The Reencounter, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Original edition

Analysis

Written by Aurora Ledesma

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the twentieth century, as well as an important figure of literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and in the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived childhood. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. Singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel Satan in Goray was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A. in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but when he moved to New York, he left them, and then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her. He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before. Singer worked for the Yiddish newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish; and from German, some books by Thomas Man.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer’s has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbara Streisand. He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

He died on the 24th of July, 1991, in Surfside Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried at Cedar Park Cemetery, New Jersey.

SUMMARY

The story appears in Singer’s 1982 anthology The Collected Stories, a selection of forty-seven works spanning his career and blending Jewish folklore, mysticism, and modern irony.

This is a story of ghosts and the afterlife, a theme that our author Isaac Bashevis Singer loved so much.

Dr. Max Greitzer is abruptly awakened by a phone call informing him of the death of Liza Nestling, a woman who was deeply significant in his life. She had been his great love. Despite the years of separation, the news shocks him, reminding him of their tumultuous thirteen-year love affair,which ended twelve years ago without any communication since. 

Greitzer gets dressed and heads to the funeral parlor in New York City for the service, arriving early. At the parlor, the receptionist escorts him to view Liza’s body in a dimly lit room. Liza lies in a simple coffin. Her face, covered with gauze, is completely unrecognizable, her hair has lost the shine of her youth, and her face, full of wrinkles, is covered by thick makeup. A hint of a smile appears on her lips. How can they do that?, he wonders.

The door of the room opens and a woman, who resembles Liza, enters. At first he thinks it’s Liza’s sister, but then he realizes that this woman is actually Liza herself. This surreal situation reveals a shocking truth: both are now dead and experiencing a strange afterlife together.

They grapple with the absurdity of the situation, wondering how they can remain conscious and aware of everything without their physical bodies. They discuss their pasts, including Liza’s marriage and challenging life, experiencing a mixture of amusement, irony and sadness as they reflect on their deaths and the lack of emotion they feel in this new state. As they float outside, observing the familiar world below, they wonder what life after death means.

They feel liberated from earthly pains, but realize a significant emptiness where their desires once resided. Finally, they begin to rise together, without a destination, gazing down at the earth. Now they embark on a hopeful journey into the unknown reflecting on immortality and the disappointments of life.

SOME REFLECTIONS

The Reencounter is a modern ghost story that prioritizes irony over traditional horror. The author shows us his preference for afterlife stories and he does so with a magnificent sense of humor that hooks us all. The narrative critiques the futility of immortality and treats it with sarcasm and philosophical resignation, as Max says, “of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest”.

This story is interesting and engaging to us, because we wonder what will happen to us after we die. Death is one of life’s greatest mysteries because we do not get to understand it until we are dead.

QUESTIONS

-Do you like visiting cemeteries? What can you tell about any you have visited?

-Do you believe in afterlife? In your opinion, what is there after we’re dead?

-In your view, is it possible a communication between living people and dead people? Have you ever player Ouija, or used the services of a psychic?

-According to you, what important things have to be said in a funeral, or written in an obituary?

-Are all philosophic works sheer nonsense?

-What do you know about Yiddish?

VOCABULARY

rouged, awry, eulogy, wreath, stingy, astral

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

 

 Animation summary (full novel)

Interview with Tim O'Brien about his book

Written by Pere Vila

THE AUTHOR

Tim O’Brien was born on October the1st, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota. He is an American novelist noted for his writings about American soldiers in the Vietnam War. O’Brien was the son of a schoolteacher and an insurance salesman who had served in World War II. When he was ten, his family ―including a younger brother and sister― moved to Worthington, Minnesota. This place had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and his development as an author. The town is on Lake Okabena, in the southwestern part of the state, and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in The Things They Carried.

After studying political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army. In later talks and essays, O’Brien has described how conflicted he felt when he was drafted. He said he often felt restless and shaped by its conservative civic culture. Opposed to the Vietnam War, he spent the summer of 1968 working in a meatpacking plant, while he worried about his draft notice. O’Brien has recalled feeling pulled in two directions: toward his anti-war convictions on one side and, on the other, toward family expectations, hometown loyalties, and fear of being a coward if he refused to serve. In his public lectures, he uses this period to illustrate the moral pressure many draftees experienced as they decided whether to enter the Army, resist the draft, or leave the country. He had been opposed to the war and intended to go to Canada while in training in Washington. Instead, he returned to the army base out of fear, and the following year he was sent to fight in Vietnam.

During his tour of duty, he walked with his platoon to the village of My Lai, where a massacre of unarmed villagers by another platoon had occurred in March 1968, unbeknownst at the time to O’Brien and his fellow soldiers. Years later he would return to Vietnam and revisit My Lai, and write about his experience in a powerful essay for The New York Times, called “The Vietnam in me”.

When he returned to the U.S., he studied intermittently at Harvard University and worked for The Washington Post (1971-74), as an intern and reporter. He collected his newspaper and magazine articles about his war experiences in his first book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, by turns meditative and brutally realistic; it was praised for its honest portrayal of a soldier’s emotions.

The Vietnam War is present in many of O’Brien’s novels: Going after Cacciato; the already mentioned If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home; In the Lake of the Woods; The Things They Carried; Tomcat in Love; etc.

Among other prizes, O’Brien won the 1979 National Book Award; The James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, in 1995; The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, in August 2012; and in 2010, he received The Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College.

 

THE STORY

The Things They Carried is a collection of interconnected short stories about the experiences of a small company of young American men serving in the Vietnam War. The book blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. It is told mainly from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged narrator named Tim O’Brien (the same name of the author), who is looking back on his time during the war. The first story, the one we read, gives its name to the entire book and is a kind of introduction to the main characters and everything they carry, both physically and emotionally.

The story begins with the letters sent by a girl, Martha, which lieutenant Jimmy Cross was carrying. These letters appear throughout the story, as a reference to the past that Cross has left behind and which is very different from the reality he lives in Vietnam. Then the narrator goes on to detail what some of the soldiers carried. First, he details what they carried according to psychological needs, for example: Kiowa carried his father’s New Testament and his grandfather’s old hatchet; Henry Dobbins, in dangerous situations, carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter; Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers and 6 or 7 ounces of premium dop… All this mixed with the detailed description of the weight of their weapons, ammunition, helmets, bulletproof vests, mine detectors, radios, flares, etc.

Little by little, learning how things weigh, we get into the activities and routines of one platoon of 17 men in the Vietnam War: like marching in a line through the meadows and rice fields to the coordinates of an ambush; or how they chose by lot who would enter the tunnels that the Vietnamese strategically built to hide; or how they dug the holes in which they had to spend the night. Until the story reaches a turning point: The death of Ted Lavender.

Everyone is affected by the death of their comrade. While waiting for the chopper to evacuate the dead man, they smoke Ted’s drug, as a kind of tribute and release from the pain of the loss. Then they entered the village of Than Khe and burned everything, shot the chickens and dogs, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage.

Lieutenant Cross feels responsible for Lavender’s death and takes his position more seriously: he burns Martha’s letters and photos. Henceforth he would shut down the daydreams, he would not tolerate laxity, he would show strength, he needed to distance himself from his men, and reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead.

 

STYLISTIC KEYS OF THE AUTHOR

Metafiction: O’Brien frequently addresses the act of storytelling itself, drawing attention to the artificiality of narrative and the author’s role. He often affirms that a story isn’t true in a literal sense but that it is true in the sense of capturing a particular emotional or psychological reality.

Fragmentation: His stories often lack a traditional narrative structure, jumping between time periods and perspectives. This fragmentation mirrors the fractured nature of memory and the disorientation experienced by soldiers in combat.

Repetition and Motif: O’Brien uses repetition and recurring motifs to emphasize key themes and create emotional resonance. The image of the weight carried by soldiers ―both physical and emotional― is a prominent motif in The Things They Carried.

Lyrical Prose: Despite dealing with difficult subject matter, O’Brien’s prose is often remarkably beautiful and evocative. He employs vivid imagery and poetic language to create a powerful emotional impact.

“Happening Truth”: O’Brien frequently speaks of a “Happening Truth”, a truth that isn’t necessarily factual but is emotionally and psychologically authentic. This concept is central to his writing. He argues that stories can be true even if they did not happen exactly as told. The goal is not to report facts but to convey a deeper understanding of the human experience.

 

IN MY OPINION

This story is highly recommended to the times we live in, when wars spread so easily. We have in our hands an anti-war book par excellence. All the events narrated in the story lead us to reject wars, such as the death of Lavender and its consequences, that we have already seen above. This is a clear example of how brutal wars are. However, there are two more examples that I would like to comment on: one is Martha’s virginity, and the other what we could call Sander’s gift.

Martha’s virginity.  Throughout this chapter of the book, Lieutenant Cross reflects at least five times on Martha’s virginity. Is Martha a virgin or not?, Cross asks himself. We don’t need to know. What matters is what O’Brien (the author) wants to convey to us with this fact. Martha’s letters talk about teachers, classmates, writers, poets… She never mentions the war. She lives in another world. She lives immaculately, without having to do horrible things. She carries no stain, nor does she imagine the hell that Jimmy Cross is going through. She does not suspect how dirty war is, how it profanes the integrity of the soldiers, who are stained for life. Martha’s virginity is for Cross like a mirror, where every time he looks at it, he sees himself dirtier.

Sander’s gift. This is the episode where Mitchell Sander finds the dead body of a Viet Cong boy. Sander says: Here it is a definite moral. And he cuts off the dead boy’s thumb and gives it to Norman Bowker, who will carry it on his person from then on. Then they argue about the morality of this event, but it is really hard to see the moral here. However, if we look just before these events, Bowker is described as a good person, literally “a very gentle person”. Under normal circumstances, a good person would never accept a gift of this kind. But they are in a cruel war, and Bowker accepts the gift. So, the moral is that no matter how good a person you are, in a war to survive you have to do horrible things. And they remember the old TV series Have gun, will travel, where if you have a gun, use it and you will be able to move forward, survive. So, we see how war brutalizes good people.

 

TO FINISH

Tim O’Brien work has helped redefine the war narrative, moving away from traditional heroic portrayals and focusing instead on the psychological and emotional toll of conflict. His innovative use of metafiction and his exploration of the relation between truth and storytelling have inspired countless writers. His commitment to honesty, vulnerability and emotional depth has earned him a place among the most important American authors of his generation. He forces readers to confront the complexities of truth and the enduring power of stories to shape our understanding of the world.

O’Brien’s legacy is not simply about writing about war, it is about writing about what means to be human: to remember, to grieve, to search for meaning in a chaotic world, and to understand that the stories we tell ourselves and each other ultimately define us.

 

QUESTIONS

-What things would you carry (in an emergency, in an epidemic, to a desert island…)?

-Are they fair wars and unfair wars, or are all the wars unjustifiable?

-How can an Indian become a Christian? How is possible for a person fit two contradictory behaviours or beliefs / faiths?

-Would you justify SIW in order to avoid going to war?

-What do you think it’s better for a country, a compulsory military service for everybody, or a professional army? Expose your reasons.

 

VOCABULARY

(There are unnumbered military terms in the text: we’ll try to explain them in our session.)

foxhole, canteen, major, killer, magazine, swabs, slingshot, bad news, draw numbers, rabies, spools, fatigues, sniper, frisking, smokestacks, wiggy, talons

Happy Endings, by Margaret Atwood

 Audiobook

Analysis (video)

Themes in ths story

Written by Glòria Torner

BIOGRAPHY

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). When she was seven years old, her family moved to Toronto, but she still spent much of her childhood in the northern Ontario and Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research in forests. Her love for nature influenced her writing. She became a voracious reader of literature: pocketbook mysteries, Canadian animal stories and comic books. She did not attend school full-time until she was twelve years old.
Atwood realised she wanted to write professionally when she was sixteen. She studied and received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1961, where she published poems and articles in the college literary journal. Later, she studied and obtained a master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962.
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but they divorced in 1973. She had a long-term relationship with the Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, living together in Toronto until his death in 2019. She wrote about her lover, Gibson, in the poetry book, Dearly.
She is a prolific writer. Since 1961 she has published eighteen novels, eighteen books of poetry, eleven books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, two graphic novels and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her autobiography, called Book of Lives: A Memoir, was published in 2025.
In addition to writing, she taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities.

The main themes in her literature are:
Dystopian and speculative and science fiction.
Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin are historical novels, and the MaddAddam trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster.
She published her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1985. This novel tells the story of Offred, a woman living in a sexual slavery, in a repressive Christian theocracy in the future. She recounts her daily experiences of her life as a “Handmaid”, forced to bear children for the higher-ranking members of Gilead society. As most women cannot conceive children, Offred and some other young women, who live without freedom and under oppression, provide children for influential families.
This book, criticised as immoral in Christian societies, was adapted into a film in 1990, and an acclaimed TV series based on the novel was co-written by the author in 2017. In 2019 she wrote a sequel, The Testaments.
Afterwards, in The Heart Goes Last, the writer imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a community that functions like a prison.
The theory of Canadian identity and memory. This theory has garnered attention both in Canada and internationally in her principal work of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. She postulates that Canadian literature, and by extension Canadian identity, is characterised by the symbol of survival.
Gender, identity and feminism. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, published in1969, is an early example of feminism, a topic found in many of her works.
Animal rights. Surfacing is an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, and in Cat’s Eye, the narrator recognises the similarity between a turkey and a baby survivor.
She writes about other themes: religion and myth, climate change, power politics. Sometimes, several themes are interconnected within a single novel.
She has won, among other prices, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2008, the Pen Pinter Prize, in 2016, and two Booker Prizes, in 2000 and 2019.
 
HAPPY ENDINGS

This short story was first published in 1983 in the Canadian collection Murder in the Dark, and in1994 it was available in the United States in Good Bones and Simple Murders.
It is a short story structured into eight sections: six varying, interlocked narratives and two brief sections, one at the beginning of the story, and the other one at the end.
In the first section (I think), Margaret Atwood decides to use the interrogative pronouns “Who” and “What,” following “The 5Ws”: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and one more, “H” How?” Many journalists use this framework to communicate the most relevant information of the story in a newspaper article. And these three sentences are used as an introduction by the narrator who addresses readers directly as you, and comments on the craft of storytelling during and after the narratives.
The six variations are written using these five plot elements. I’ll use this structure in the first one, but I think it is not necessary in the other ones.
Exposition: John and Mary fall in love and get married.
Rising action: they have good jobs, buy a beautiful house, and have two children.
Climax: they have some friends and a stimulating sex life.
Falling action: they retire and enjoy their hobbies.
Resolution: they die.
In this second storyline, Mary falls in love with John, who doesn’t love her, he only uses her for sex, but she hopes that he will come to love her. One day, John is in a restaurant with another woman, Madge. When Mary’s friends tell her he is cheating with Madge, Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find and takes them with half a bottle of sherry. She leaves a note for John, but she thinks he’ll discover her, take her to the hospital, and later marry her. But this fails to happen. Mary dies and John marries Madge.
Now, in the third structure, John, an old man, who has a steady respectable job, is married to Madge. He is having an affair with Mary, a young girl. She has sexual relations with him, but she doesn’t love him because she prefers James, who is the same age as her, has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. One day, James discovers John and Mary in the bed. James shoots the two of them and commits suicide. At the end, Madge marries Fred. It is a love triangle.
In this fourth storyline, Fred and Madge are happy together. They have a nice house near the seashore. One day, a tidal wave approaches their home. Despite the loss of their home, they are grateful to have survived the calamity that killed thousands. They remain together. This ending is very similar to the first one.
In the fifth storyline, Fred has a bad heart and he dies. Afterwards, Madge devotes herself to charity work. However, the narrator address directly to the reader in 2n person, and tells them that these details can be changed. You can choose: Madge could have different endings: cancer…
In the last storyline the narrator suggests that the story can be changed again, making John a revolutionary, and Mary a secret agent who starts a relationship with him in order to spy on him. This story is very similar to the first story.
The last section has two brief remarks: the narrator observes that the endings of different plots are the same: death is the only true ending that comes to all of us, and therefore to all characters. But the beginnings are more fun. Plot is fundamentally, just one thing happening after another. Intentionally, she forgets “where”, “how” and “why”.

Conclusion
Margaret Atwood writes a story about writing stories with six different scenarios, always with a relationship between a man and a woman. Plain stories without poetry and sensibility. Too much pessimism! And with an unreal title!

QUESTIONS
-Do you think plot is only “one thing after another”? What do you know of Todorov’s Five Stages of Plot?
-According to a theory, girls usually prefer bad boys to goody-goody ones. Do you think it is a real fact or it is something conjuntural?
-What is happiness? What is for you the best/most original definition of happiness? How do you know if you're happy or you aren't? How do you know when other people are or arent happy? Is happiness an invention of the consumer society?

VOCABULARY
live-in, tepid, run-down, higher, underwater, stoned, brawling

Tomorrow is too far, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BIOGRAPHY

About her biography, I send the link of another work in the English Book Club:

https://blanesbookclub.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-thing-around-your-neck-by.html

Analysis

More analysis

Review

A deep essay

Video comment

An interview

Written by Elisa Sola:

A little introduction about Nigeria and its ethnic and linguistic diversity 

Nigeria is a very ethnically diverse country with 371 ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo.

In spite of this diversity, Nigeria has one official language: English, as a result of the British colonial rule over the nation. Nevertheless, it is not spoken as a first language in the entire country because other languages are majority in terms of number of native speakers. Nigeria stands out as one of the world’s most linguistically diverse nations, with over 500 languages, spoken among 223 million people. Some of the most popular languages spoken in Nigeria are: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Edo…

Chimamanda Ngozi was born into an Igbo family in Enugu (Nigeria), and in her formal education, Chimamanda was taught in both, Igbo and English. Although Igbo was not a popular subject, she continued taking courses of Igbo in high school.

 

SUMMARY

 

Tomorrow is Too Far tells the story of a family tragedy and the consequences it has on the protagonist and on all of her family.

The main character is a twenty-eight-year-old woman (we don’t know what is her name) who clearly relives the moment when her older brother (Nonso) died eighteen years earlier, when he was twelve years old. She, who was ten at the time, reveals that she caused Nonso’s death by challenging him to climb an avocado tree and then scaring him by telling him there was a dangerous snake (echi eteka), the “Tomorrow is Too Far” snake.

The story takes place in Nigeria, in Gradmama’s yard, in a humid and warm summer. The atmosphere is important because it shows us an exuberant and ripe nature, which is about to explode, like the feelings of the girl, who was torn between the hate and jealousy she felt towards her brother (for the preferential treatment he received  ̶ patriarchal upbringing) and the love and desire she felt for her cousin Dozie, thirteen years old.

A fatal triangle is drawn that will bring tragic consequences and will dynamite not only the relationship of all family members between themselves, but also their entire lives.

The decision to keep the secret for all these years in order to try to achieve the love and recognition of her parents means that she has not been able to overcome the facts, and at this moment, eighteen years later, she’s still not able to understand what happened in the “amoral kingdom of her childhood”. Things being like this, when she receives the news of her Grandmama’s death, she returns to the scene of the crime in a state of shock.

The fact that the story is told in the second person by an omniscient narrator helps to picture the image of a girl who is shocked, and she has difficulty expressing herself: everything we know about her is told us by this narrator who is inside her, but she is silent, blocked.

The representation that we have of the cousin is of a passive and sad character, overwhelmed by the events. When the girl asks him “what did you want that summer?”, trying to share the blame a little, his answer is categorical: “What mattered was what you wanted”.

The story ends with a beautiful image of ants, because, in fact, she and the entire family is like a “column of black ants making his way up the trunk, each ant carrying” a bit of guilty and a lot of sorrow.

 

QUESTIONS

-Apart from being the name of a snake, has the title another meaning in the story?

-In your view, the "kingdom of childhood" is amoral? Is / was childhood a paradise, for you?

-Why do you think the story is narrated in the second person (you)?

-There is a raw sex scene in all the story, but only one, and there's no more references to it. According to you, what is the purpose of this?

-In your opinion, Nonso's death was a crime out of jealousy, or only an accident due to a misplaced joke?

VOCABULARY

cashew, mat, soggy, pluck, limb-free, nudge down, padded, pods, moult, harmattan, makeshift, coaxed, choking, clogged, petting, clucked, cinnamon, cowries, toddler, mar, inching, fluff, roiling

Atrophy, by Edith Wharton

 

To read her BIOGRAPHY by Nora Carranza, click here.
Notes for Atrophy

SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteras

Nora Frenway was a young, beautiful and elegant woman. She was married to Mr. George Frenway, a semi-invalid man with a bad temper which made him a desolate and pathetic figure.
They had two sons who were Nora’s jewels. George had a possessive and domineering mother, before whom the entire family cowered, lied and flattered.
Nora had once had a lover, Christopher, who lived in Oakfield near Westover. He was currently very ill and his life was in danger, so Nora Frenway secretly decided to take the train and visit him.
Her lover lived with his spinster sister, Jana Aldis, a dishevelled, old and insignificant woman.
Jana Aldis made it as difficult as she could to prevent Nora from seeing her brother Christopher. Nora suspected that Jana knew about her relationship with her brother, and just in case there was any doubt about this, when Nora was about to board the taxi that would take her to Westover station to return home, Jane Aldis called from the threshold “I’ll be sure to write to thank your husband Mr. Frenway for your visit.”

QUESTIONS
-Has been there a moment when you had the feeling of being "flung naked to the public scrutiny"?
-Do you feel you have adopted all the inhibitions of your parents and grandparents? What inhibitions do you regret more?
-In your opinion, does a sister have more power upon her brother than a wife upon her husband?
-According to your view, is the partner the first one to feel being cheated, or the last one, when everybody already knows?
-In the story there is a beautiful love gesture: to stroke the dog on the same place her lover's hand had rested. Do you remember any other tender gesture, in real life or in fiction?
-What would you be your best option when you feel your adversary (in a match, in a debate...) is much weaker than yourself?
-Miss Aldis speaks several times about "tree moving". What is its symbolism, on your view?
-What could be the relation between the title and the story?

VOCABULARY
quailed, humbugged, fibbed, fawned, holds-up, welter, tarred, inferences, dowdy, brim, panelled, brink, prying, cared for a fig, upholsterer, moping, groping, caller, beech, twaddle, platitudes, blighting

The Last Leaf, by O. Henry

 

Film (minute 41:24)

SUMMARY

Greenwich Village was, and is, a quarter in New York where artists like to live. They could be famous artists or poor artists, but all of them strove to produce a masterpiece. However, in order to make booth ends meet, they had to do menial works, usually related to decorative arts.

In a building in this place, there lived a pair of young women, Johnsy and Sue. As most of the artists there, they had their own difficulties with money; but money wasn’t the only trouble: that year, November was very cold, and Johnsy caught a pneumonia. In the beginning of the twentieth century, a pneumonia was a serious illness and sometimes a fatal one.

The doctor visited Johnsy and gave her some remedies, but she didn’t get better, and according to the doctor, it was because she was in low spirits, she didn’t have the strength of mind to overcome her disease and she felt depressed and suspected she was going to die soon; in short, she imagined that her life depended on the number of leaves of an old ivy vine that climbed the wall opposite her window; as fewer leaves were left in the vine, less life was left for her. So, falling leaves were a kind of final countdown for her.

Sue and Johnsy had a neighbour, old Behrman. He was also a poor artist trying to start to paint what had to be his masterpiece; but he never could find the inspiration. Although he was in want all the time, he tried to help his neighbours artists and sometimes posed for them.

Sue told old Behrman about Johnsy’s illness and about her strange obsession with the falling leaves, and perhaps he thought about her strange superstition.

Well, in the end, the vine had only a leaf left. Johnsy believed it was her last hope to live: if the leaf fell, she would die; if the leaf stood stuck to the vine, she would live.

That night was windy and snowy, so her chances to live were few, and her friend wouldn't allow her to be watching the last leaf during the night.

But the next morning, the leaf was still there: it had withstood all the attacks of the tempest. And because of this, Johnsy recovered her spirits and her desire to live, and soon she felt better.

When she was a bit stronger, Sue told her a piece of bad news: her good old neighbour was found dead on the snow, on the street below their window, the night of the tempest, with his painting tools near him.

What was he doing there?

QUESTIONS

-A big question: what is art? Or better: what is art for you?

-Are you superstitious? What can be a definition of superstition? Do you know a superstition that has a scientific basis?

-Johnsy didn't have spirits to fight for her life. When a disease can be considered psychosomatic?

VOCABULARY

paid on account, gable, pewter, bishop sleeves, duffer, smote, Ducht window, jew's harp, goosey, imp, hem, daub, juniper berries

Miss Pulkinhorn, by William Golding

Analysis

Another analysis

BIOGRAPHY

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. His father was a teacher, but the family was very poor. Nevertheless, they were able to pay his studies in a grammar school and then at the university.

He worked as a teacher like his father before him. He got married and had two children. During the WWII, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer and commanded a ship, although he didn’t belong to the ruler classes.

All his life he was disappointed with the humankind and said “men produced evil as bees produced honey”, and that he lived under (not in) the British class system and that this system was indestructible. This is more or less the message of his most famous book, Lord of the Flies. The novel narrates how a group of educated children gets stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, where all the adults die. They try to organize a society to survive on the island, but they fail because of a disagreement between them that drives them to war and to a regression to savagery.

At the beginning, the book (under the name of Strangers from Within) was rejected by the publisher, but then, after some changes in the text, was accepted. It was published in 1954.

The Spire, published in 1964, is about the construction of a spire on the Salisbury Cathedral. The dean is obsessed with the spire, but the cathedral doesn’t have any foundations, and his stubbornness will destroy human lives around him.

Rites of Passage, which got the Booker Prize in 1980, tells the story of Edmund Talbot, a man sailing to Australia during the Napoleonic time. Edmund Talbot keeps a journal where he records the life on the ship. But, if at the beginning the passage is amusing, it soon becomes cruel because the sailors bully another passenger, Reverend Colley.

William Golding got the Nobel Prize in 1983, after an unexpected and even contentious choice. Other nominees were Claude Simon, Anthony Burgess, Graham Green, and more.

He died at 81 in Cornwall.

SUMMARY

Sir Edward, the organist of a cathedral, tells us the story of two sanctimonious people: Miss Pulkinhorn, a bigoted old woman, and a sincere devotee (and perhaps mystic), lunatic old man.

Miss Pulkinhorn watches the behaviour of all people who goes to church, because she thinks that everybody is a Pharisee. According to the organist, she wants to punish one way or another everybody, even himself; and he feels a bit relieved when he is made Sir, because then he knew she couldn’t do any harm to him. But her worst enemy is the fervent old man; she is envious and thinks that he is a hypocrite because he goes to church three times a day to pray ecstatically in front of the Sacrament. She wants to give him a lesson, to punish him for his supposed fake piety.

By the way, you must know that the Sacrament is the holy Host, the bread that means Jesus's body, and that it is kept in a kind of cupboard called sanctuary with a candle near it; if the candle, or light, is lit, then the Sacrament is there; if not, the candle is put out.

One day, Sir Edward has to go to the cathedral to leave a note giving instructions to his substitute because the next day he is going to London. He almost forgot and went there very late. In his way there, he crossed paths with a priest (the precentor) who was carrying the Sacrament to give Canon Blake the last rites, because he was agonizing.

Inside the church, there were only two people more, the verger (or sacristan) Rekeby, who was checking that all things were all right, and Miss Pulkinhorn, all the time spying. After a while, the devout old man entered the church. This time he was late because he had met a poor man and had given him his jacket and shirt, in a kind of charity work; so he was beaming when he kneeled to pray in the chapel of the Sacrament. But the verger, in his round to check the things, saw that the candle of the Sacrament was on, but he didn’t see the old man, because he was in the back of the chapel. However, the Sacrament wasn’t there, and Rekeby thought the precentor had forgotten to blow the candle out; so he put the light out. Now the old man realized that he was praying to the void, and he felt so frustrated that he had a fit: he laughed and cried, went away and collapsed near the door. The organist and Rekeby heard his cries and went to help him; they carried him to the verger’s cottage, and from there he was taken to the hospital, where he died some days after. Meanwhile, Miss Pulkinhorn was still inside the church, but she didn’t come to help.

But, how was it possible the light was on if the Sacrament wasn’t there? The organist suspected that Miss Pulkinhorn lit it after the precentor had put it out when he went away with the Host to Canon Blake. But she made a mistake: as she saw the old man wasn’t coming, although he was always punctual, she thought he wouldn’t come at all and was going to put the candle out again, when she met Sir Edward and couldn’t do it and had to go by.

Sir Edward believed she wanted to chastise the old man, showing him his piety was a fake. But he didn’t say anything and kept watching her from the distance. Miss Pulkinhorn had to know of Sir Edward suspicions, because the evening of the events they saw each other inside the church. However, she went on attending the church with the same stiffness and affected righteousness as ever.

The time passed, until one day, all of a sudden, Miss Pulkinhorn approached Sir Edward and told him that her conscience was perfectly clear. Nevertheless, she died seven days after.

QUESTIONS

-What are the thirty-nine articles?

-Do you like visiting churches? Is there any you liked best? Is there anyone you remember because of something curious or interesting?

-Have you sung in a choir? Can you tell us your experiences with singing?

-How religious is Sir Edward?

-In your view, what was Miss Pulkinhorn’s cause of death?

-There’s the moon acting upon the characters. Do you think stars, planets and constellations have any influence in our lives?

VOCABULARY

chapter, what with, rubric, flat, buns, shoddy, ambulatory, sat out, instep, enmeshed, smouldering, curdles, steel-sheer adamant, decani, chantry, stumps, spell, close, turned up, flue, cantered, cheapened, precentor, pyx, aumbry, guttered out, anthem, rush-bottom