My Polish Teacher's Tie, by Helen Dunmore

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Obituary

Analysis

By Aurora Ledesma

 

HELEN DUNMORE

 

Helen Dunmore was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children’s writer. She was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1952. She was the second child of four children of Betty (née Smith) and Maurice Dunmore. Her father managed industrial firms, but loved poetry, and Helen learned many rhymes, hymns and ballads during her childhood.

She attended Nottingham Girls’ High School and studied English at York University (1970-1973). She lived for two years in Finland, where she worked as a teacher.

In 1980, she married Frank Charnley, a lawyer, and they had two children: a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Tess. Frank had a son, Ollie, from a previous marriage. Helen died from cancer in 2017.

Her best-known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry was Inside the Wave (2017). She won the inaugural Orange Prize for fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.

Her writings for children include short stories, and novels for older children, such as the Ingo Chronicles (2005). Some of Dunmore’s children’s books are included in reading lists for use in schools.

Dunmore’s readers will not be surprised to learn she loved gardening, and she knew about wild flowers. She was a brave and strong swimmer, venturing into the sea on cold days in a wetsuit. She loved art, buying as much as she could afford and enjoyed collaborating with artists and musicians.

The final poem Hold Out Your Arms, is an intimate and powerful poem of how the novelist recounts her thoughts and emotions as she faces her final days. She invites death to “hold out your arms for me” describing the figure of death coming to take her away. Death is not something to be feared, but caring and gentle. The poem, written just days before she died of cancer on June 2017, was included in her poetry collection Inside the wave. She was ‒first and last‒ a poet.

 

MY POLISH TEACHER’S TIE

 

My Polish Teacher’s Tie was first published in 2001 in the short story collection Ice Cream. The protagonist, Carla Carter, works as a part-time catering staff at an English School. She is half-Polish, but the teachers don’t know that. She is a single mother with a daughter, Jade. Carla’s mother was Polish, and she came to England after the war. She taught her some Polish children’s songs full of rhymes, so Carla spoke Polish till she was six, but her father forbade her to speak Polish before she started school, and that’s why she has forgotten most of it.

One day, Carla overhears the school’s headmaster saying that some Polish teachers want to improve their written English and are looking for pen friends in English schools. Carla asks the headmaster for one of the Polish teacher’s addresses, and she begins writing to Steve. Days later, she receives the first letter from him, and she realises that he thinks that she is an English teacher. When Carla writes to Steve, she doesn’t want to tell him anything about her employment. She tells him about her daughter Jade and about the songs that her mother taught her. Steve tells her that he writes poetry and sends Carla beautiful poems. At first, they write once a week, but later, twice. Their letters become friendly and personal, and a connection between them builds up.

Some time later, the Head announces that a teacher will be coming over from Katowice the following month. His name is Stefan Jeziorny. Carla feels a bit surprised, because she hadn’t read his last letter yet, in which he tells her about his visit. Carla dreads meeting him, knowing he will discover her real job, and thinks he will be disappointed. When he arrives, he will be staying with Valerie Kenward, a teacher at the school. Valerie complains that she can’t understand Steve, because of his accent, and she also makes fun of his tie.

As soon as Carla sees him in the staff room, she goes over to introduce herself. When she sees that he is pleased to meet her and does not care what job she does, she becomes more confident and positive. To her surprise, Steve sings a Polish song. She recognizes it from her childhood, and the two of them sing together.

 

Some Reflections

Sometimes, as happens with the characters in the story, having a low-level job and being a foreigner could make us feel ashamed, insignificant and even invisible.

On one hand, Carla hides her origins from her colleagues and her job from Stefan, she’s ashamed of being just a server. On the other hand, Stefan feels isolated and misunderstood, he just smiles like a child, because he doesn’t know anyone. His way of dressing, his accent and his manners are cruelly criticized by Valerie.

When Stefan shows a warm and inclusive approach towards Carla, regardless of her job, she becomes more confident. She realises that there is so much more to a person’s identity than their surface.

QUESTIONS

-What can a tie, a piece of clothes, a dress... tell us about the person?

-What is more important for you, your mother tongue, or another tongue you have learned along your life? Why do you think so? When are we ashamed of our accent or of our mother tongue?

-Sometimes we feel inferior, and sometimes superior, in front of a stranger. What are the circumstances for every case?

-In your view, can art be really appreciated by somebody without education? What is your opinion about the saying "There's no accounting for taste"? "Good taste" is something natural or something learned?

VOCABULARY

overall, kitty, tipping, chucking, OFSTED, serving-hatch, bin, sod it, stage-whispered, squiggles, swim, bumbled

Fear and Trembling, by Amélie Nothomb

BIOGRAPHY

This is a slightly different biography, mixing Wikipedia and other sources with my personal opinion of her.

Amélie Nothomb is a very interesting writer, quite different from the others writers I know. She stems from a Belgian noble family. Her father was the Belgian diplomat Patrick Nothomb, and she is the grandniece of Charles Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian Foreign Secretary (1960–2001), and the great-granddaughter of the writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She is a Commander of the Order of the Crown and has had the title of Baroness bestowed upon her by King Philippe of Belgium.

But I have said that she is a very different person for other reasons. Let’s see. For starters, she has two places and two dates of birth. According to some sources, she was born in Etterbeek (Brussels) on 9 July 1966, Belgium, but according to herself, she was born in Kobe (Japan) in 1967. It is a metaphorical statement, since her childhood memories begin in Japan, where she lived from the ages of two to five, the time that most deeply marked his character, due to his learning at school, and his close relationship with his beloved Nanny.

After living in Japan, she lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, The United Kingdom and Laos, and finally in Belgium. All these transfers were due to his father’s profession (a diplomat, as I said) and undoubtedly marked her character. In Biographie de la faim, at one point in the novel she writes: “the majority of international terrorists are children of diplomats. It does not surprise me”. Her sense of humour, cynical and intelligent, is one of her main characteristics.

She has a brother and a sister, and she has always felt very close to the latter, with whom she takes refuge imagining fictional worlds (and both writing about that) during their childhood, in which they saw the horror of hunger and misery of places like China or Bangladesh.

At the age of 17, she discovered Europe, and more specifically Belgium, where at first she felt like a foreigner. She studied Romance Philology at the Free University of Brussels (with liberal socialist tendencies), where she found it difficult to integrate because her last name evokes her family’s extreme right-wing past. She refers to this experience in her novel Antichrista.

After graduating at the age of 21, she returned to Tokyo and worked for a year in a large Japanese company. She recounts this experience in her novel Fear and Trembling. When she returned to Belgium, she wrote her first novel, Hygiène de l’assassin, which was very well received by the critics and the public. From that moment, she devoted herself exclusively to writing. According to her own explanation, she spends four hours a day writing, and she writes three novels a year, of which she only publishes one. She has written more than thirty novels and almost 20 short stories.

In 2012, Luca Chiari directed the documentary Amélie Nothomb: une vie entre deux eaux (“A Life Between Two Waters”) about Amélie’s return to Japan, where she rediscovered the beauty of its landscapes, its peaceful rites, the sadness of Fukushima, but especially, where she met again her Japanese nursemaid, Nishio San.

She is, as I have already said, very special even by the way of presenting herself.  In her photos on her books, she always appears dressed in black and wearing a big hat, which gives her a distant, even cold appearance.

In my opinion, perhaps it’s the way of creating a character that allows her to stay hidden, and also away from fashion. As she explains in her numerous autobiographical books, Amélie does not consider herself beautiful at all, but she admires beauty, especially feminine beauty, and that way of showing herself, always just her face and little else, protects her from her unattractive appearance (according to her, who also says that she is quite short and suffers from scoliosis).

All her novels are interesting, especially the autobiographical ones, and almost all of them are short and easy to read because they are captivating and full of surrealism and intelligence.

Try reading this author, because I am sure you will enjoy her a lot.

 

SUMMARY

 

I’m going to make a general summary of the entire book, in order to awaken your curiosity and your desire to read it. I hope I get it without too many spoilers. For that reason I’ll focus on explaining what was happening around the book at that time, especially the motivation that led Amélie Nothomb to go to Japan, and the feelings she had during that year.

Firstly, in my opinion, we are faced with a book about love, about crazy, excessive, disproportionate and absurd love. All these adjectives also serve to describe the content of the book.

At the age of 20, Amélie Nothomb was in love with Japan, or more precisely with an idea of Japan, the one she had of the Japan of her early childhood, between two and five years old, with a loving nanny, a school she loved attending and using a language she found sublime. In some of her books, she speaks with pride of the Japanese language, with a forceful pronunciation and significant ideographs, instead of the pitiful language her brothers were forced to study at the same time (English), a “boiled” language, according to her, in which some words mix with others forming a broth that is sometimes unintelligible (I agree, by the way). She remembers herself writing at school, and reading Japanese books (not children’s stories but books for adults) with enthusiasm.

Isn’t it incredible that someone could write and read fluently in Japanese at that age, and that her memories of that time are so clear? However, that is what she describes very clearly in at least two of her books: Le sabotage amoreux (1999) and Biographie de la faim (2004), both autobiographical. In both she makes it clear, and still considers it so, that the separation from Japan to go living in China (the communist China of the eighties) was the most painful and traumatic separation of her life. That was the reason why, after having finished his studies in Romance Philology, she made every effort to obtain the degree of Japanese translator, so that she could go to work for one of the most important corporate companies in that country for a year.

And, at that point, the book begins. During that year, she will go from being practically nobody, with no one below her, to being much less than nothing, suffering an endless number of hilarious, humiliating, absurd and degrading situations. And she overcame all of this for love, for her love to Japan.

Instead of rebelling, as would be expected of someone with her character, she tries incessantly to understand, and even justify, these tyrannical behaviours of unlimited cruelty based on absurd rites of honour, which despise Westerners in general and women in particular (Japanese women are not exempt from this either, within a deeply sexist and classist society). And she tells us this with a great sense of humour, often close to sarcasm and surrealism, and with a great feeling of acceptance, even with a rare and almost inexplicable pleasure. 

In my opinion, the thing we have to thank that year in Japan for is that Amélie Nothomb decided that, after her return to Europe, she would dedicate herself exclusively to writing. The countless times she committed metaphorical suicide by jumping into the void through the company bay windows (a little spoiler, sorry), and flying over the wonderful landscapes of her beloved Japan, stimulated her imagination (already prodigious) and helped her to make that decision.

If you try reading Biographie de la faim and Fear and trembling you will be able to know Nothomb childhood and early youth, and perhaps to begin to appreciate his particular way of writing, and even of her being hedonistic, solitary, caustic, surreal and as fun as difficult to understand.

 

QUESTIONS

-What is the relation of the title with the novel? Does it have any relation with the book by Søren Kierkegaard?

-Why the reference to Aristotle?

-What do you know about the Japanese culture? Have you been there? Nothomb observations, are they clichés or real habits?

-Nothomb mentions Cleopatra and her nose. Do you think a so small detail can change the History?

-If you were to live abroad, what would be more important for you, to keep your culture and traditions, or to adapt to your new situation?

VOCABULARY

spat me out, bay window, open-plan, scornful, tore it up, output, refrain, umpteenth, brimmed, complexion, carnation, mourned, downfall, lair, ashen, dumbfounded, losing face, probed, slumped, kanji 

A Horse and Two Goats, by R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan at the Wikipedia

A Horse and Two Goats at enciclopedia.com

A Horse and two Goats, cartoon

 

R. K. NARAYAN, by Begoña Devis

BIOGRAPHY

R. K. Narayan was an Indian writer born on October 10th, 1906 in Madras (now Chennai), British India, into a Hindu family. He was one of eight children, six sons and two daughters. His father was a school headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father’s school. As his father’s job entailed frequent transfers, Narayan spent part of childhood under the care of his maternal grandmother, Pavarti. During this time, his best friends were a peacock and a mischievous monkey.
When he was twelve years old, Narayan participated in a pro-independence march, for which he was reprimanded by his uncle, as the family was apolitical and considered all governments wicked.
Narayan moved to Mysore when his father was transferred to the Maharajas’s College High School. The well-stocked library at the school, and his father’s own, fed his reading habit, and he started writing as well. After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination and spent a year at home reading and writing.
After a brief job as a school teacher, Narayan realized that the only career for him was in writing, and he decided to stay at home and write novels.
While vacationing at his sister’s house in Coimbatore, in 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl who lived nearby, and married her. After that, Narayan became a reporter for a Madras paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The job brought him in contact with a variety of people.
Narayan sent the manuscript of Swami and Friend (his first novel) to a friend in Oxford, and the friend showed it to Graham Green, who recommended the book to his publisher, and it was finally published in 1935.
R. K. Narayan developed his literary career in the English language and is considered one of the most important Indian storytellers of the 20th century.
Graham Greene considered himself a friend for life and decreed success in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Narayan was for a long time, before Salman Rushdie, perhaps the best-known storyteller of Indian origin.
He wrote about situations in a provincial society in which shopkeepers, beggars, businessmen and a greedy petty bourgeoisie live bustling side by side with the old and static world of the peasants and saints. His novels are set in the imaginary city of Malgudi, especially in the streets and popular settings, a microcosm of South India that still reflects the values and customs of the rural and archaic Indian world, but at the same time also the encounter/disagreement with the modernization that advances inexorably.
However, what stands out in Narayan is his use of irony, the acute observation of the changes that are taking place, rather than social or political denunciation. It also highlights how his characters and their environments continuously refer to the literary and religious heritage of India (sacred books, traditions and Hindu rites), a heritage that the author particularly loves and studies. This makes Narayan the singer of a world that, although not closed to the modern, continues to be deeply proud of its identity and cultural heritage.
Narayan received various awards and honours, such as the Padma Bhusham or the Sahita Akademi, India's second and third highest civilian awards.
R. K. Narayan died on May 13, 2001 in his hometown of Chennai.

 A Horse and Two Goats 

This is the history of a misunderstanding between a poor Indian man, Muni, and a rich American tourist who is visiting the village.
Muni is a very poor man who only has two goats and lives in a thatched hut. One day, Muni wakes up with the craving for something more sumptuous than the balls of cooked milled and raw onion he eats for his daily meal, and asks his wife to make a curry for dinner. She agrees to make him a curry, provided he can go to the local shop and buy the necessary ingredients for it.
Muni goes to buy them, but the shopkeeper refuses to allow him to purchase the items on credit, as Muni has no money. Muni returns home to inform his wife of the bad news. She exasperatedly orders him out of the house to graze his two goats, which are all he has left of a once large and healthy herd of sheep and goats that was afflicted by a pestilence.
As Muni walks toward the highway with his two scraggly goats, he arrives at his favourite spot, an area beside the highway that is the site of an old and grandiose statue of a warrior and a horse. Suddenly, a foreigner in a yellow station wagon comes barrelling down the highway, only to stop abruptly in front of Muni. He reveals that he is interested in buying the statue from Muni, whom he assumes to be its owner.
They both talk for a long time, but they don't understand each other at all. Muni explains to the foreigner the miracles and wonderful deeds carried out by the warrior of the statue, while the American tells him about his life in New York and what he wants to do with the statue in his mansion. The foreigner offers him more and more money, thinking that Muni is haggling, and Muni believes that he wants to buy the goats, so he takes the money very happily.
After that, the American loads the statue in his vehicle and drives it away, thinking he has bought it.
Muni returns home triumphant, informing his wife that he has managed to sell his goats, that had proven to be a curse to him as a constant reminder of how far he had fallen in the world. His wife initially assumes that he must have robbed someone, as the sum of 100 rupees is a small fortune. However, Muni’s elation does not last long as, soon enough, he hears the bleating of his goats at his door, and his wife threatens to call the police.
For me, the most interesting thing about the story is
the detailed vision of life in India for poor peasants like Muni, and the huge
difference of cultures that is reflected between that type of life and that of
the foreigner. The sense of humour and irony that there is, transforms a hard
to believe story in a fun and interesting one.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

Muni (age, job, daily routines…)

His wife

The shopman

The postman

The American

Tell us something about the postman’s relationship with Muni. And with the postman.

Say something about Muni’s village.

What kind of conversation do the American and Muni have? What do they talk about?

What do people usually do when they try to communicate to a foreigner?

Once upon a time, offering a cigarette was a way to break the ice to start a conversation. Do you think we now communicate less because we smoke less?

“At seventy-one didn’t run, but surrenders to whatever came.” Do you think there is an age when every one of us has to surrender?

The America got stuck in the Empire State Building’s lift for hours, and then he decided to travel. If you had undergone a big thread in your life, what would you do to make up for it?

What is the American going to do with the statue? How did he carry it?

What kind of souvenirs do you by when you travel?

What is an “avatar”? Do you know something about Hinduism?

What is really communication? Is it always necessary to say something that makes sense?

What did Muni dream to do if he had some money?

What did the American buy, and what did Muni sell?

What happened when Muni arrived home with the money?

VOCABULARY

dotting, bullock, faggots, millet, pen, tethered, drumstick tree, ails, imp, ledger, swarga, fast, cronies, hailed, affluence, fleecy, gawky, bhang, thrashed, barren, spurn, scythe, dhobi, scrounge, cheetah, mauled, Namaste!, gainsay, slanderers, undaunted, wary, ingratiatingly, backwater, pinioned, Pongal, Parangi, quip, pundit, bearish, lakh, puja, creeper, gunny sack, dhoti