers, and, especially, the figure of their mother, overwhelmed, permanently dishevelled, pregnant and with a wild appearance that made people look at her in the street.
For all these reasons, when they both confess to each other that they no longer believe in God, they decide that, in no way, they are going to follow the family model, to have a conventional family, or pregnancies, or children, or anything that remotely reminds them of how their childhood has been. As escaping from this pattern is not so easy, because of their status as women, they decide that Sheila, always more courageous and determined (and probably the older one) will be the one to lead the way by going to the university, so that, later on, Hilary would be also able to move away from the place where they still reside.

When Sheila is already at the University of Bristol, Hilary embarks on a hopeful bus trip to visit her. It is her first time away from home, she is shy and rather unfriendly with people because she doesn't know how to interact with them, and the trip makes her sick, but, despite this, she feels happy. She hopes to meet her sister waiting for her at the station, and then to go together to the Manor Hill residence, where she will be happily ensconced.

But nothing goes as she expected. Instead of her sister, a young man who seems ugly, short and very inattentive, comes to pick her up at the station. She is forced to follow him through innumerable streets, leaving behind the tower of the University, to reach a filthy building, poorly lit, with hardly any water, where her sister and a group of friends live illegally. Sheila is suffering great pains at this time, and everywhere there are small buckets of blood, because she is having a miscarriage. The discovery that her sister has had sexual relations, has become pregnant (by Neil, the ugly boy who has been waiting for her in the

station, and who is not helping at all in that situation) makes Hilary to be in shock, and changes their relationship forever. On the other hand, her classmates seem to her unattractive, and more concerned with drinking in pubs and consuming joints than studying. Hilary has a great disappointment. She can’t understand how people who are on the lucky side of life can behave so rudely and inappropriately, and she can even less understand the attitude of her sister, always willing to please Neil, despite the fact that he did nothing for her during her miscarriage, and that he is always arrogant and pretentious. Hilary can’t recognize in Sheila the girl who had always been her sister.

Finally, after a few days, Sheila accompanies her sister to the station for the trip back home. They have made it very clear that the family will never know anything about what happened, and they won’t ever talk about it again.

On her way home, Hilary thinks that her life will never change as much as her sister’s has, and she feels bewildered. Suddenly, the landscape that she sees from the window seems beautiful to her, and she is saddened by thinking that, when she'll die, she will stop seeing it; then she thinks that she is already dead, and she cannot see it any more, but somehow she is allowed to return to life, and so she decides to enjoy everything while she has the opportunity to do it, down to the smallest detail.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

I think that Hilary and Sheila are very different, even though they are sisters.

The only thing that unites them is the fact of not wanting to form a family that follows the pattern of which they belong, and the need to flee from there.

When Hilary visits Sheila at the University, her hopes are dashed and her wishes changed. That was not the kind of life she expected there, and much less the life she wanted for herself. For this reason, during her trip back home, she suddenly finds herself appreciating the present: she doesn’t like the past, and the future is uncertain, so she decides to appreciate every second and every opportunity that the present offers to her.

QUESTIONS

-“She worried that she smelled of home.” Does every house / home have a different smell? Why does she say “home” and not “house”?

-What do you think of priest getting married and having a family? (Have you seen the film “Keeping the Faith”, “Más que amigos” in Spanish)

-How can you notice that someone has dressed up to be admired?

-Why did both sisters want to get far away from their home and not to become like their mother?

-But Sheila is studying Classics, a bit as her father. What kind of relationship is there between her and her father?

-Has religion or your opinions of the existence of God to be a private question? Why do you think so?

-Do you think there is trust in a family when the children don’t tell one another?

-In your opinion, why is their mother so disarranged?

-Why their mother’s pregnancies were humiliating for both sisters?

-How can you define “provincial”?

-Why does the author describe the hospital as something “sobering and impassive”?

-What do you think of the squatter movement?

-What do you know about Bluebeard story?

-Did you feel a difference between secondary school and university in the students’ attitudes in front of subjects and exams?

-To go to university is being in the “lucky side”?

-What is for you the event that changes a child or a teenager into an adult?

-In the story, Neil seems to be the “alpha male” because of his intellectual power or his coolness? Is this kind of rank going to disappear in the future?

-What do you know about the Oresteia? Do you think it’s a kind of symbol in our story?

-When Hilary goes back home, the weather is cheerful. What is the use of this for the story?

 

VOCABULARY

drawstring, navy school, school mac, Mothballs, Germolene, spots, dribbled out, remonstrated with, fleshpots, flaunt, surreptitious, reading, permed, hand-me-down, wellingtons, paltry, picked, palsy, entrist, beach rounders, twin-tub washing machine, playpen, dun, larked, ropy, maimed, pinstriped suit jacket, blue-rinsed, embossed, Brownie belt, squeak, dogged, daunting, quaint, racked, bundling, toppling, leering, shifty, Hills, Shuggs, kicked out, mould, reel, buckings, the halls, fractious, potties, tummy bug, studded, jug ears, lumpish, duffel coat, perfunctory, estate, fumy, slum, debunking, beeting, harrowed, heaved over, Brummie, small talk, shrank, gawky, lectures, skeins, haze, hummocky