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| San Miniato al Monte |
SUMMARY AND IDEAS
This is another story about a singular girl: the intellectual, clever, plain, rejected by her schoolmates, shy girl, and her getting free of this secluded scholar life.
Cecilia, a 15-year-old girl, is the only daughter of an
elderly couple, a librarian (Ken, the husband) and a historical novels' writer
(Angela, the wife). This couple brought up their daughter in their likes,
habits and culture, rather apart from ordinary or not so cultivated people. But
while a child, Cecilia has liked this kind of life (reading thick books, going
to the museums…), although for her mates and even for her teachers she has been
a bit of a smart-arse or too goody-goody.
The story is situated mostly in the family stay in
Italy, where they spend a week holiday, although it goes backwards, and
forwards again. In this trip, Cecilia awakens to her adolescence when he sees
how absurd it’s that she’s still sleeping in the same room as her parents, she
doesn’t dress as a teenager and she does cultural tourism. Now she’s abroad,
she feels deep inside her that she’s a kind of weirdo, she sees that they are a
nuisance for the local people and notices the contrast between herself and the
local girls.
She spends all the week in Florence sulking,
although she doesn’t oppose openly to her parents’ opinions and proposals. But
the last day of her stay, she has an epiphany, a moment of revelation when they
go and see a church away from the most touristic and crowded places. There she
likes the building and its pictures, and she sees clearly what a pest is the
tourism. After the moment of calm bliss, a monk chides them for being there
when local people are meeting to say a prayer, and she doesn’t want to be there
any more because she thinks the monk is right; so she asks her parents to go
back to the hotel alone. She has awakened, she wants to break free from her
family and from her childhood.
The ending is very peculiar because the narrator
doesn’t tell us what she’s doing, but what her mother imagines she’s doing.
I think there are some interesting topics in this
story. One of them it’s the beginning: as we can see, it isn’t unusual for
Tessa Hadley to start the story in medias res; it’s a classical way (e.g. Odyssey)
and it’s useful to attract the reader’s attention.
A resource we don’t find in this story is the weather
to create some mood in the atmosphere: sadness, melancholy, action… Perhaps in Italy,
the weather doesn’t change so often to give us a variety of moods.
We can see the story has some similarities with “A
Card Trick”, because the star is also a weirdo shy intellectual girl that wants
to get out of her cocoon. But in the present case, the girl is not the absolute
protagonist: she shares this role with her mother. Angela had to
fight her own mother, because she didn’t want to be a traditional woman, and
now she feels that her daughter also wants to fight her because maybe she wants
to be more like the other normal girls, so maybe every generation has to reject
the previous one.
Another interesting question is the reason or the
meaning of the characters’ names. Does Angela want to be a guardian of her
daughter, as an angel? Saint Cecilia, besides being the musicians’ patroness, is (according to some sources) also
the patron saint of blind people: was Cecilia blind (or voluntarily blind) to
other girls, to the world, and now she can see it because of a miracle /
epiphany?
And we have also some mysteries: why does the narrator
focus our attention in Angela’s mother’s lipstick? What is the meaning of San Miniato martyrdom (he was beheaded, but then he carries his head on his trunk)?
And what about St. Placidus being rescued from the water?
QUESTIONS
-Did / do you do any collection? What do you collect? What for?
-Have you read Middlemarch? And what about Dickens novels? What can you tell us about them?
-Why do you think the writer had chosen such big
physical changes in Cecilia’s puberty?
-Cecilia’s family liked the past and didn’t like the
present. What do you prefer, and why, past, present of future? Is there an age
for each preference?
-Is there a cliché in the story about what men and
women see in museums?
-“Angela wasn’t a feminist, grateful to be liberated
from the tyranny of pleasing.” What does it mean for you?
-The father is “getting early English books online.”
Do you know what is Project Gutenberg?
-Do you think that some people are more attractive
with a cup / cigarette in their hands?
-As you see it, is Signora Petricci correct in her
opinion about Cecilia’s father? Or was it only a teenager’s imagination?
-Cecilia has a trick to get rid of a fear. Do you have
one? Can you tell us?
-May you say that the writer has chosen the
character’s names for any reason?
-What message could the sound of Petricci’s bracelet
have sent to Cecilia?
-“She wasn’t beautiful.” When and why do we decide
that a person is beautiful?
-According to your point of view, intellectual people
are always shut out of the world?
-When you travel as a tourist, do you feel rejected?
How much tourism is too much tourism?
-What do Abraham and Isaac symbolize in the story?
-What do you know about Caravaggio? And about San Miniato al Monte?
-What is for you the best way to learn to appreciate
art, books and music?
-What are the meanings of these revelations for
Cecilia: 1-San Miniato, 2-Vespers song, 3-the monk?
-Why does Angela remember her mother’s lipstick when
Cecilia has gone to the hotel?
-Does San Placidus rescue have any meaning for the end of the story?
VOCABULARY
dummies, squalling, stinks,
showed her off, finicky, wizened, fey, sprite, Poundworlds, identikit, dozed, jazzed
it up, plotters, reëntering, harbouring, static, slacks, hooking, pull-out bed,
swarthy, truckle, checked, derided, crop, scowling, swooning, unassailable, printouts,
sweltering, reprieve, thawing, skeins, Verpers, doom, quailed, scourging, puny,
foreboding, snooping, nub, stamped-out