Bedbugs, by Clive Sinclair

BIOGRAPHY
There is another famous Clive Sinclair, the one who was an entrepreneur and an inventor. He’s known for having produced the first pocket calculator, and then, the home computer ZX Spectrum.
But our Clive Sinclair is the author.
He was born in London in 1948. He was of Jewish origin, and his surname was Smolensky. He studied at different universities: East Anglia, California and Exeter.
He defined himself as a short stories’ writer. Even his first novel, Bibliosexuality, was originally a collection of short stories linked one to another.
He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981 for his collection Hearts of Gold.
Asked about what he wrote, his answer was “Sex, death and Jews”, but he was also fascinated with cowboys and the Far West, and True Tales of the Wild West is a collection of stories in the Western style.
He also was compared to Kafka, Borges and Nabokov. In 1983 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists alongside with Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift.
He died aged 70 in London.
 
SUMMARY
Joshua, a university English teacher with a marriage in failure, is offered to give a summer course in Cambridge about First World War Poets to a group of German students, mostly girls. He accepts the offer because of the money and also because, as he is a Jew, can avenge his people and forefathers calling mentally his course “Rosenberg’s Revenge”, being Rosenberg one of the poets who was Jewish. But, although Cambridge is only thirty miles from his place, Bury St Edmund, he has to sleep in the college because he is also going to provide the students some entertainment, not only lessons. But the rooms the university has provided for him and his students are infested with bedbugs coming from a nearby building, recently demolished.
So he starts the lessons, where he finds some unfriendly students and some acolytes. One night, for the evening entertainment, they went to the theatre where they could see The Lesson, by Ionesco, a controversial play since it’s an allegory against the Nazis. After the play, Inge, his main devotee, goes with him to a pub where she proposes to produce a similar play. Then, at the college, Inge goes to Joshua’s room with the excuse of exterminating his bedbugs, but there she has an accident going down the modernist stairs, and they get laid.
On the last Saturday, Joshua takes his students on a visit to Bury St Edmund, where he lives and where Rosenberg trained before going to the front. Inge has a minor accident, and he decides to take her home to cure the small scratching; there they find his wife, and, as if his wife doesn’t show any suspicion about their affair, they had a nice dinner.
On Tuesday they have the show, but before the performance, Joshua has a strange vision: he sees, or dreams to see, his wife dead in their kitchen with a knife stuck in her belly. The play is a very singular one: it’s similar to Ionesco’s because there are only three characters, but in our case, Joshua is dressed up as a woman, Inge as his husband, and another student is a TV set. The story ends when Joshua disguised as a housewife shoots her husband six blanks, shouting madly “Daughter of Germany!”
 
QUESTIONS
-What do you know about…?
            bedbugs, lice, fleas, ticks, mange
            Rosenberg (Great War Poet)
            Bury St Edmund
            The Lesson, by Ionesco
            Baader-Meinhof
            Martin Buber
-Do you think Germans are still anti-Semites?
-Anti-Semitism is something you find in a lot of countries and in a lot of epochs? What can be the reason?
-“Women not interested in War? What nonsense! War involves everybody.” Debate: do you think women have to be involved in military conflicts? Or: if you want to stop a military conflict, you mustn’t take part in it?

VOCABULARY
congress, bantam, looms, concerns, rubbed the cow’s nose, routed, phony, counterfeit, lop off, rash, hives, louse, prowler, spunk, pardon my French, Aussie, hatch, sulks, loony, crannies, Spreadeagled, supine, agape, gibbering, cavorts, comes, props, blanks

The Prophet's Hair, by Salman Rushdie

 

Analysis

Summary

Power Point

Another Power Point

Another analysis

Opinion

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

British writer of Indian origin, Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947 in Mumbai.
His father was Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a lawyer who graduated from Cambridge and a businessman, and Negin Bhatt was his mother, a teacher. He has three sisters.
Rushdie studied at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School in Warwickshire, and King’s College, University of Cambridge, where he graduated in History.
When Rushdie was a teenager, his family settled in England.
His first novel, Grimus, published in 1975, had no repercussions.  His next works were Midnight’s Children (1981), an allegory of modern India, and Shame (1983). Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981. He is also the author of a chronicle of his travels through Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile (1987), and in 1990, of a book for children entitled Haroun and the Sea of Stories published in November 2010 to great critical acclaim.
His memoirs were published in September 2012, under the title Joseph Anton, a Memoir.
In 2015, he presented the novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights; in 2017 he published The Golden House, a satirical novel, and, in 2019, his fourteenth novel, Quichotte, inspired by Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel, Victory City, was published in February 2023.
In 2024, his autobiographical book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which Rushdie writes about the attack and his recovery, was published. Salman Rushdie was attacked during a performance in upstate New York on August 12, 2022, at a Chautauqua Institution. As a consequence, he lost the sight of one eye and the use of one hand, but survived the assassination attempt.
Salman Rushdie is an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His books are translated into more than 25 languages.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 for services to literature.
Salman Rushdie also became worldwide news in 1988 when he published The Satanic Verses. It was a very well-received novel in which fantasy was combined with philosophical reflection and a sense of humour. The work aroused the wrath of Shiite Muslims, who considered it an insult to the Koran, Muhammad and the Islamic faith.  It was banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini declared the work a blasphemy against Islam and decreed a fatwa against the writer, putting a price on his head worth $5,000,000 and offering the reward to whoever executed him as well as all those involved in the publication of the book. A fatwa is a religious ruling or opinion issued by an Islamic scholar or mufti. It is usually in response to a question posed by a Muslim concerning Islamic law or doctrine and is not legally binding. The word “fatwa” comes from the Arabic root f-t-y, which means “to decide” or “to give an opinion”. Despite Rushdie’s public retraction and drafting a statement expressing his adherence to Islam, the fatwa was not lifted.
Rushdie’s matrimonies:  He was married to Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987, with whom he had a son, Zafar, in 1979. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West, with whom he had his son Milan in 1999. In 2004, he married Padma Lakshmi, an actress, model, and host of the American television show Top Chef. They divorced in 2007.
Rushdie is one of the best-selling authors in the English language. Most of his works of fiction have generated several controversies for their criticism of different political and social ideologies. His work combines magical realism with historical fiction and is mainly concerned with the connections and influences between Eastern and Western civilizations. Much of his fiction takes place in the Indian subcontinent.
Some of the authors that Rushdie admired or influenced his literature are Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass, Dickens and Joyce.
Rushdie has permanently been very active in numerous academic activities, humanitarian associations, cinema and television 
 
“I grew up kissing books and bread... Since I kissed a woman, my activities with bread and books lost interest.”
 
SUMMARY
This Salman Rushdie story takes place in Srinagar at the beginning of the 20th century, and deals with an Indian Muslim family, dangerous thieves, the finding of a holy relic and the unexpected consequences that the possession of the relic brings over all those varied people.
The narrative explains terrible and dramatic facts in such a comical style, that moves the reader to laugh, besides suffering due to the fast progression of appalling events.
Although this is a short story, many characters take part in the narrative:
Hashim: a powerful moneylender, owning a fortune but not moral concern for his behaviour.  
Atta: Hashim's son.
Huma: Hashim's daughter.
Hashim’s wife: no name.
Sheik Sin: arrogant, bossy and fearless thief. He has a blind wife and four invalid sons.
The tale begins when young Atta entered a most dreadful and degraded quarter; there he asked where he could address to hire a professional thief, but he was immediately robbed of the significant amount of money he had taken along and was savagely beaten.
Next morning, a flower-vendor came across the body of the unfortunate Atta, covered by the frost, at the edge of a lake, and the vendor could learn the address of the dying young from his lips and, expecting a good tip, he decided to row Atta home.
The house was shown as a large mansion by the lake where his beautiful sister and his attractive mother, both evidently waiting in despair, received Atta, in that cold freezing winter morning. Soon Atta fell into a deep coma.
Incredible but true, that evening, Huma followed the steps of her brother through the alleys of the wretched, vile, quarter, asking the same question. Although she was so beautiful, the girl had visible wounds and bruises in her arms and forehead inflicted by her father. Huma made clear to the inhabitants of that neighbourhood she carried no money, her father would pay no ransom, and her uncle, the Commissioner of Police, was informed about her “tour”, just in case she would not come out of the place.  With this introduction Huma got to be taken through terrific, dark, narrow streets to a hidden house. A blind old woman directed the girl inside a darker room until Huma heard the voice of an enormous man sitting on the floor. The courageous girl tried to hide her fear, collecting enough voice to ask the mountain-like man if he was the thief she requested.
A curious conversation followed, as in an employment Office. Hume wanted to hire the most daring criminal, and the grey haired and scarred mountain-man revealed he was Sheikh Sin, the “Thief of the Thieves”, the most notorious criminal. They arrived at an agreement, and brave Huma explained her story, which began 6 days before.
Hashim, the money lender, had breakfast with his family, his wife, his son Atta and his daughter Huma. The atmosphere in the lake side residence was as always one of courtesy and tranquillity. Hashim felt proud of building a prosperous business “living honourably in the word” following virtues like prudence, perfect manners and independence of spirit, virtues that Hashim and his wife taught to their children. By the way, Hashim asked 71 per cent of interest to those who needed to borrow him some money.
Later on, Hashim was about to step inside his shikara, when he noticed a floating phial with an exquisite silver decoration, containing a single human hair. He immediately knew this was the holy hair of Prophet Muhammad, that had been stolen from the shrine, and which the police were furiously searching,
Hashim knew the relic should be returned to the mosque, but being a maniac collector, he easily convinced himself that he must keep the Prophet’s Hair.
He only explained the finding to Atta.
After that possession, a series of dramatic and unnatural events fell on the Hashim family and its members.
Hashim became swollen and spoke awful words, he explained he had a mistress and blamed his children. Driven by an increasing madness, Hashim obliged his family to pray five times a day and read the Quran, or he hit Atta and Huma or the debtors that arrived at the house.
Many other incredible facts happened, until Atta and Huma, overcome with horror, understood that the relic had brought disgrace to the family and decided the relic must be returned, and to get this aim, they should first steal the terrific hair. They should get rid of it at all costs.
That’s how Huma arrived at Sheik Sin house, after the failed attempt of her brother, and made a deal with the king of thieves. The thief should get the relic from Hashim's bedroom by night and he would get the jewellery owned by Huma and her mother.
When the night arrived, Huma opened the house door as arranged, and Sheik Sin entered Hashim's room. In that exact moment, Atta woke from the coma, crying, “Thief!!!”, and died. Her desperate mother began to cry loudly waking her husband in the other room. Hashim immediately grasped his sword and rushed out to the dark corridor, where he ran over a figure and, in a second, he thrust his sword into the figure’s heart. Turning up the light, Hashim discovered he had murdered Huma, and killed himself.
The only surviving member of the family from that dreadful night was the wife and mother, who became mad. Her brother, the Commissioner, had to take her to the asylum.
Sheik Sin got to leave the lake house with the phial but had to vanish to protect himself.
When the Commissioner knew about Huma’s death, opened the letter his niece had written and immediately organised the search for the thief. That enraged policeman shot the bullet into Sheik Sin’s stomach, and the phial with silver filigree rolled out from the pocket of the dead old ruined thief.
The Prophet’s hair was given back to the Hazratbal mosque, where it was guarded closer than any other place on earth to Paradise.
There were even more miraculous facts about that time, because the four crippled sons of Sheik Sin recuperated normal legs, but they got completely angry since they couldn’t beg any more, and so their earnings were reduced by 75 per cent.
The only person who felt grateful at the end of this story was the blind thief’s widow who got light in her eyes enjoying the beauties of the valley at the end of her miserable life.
In my opinion this short narrative, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, always fast and captivating, displays many themes that might be frequent in the author’s literature like fanaticism and the power of religion, superstition, hypocrisy, women domination, money, ambition and poverty, all that concerns Indian society.

 

Srinagar is a city in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir region and it’s its largest city. It lies in the Kashmir Valley along the banks of the Jhelum River, and the shores of Dal Lake and Anchar Lakes. The city is known for its natural environment, various gardens, waterfronts and houseboats. It is also known for its traditional Kashmiri handicrafts like the Kashmir shawl (made of pashmina and cashmere wool), papier-mâché, wood carving, carpet weaving, and jewel making, as well as for dried fruits. It is the second-largest metropolitan area in the Himalayas (after Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal). Srinagar too has a distinctive blend of cultural heritage. Holy places in and around the city depict the historical cultural and religious diversity of the city as well as the Kashmir valley.

The story has its origin in an actual theft of the relic from its location at the Hazratbal mosque in Kashmir in the early 1960s. The relic was subsequently recovered and restored to the shrine after authentication by the Muslim priests.

 

Prophet Muhammad was a religious, political, and military leader from Mecca who unified Arabia into a single religious polity under Islam. He is believed by Muslims to be a messenger and prophet of God. Muhammad is almost universally considered by Muslims as the last prophet sent by God for mankind, while non-Muslims regard Muhammad to have been only the founder of Islam. Born in about 570 CE in the Arabian city of Mecca, Muhammad was orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib. He later worked mostly as a merchant, as well as a shepherd, and was first married at the age of 25. Being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, at the age of 40 he reported that it was there that he received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that “God is One”, that complete “surrender” to Him is the only way acceptable to God, and that he himself was a prophet and messenger of God, in the same vein as other Islamic prophets.

QUESTIONS

-Do you think relics can be of any help in spiritual matters?

-Think about stories where someone hires a thief or a murder and tell us about them.

-What is blasphemy? In your opinion, Salman Rushdie story can be blasphemous for a Muslim?

-What do you have to do if you find lost property?

-“There are American millionaires who buy stolen paintings and hide them away.” Why would you buy or have a work of art?

-For you, what can be the goal of a collector?

-Do you think some objects can be a curse for someone?

-Are religions dangerous for the human being or is the human being dangerous per se?

 

VOCABULARY

shikara, moored, hawker, gullies, welts, crook, application, lavish, bogymen, ayah, goblins, backings-out, shikara, phial, hue and cry, ooze, gush, dope, raga, thugs, cracked, desecrated, djinn, crippling, bulbul, brain, charpoy, hatch

The Country Girls, by Edna O'Brien

Obituary

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Glòria Torner

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in 1930, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, a small rural village in the west of Ireland. The youngest of four children, she grew up in the atmosphere of Irish National Catholicism of the 1940s, marked by an alcoholic father, who was a farmer, and a strict mother in religious practice who considered writing “a path of perdition”.

After finishing primary school in her village, she was educated at the Convent of Sisters of Mercy, a boarding school in Galway.  In her 20s, she went to university in Dublin where she graduated in Pharmacy in 1950 and where she worked briefly as an apothecary. In 1952, against her parents’ wishes, she married the writer Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two children. They settled in London, where O’Brien turned to writing as a full-time occupation. Ten years later, in 1962, she escaped from a loveless marriage and moved to the desolate suburban London where, at least, she felt free to write.

Her life has been divided between England, where she has lived for more than 50 years and where she writes, and Ireland, where her writing comes from and where it endlessly returns, exploring her home country from a more detached perspective.

Edna O’Brien has publicly acknowledged that James Joyce’s works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were her main inspiration and led her to devote to literature for the rest of her life.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, written when she was 30, was published in 1961.  It is the history of two girls who live in a backward and repressive country, especially in rural areas of Ireland. They grow up in their strict homes, attend a convent school from which they are expelled and travel to Dublin and London in search of imaginary opportunities, love and sex. This book was considered a scandal in her country and she was labelled an enemy of Ireland. Her family felt humiliated by this book. It was the first instalment of a trilogy, written in autobiographical style, completed with The Lonely Girl, later published as Girl with Green Eyes, and Girls in the Married Bliss. Now, these two books are set in London, and there the protagonists become disillusioned with marriage and men in general.

She has written more than twenty works of fiction where the main themes are Ireland and women. Some of them are: The High Road, Down by the River, In the Forest, The Light of Evening, The Little Red Chairs, and the last one, written in 2019, Girl, which was inspired by the Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by members of Boko Haram.

Other notable works include a dramatic work about Virginia Woolf, two important biographies, of James Joyce and Lord Byron, and an autobiographical essay called Mother Ireland.

She also has published nine short story collections where their setting varies, although Ireland appears in several of them. One of them is From Mrs Reinhard and Other Stories, where In the Hours of Darkness is included.

She has died recently, in London, on July 27th, 2024, at the age of 93.

THE COUNTRY GIRLS

Following the plot of the book, it’s easy to divide this novel in three parts.

First part and first chapter. Last day of the school.

Edna O’Brien writes in first person, remembering her real life when she was fourteen years old, the story of Cait and Baba, two young Irish country girls. They live in a rural area of Ireland, (County Clare), a backward and repressive country. They grow up in their strict homes and they spend their childhood together, going to the same school.

Edna O’Brien presents the following characters:

Cathleen, “Kate” or “Cait” (in Irish) Brady, the protagonist. She is a charming and naïve narrator girl who describes only one day of her life in this first chapter.

And the other ones in order of appearance:

The father’s absence. Cait begins to talk about the figure of her father with coldness, with some insinuations: “The old reason”, “He had not come here”. We will understand later her father drinks too much, has a terrible temper, and a tendency to go on benders and then returning home to beat his wife.

Deep love for her mother, called Mama in the story. Cait says, “She was the best mama in the world”. What happens to her mother along the story? There is a premonition when Cait pronounces these sentences: “She straightened the cap on my head and kissed me three or four times”.

They are the poor Brady family.

 

Bridge, “Baba” Brennan, Cait’s best friend, is the novel’s deuteragonist. Despite being opposites in most respects, because Cait is dreamy and kindly romantic, and Baba is a lying and jealous girl who wants to dominate many times Cait’s behaviour, they are sometimes allies, and sometimes enemies. She is the daughter of the rich couple Brennan.

Baba’s parents would appear frequently throughout the story.

Hickey, he is the underpaid farm labourer who preserves the family’s fields and animals, and keeps the place going. Cait says “I love him”, but later she changes the word “love” saying “what I really meant was that I was fond of him”.

Jack Holland, owner of the local grocery store who claims loving Cait and says that he wants to marry her. We know he has always been attracted to Cathleen’s mother, but now he is showing his love to Cathleen.

Miss Moriarty, the teacher. As it is the last day of school, Cait and Baba are going to say goodbye to her, and Cait brings her a bunch of lilacs.

The only one character that doesn’t appear in this first chapter is Mr Gentleman, (her real name is de Maurier), a rich French lawyer, much older than Cait. He lives in a nearby manor house with his wife and several children. He has a very important role in the novel. Cait feels attracted to Mr Gentleman, and she imagines her future life with him. Mr Gentleman will be her protector and...

If you read the book, you will know about the relationship between Cait and Mr Gentleman.

Edna O’Brien also describes the rural landscapes of green meadows and wild flowers of Ireland. We are in the poor Brady’s farm, near County Limerick, where fields must be ploughed with effort, and we’re going to discover the daily habits and the atmosphere of Cait’s home when she gets up in the morning and has her breakfast. She describes an Irish village with many small details as the names of trees, flowers, birds…

At the end of this first part, Cait, rushing home to tell her mama she’s won a scholarship to go to a convent school, something very significative happens...

Second part. The oppressive forces of the religious education.

Cait and Baba attend a convent school. They discover that life in the convent is terrible: only prayers, hours of study, and punishments. Cait feels very sorry and sad, but she shines academically. Baba gets into trouble because she hates this school so much, that on several occasions she considers running away. And according to a plan that the manipulator Baba develops, they are both expelled. Their life will change.

Third part. From repression to freedom.

After their expulsion, they move together to Dublin. Baba is sent to a secretarial college and will follow her studies, but Cait will work in a grocery store. They will go to London in search of imaginary opportunities, love and sex in the big city. They struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. At the end of this part, the two girls are 18 years old. And someone who appears along the story clams to find “his country girl” but…

Do you imagine how the book could finish? A happy new life in Dublin, London or another place? Or a sad ending?

SOME REMARKS

I hope to encourage you reading this sensitive book because I think:

Events, people, feelings, emotions and landscape are very well described.

It’s a realistic portrait of Irish people.

The book talks about the discovering of sex without any taboo. This frank treatment of sex and the sharp critique of Irish society in the post-World War II period was considered scandalous at the time in Ireland. But I have not found the obscenities they cite in some references.

Tender and sad book!

QUESTIONS

-What are the meaning of these expressions (page 6, lines 22), “A nun you are in my eye”, “the Kerry Order”, “two heads in one pillow”?

-In your view, using an alarm clock, is it a natural way of waking up? Timetables, are they a better way of organizing our lives, or they're only another way to control us?

-People usually reserve the best plates, tablecloth, cutlery... for visitors. What do you think it's the reason for this? Is it also your habit?

-Aren't you angry when you see an oppressed person happy with their way of life? What would you say to this person?

-In the story there's no much hygiene. In your opinion, does our society exaggerate with cleanness?

-Do you have a kind of talisman you put under your pillow (to sleep better, to have sweet dreams, to not snore...)?

-In your opinion, what is the best way to become your teacher's favourite?

-What is your point of view about religious education? Is it necessary to teach religion in the schools?

-What is the meaning of the last sentence, the maxim "Weep and you weep alone"? Is it true, or it's only an old wives' saying?

VOCABULARY

ankle socks, dew, hedge, canned sweets, turf house, beamed up, pullet, chicken run, he did his water, flag, flush, clippers, range, sharp, stingy, bog, simmering, paling, boulders, meal, moping, pick your steps, blackbird, fudge, sprees, bout