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

Eveline, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia: click here 

Dubliners at the Wikipedia: click here

Eveline (with audiobook): click here

Eveline: study guide

Eveline: quiz

Eveline: analysis

Eveline: symbolism

Eveline: power point

Eveline: Animation

Eveline: Italian free version by Roberto Rosselini

Presentation, by Glòria Torner

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemacus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

EVELINE

Eveline is one of the fifteen short stories published in 1904 by the journal “Irish Homestead” and later in a collection in 1914, called Dubliners. Joyce himself offers a general plan for the book, revelling that he wants to present Dublin under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Eveline opens the section dealing with adolescence.

The story begins “in medias res”, at the middle of the plot.

Eveline, a young Irish woman about nineteen years old, sits by her window. The short first paragraph reveals Eveline’s state of mind: the verb “invade” suggests the dullness and tiredness of her life, her lack of energy. She is thinking about the aspects of her life. Her mother is dead and her older brother Ernest too. Her remaining brother, Harry, is busy working, and he is away on business. She works very hard at home and at work. She muses on Miss Gavan, from the Stores: she always takes advantage of any occasion to humiliate her in front of other people.

She plans to leave home, to leave her abusive and violent father and her existence of poverty in Ireland and to seek out a new and better life. She has already consented to it, but then she says “Was that wise?” and she begins to question the decision she has made, she sees both sides of the question “Was it worth it?”

She thinks she has had shelter and food at home and also the security of the known things. But her thoughts are driving her away because she has decided to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover, and start with him a new better life in Argentina. But before leaving home to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinder outside (it's the same melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician the day her mother died), and, remembering the promise she made to her mother to look after her home, she begins to change her decision.

Another important word at the end of the story is the noun “gate”. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, she will not take this way out; at the very last moment, she takes the painful decision of not leaving with him. She will remain at home.

Themes

The description is a portrait of an unhappy woman of the lower social class in provincial Dublin.

The conflict between staying at home or leaving with her love with the promise of a new start in a new country.

The triumph of the sense of duty and responsibility.

Eveline’s anguish, frustration and pessimism.

Style

I want to emphasize some literary style traits used in this short story:

Joyce choice his favourite narrative technique: the free indirect style. The verbs are mainly in past tense, 3rd person. He changes from time to time to present tense.

Most of the long descriptions in nearly every paragraph begin with the same syntactic structures: She sat at the window, she looked round, she had consented to go away…

He uses many abstracts words (substantives and adjectives) meaning thoughts: to be free; feelings: being tired, and senses, hearing: she could hear a street organ playing, her mother voice saying constantly “Derevaun Seraun”…”, smell: the odour of dusty cretonne, and also the same sounds in one sentence: She looked round the room, reviewing all its...

CONCLUSION

In my opinion, I have read a wonderful pessimist and realistic story. The sensibility of the person, Eveline, is described by the language.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:

Eveline Hill

Ernest Hill

Harry Hill

The father

The mother

Miss Gavan

Frank

Keogh

Tizzi Dunn

The man who’s in Melbourne now

 
Describe the place where Eveline lives.
Eveline has two letters. Who were they for, and what do you think they say?
What good things did her father do for her?
What gave her palpitations?
What used to happen on Saturday at Hill’s?
Describe Eveline everyday’s work.
How did Eveline love Frank?
What was her father’s opinion about the affair?
What was the effect of the melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician?
Why do you think she didn’t go at the end?

VOCABULARY

concrete, cinder path, have an edge on somebody, squander, strut, elate, maze, mist

SOME NOTES ABOUT EVELINE

A man from Belfast: he had to be Protestant (Irish people are Catholics) and Unionist.

Brown houses: for Joyce brown was the colour of the paralysis of Ireland

Blackthorn stick: according to Celtic folklore, blackthorn carries bad luck. Jesus thorns crown was made of blackthorn.

“To keep nix” means “to keep watch”.

Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) was a French nun, enthusiastic of self-mortification; she was some years paralysed, and she had visions of Christ. She was canonized in 1920.

Melbourne: lots of Irish people went there because of the famines.

“They had come to know each other”: it’s a very ambiguous sentence, because it can be in the Biblical sense.

The Bohemian Girl: it was a light opera (1843). The count’s daughter is abducted by some gypsies. She grows up with the gypsies until a Polish count disguised as a gypsy marries her. She discovers who she is and goes to his father, who, at the end, forgives her for getting married.

Italian organ player: at the time a lot of Italians who lived in Ireland were musicians, actors, artisans, pedlars…

Patagonians: in the 19^th century they believe Patagonians were giants.

Deveraun Seraun!: perhaps a Gaelic expression that means “death is very near”.

Sunday Afternoon, by Elisabet Bowen

Elisabeth Bowen at the Wikipedia: here

 The BLITZ. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4104942

 
Elisabeth Bowen was an Irish-born author, but she did her literary activities within a cultural club in London called The Bloomsbury Group, which had its headquarters in the neighbourhood of the British Museum and whose most famous members were the writer Virginia Woolf and the economist John M. Keynes (whose main idea was that the government had to intervene in the economy to correct the bad effects of the capitalism).

But Bowen isn’t very known here: in Catalan you aren’t going to find any translation, and there are only some of this books in Spanish. If you want to find her works in the library, click here.

The short story that we’re reading is a bit autobiographic, because she was born in Dublin and, although she went to live in England, she used to spend her holidays in Ireland where she had an estate and a house, and because during the World War II she worked in London for a Ministry that monitored the Irish neutrality.

Sunday Afternoon is the typical story in where it seems that nothing happens; but the thing is that what happens is about feelings, and this is harder to see and understand; so, I think that the story, although its language isn’t difficult, needs a slow pace and more than one reading.

SOME VOCABULARY YOU'LL HAVE TO CHECK

lawn, drawing, fanlight, twiddle, diversion, nonchalantly, preposterous, at any rate, pert, relinquish, ruthlessness, askance, last quarter (Mrs Versey beauty), besought (beseech), spell

PERHAPS THESE QUESTIONS WILL HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND DE TEXT.

Who was Mrs Versey and what was her relationship with Henry?
Why, in your opinion, does Ria think that Maria wants to go to London?
What is the relationship between Maria and Mrs Versey?
Why does Ronald Cuffe think Henry is a bit cynic?
Why do you think Maria looked at her wristwatch several times?
How do you know that Mrs Versey is a very rich woman?
Why does he call her “Miranda”? (Maybe the 'Miranda' in Shakespeare's The Tempest?)
What’s the “new number chained to your wrist”?

HAVE A LOOK AT THESE SENTENCES/PHRASES AND COMMENT THEM

“But nothing dreadful: we are already feeling a little sad”.
“The late May Sunday blazed, but was not warm.”
“The coldness had been admitted by none of the seven people.”
“They continued to master the coldness.”
“He was to tell a little, but not much.”
“… the aesthetic of living that he had got from them.”
“’Are the things there as shocking there as they say... or the are more shocking?’, he went on, with distaste.”
“The girl... seemed to belong to everyone there.”
“This outrage... will not have literature.”
“Their position was, he saw, more difficult than his own.”
“Screen of lilac/Another cold puff came through the lilac.”
“You had lost everything. But that cannot be true!”
“You live with nothing, for ever. Can you really feel that that is life?”
“This little bit of destruction was watched by the older people with fascination.”
“’They are frightened someone would miss the bus and come back.’”
“’How weak you are!’” (said Maria)
“I can drive a car.” (said Maria)
“We shall be nothing but brutes.”
“You are only inside their spell.”
“The trouble with you is, you’re half old.”

POSSIBLE TOPICS TO DEBATE:

-Gap between generations (you can see three in the story)
-Wars and desertion
-When can/must you be a pacifist?