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 

The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse