The Enemy, by Tessa Hadley

SUMMARY, by Alícia Usart

This is a story about a girl named Caro, who met a boy named Keith in a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation, at her university.
She had bought a new trouser suit for the occasion; she was very proud because this dress made her feel sure of herself and attractive at the same time. In addition, she was approved by some of her companions.
When she met Keith for the first time, she found him very attractive and charismatic; furthermore, his Welsh accent made women melt.
Unfortunately for Caro, when he approached her, he reproached the way she was dressed (not appropriate in a Revolutionary meeting).
She felt humiliated; however, she remained calm, but she kept thinking how she could take revenge. Since then, he was her enemy.
After the meeting, all the visitors went to an old house where Caro and Keith had a long night arguing together.
When everybody went to sleep, Keith disappeared, and, the next morning, she was shocked to find him sleeping with her older sister Penny.
Later on, Penny and Keith had a relationship during twenty years in which Penny had struggled with him, bearing all his bad behaviours towards her and their children, changing his behaviour to a softer one, after she finished with him, and he started a new relationship. Caro had supported her sister in all difficult moments she lived with her husband, to the point of moving where they were living, in Cardiff, Wales. 
Finally, Penny ended this relationship after she had a third baby and moved near where she and Caro were born.
Keith met another girl, Lyne, and they lived between London and Dordogne. In the end, it was Caro who was left living in Wales.
And then, one day he had to come to Cardiff to talk to some people about a new film project, and she received him at her house.
She spent all day shopping and preparing a meal which was eaten in an hour or so, but she enjoyed all this work.
They talked about old times and old idealisms. After all, she realized that she was not the same person now at her age of fifty-five.

QUESTIONS

Keith was a revolutionary, but now he understands in wines. All the time there has been a debate: Can a revolutionary eat delicatessen, own luxury cars, wear expensive clothes? What do you think?

Why was Keith an enemy for Carol, according to Carol?
Are there clothes for activists, and clothes for posh people?
What do you know about lefty parties, as Trotskyists, Maoists…?
What was Caro wearing at the revolutionary meeting?
Did you stop seeing someone because of your different political views or religion beliefs? Have you read Fred Ullmann?
Are boys more revolutionary than girls?
Are science students less revolutionary than art and humanities students?
Is still there machismo in the revolutionary ranks?
What do you think of wolf whistles and catcalls?
Can students (they usually come from middle class or rich families) be truly revolutionary?
Being a revolutionary leader, was something like being an alpha macho?
Why do you think Keith choose Penny and not Caro?

They mention "the way that men chose women". What is that way?
Is marriage a fatal destiny for most of the women?
Can you remember the incident with the gun? What can this tell us about Keith character? What is the meaning of this incident in the story? Why does the authoress decide to tell us about it?
Personality versus artistic talent: Does the personality of a writer create a bias in his or her works or in the way we read his or her books?
What are your lost illusions?
What do you do in your hairstyle o dressing style to keep you young?

Are patriarchal systems linked more to human evolutionary biology than to cultural environment? Give your reasons.
She accommodated his enemy in her house, but she cooked him an elaborate meal. Why? Did she feel she was receding to the traditional female role?

VOCABULARY

yawn, faltered, restless, stir, upset, prowled, PA, thane, eke, grant, trendy, fug, wolf whistle, Agit Prop, currency, muddled, scalding, mock-, motley, politicos, hassle, sparring, Enoch Powell, overstating, squeamishness, countenance, obnoxious, teasing, sheer, auburn, cosy, council house, bleak, estate, raucous, predicament, feted, basking, stern, pithead, winding gear, leads, tenants, pottered, DIY, gnawed, maudlin, skittles, rag, dreary, infighting, welfare, Black Dwarf, brimming, spills, fug, jacknifed, rangy, quaked, tuiles, bara brith, thwarted

The Teacher's Story, by Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta at the Wikipedia

Review

Another review

A comment

Gita Mehta, The Teacher’s Story, by Elisa Sola

 

Gita Mehta, biography

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer and documentary filmmaker. She was born in Delhi in 1943 into a well-known Odia family. She’s alive, and she’s 79 years old.

Odia people are native to the Indian state of Odisha, which is located in Eastern of India, and they have their own language, Odia, which is one of the classical languages of India. India is an independent republic since 1950, and Odisha, formerly Orissa, became independent into the republic of India on April 1936.

Gita’s father, Biju Patnaik, was an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Odisha, and her brother, Naveen Patnaik, is the Chief Minister of Odisha since 2000. In 2019 Gita Mehta was nominated for one of the highest civilian awards in the field of literature and education, the Padma Shri, but she declined, because the general elections were coming and she didn’t want to harm her brother.

She was educated in India and in the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In her professional career, she has produced and/or directed 14 television documentaries for UK, European and US networks. During the years 1970–1971 she was a television war correspondent for the US television network NBC.

She is the widow of Sonny Mehta, former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, whom she married in 1965. She has one son, Aditya Singh Mehta. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and been on the bestseller lists in Europe, the US and India. Her fiction and non-fiction writings focus exclusively on India - its culture and history - and on the Western perception of it. Her works reflect the insight gained through her journalistic and political background.

She has published 5 works: Karma Cola in 1979, a non-fiction book about India and its mysticism; Raj, her first novel, in 1989, which is and colourful historical story that follows the progression of a young woman born into Indian nobility under the British Raj. In this novel, she mixes history and fiction. The next work is A River Sutra, published in 1993, a collection of short stories, including our story, “The Teacher’s Story”. Her latest work was Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, in 2006, which is a collection of essays about India since Independence.

Mehta divides her time between New York City, London and New Delhi.

 

The Teacher’s Story

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer that she has written about Indian culture and society. In this short story, the author shows us how the life in India is. We know the paanwallah, the paan leaves, betel leaves, the samosa, the paisa, the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin, the tanpura, the raga, the street hawkers, the goats and shepherds in the marble mausoleum of the Victoria Memorial…

The Teacher’s Story is one of the six stories that make up the novel A River Sutra. These stories are: “The Monk’s Story", “The Teacher’s Story”, “The Executive’s Story”, “The Courtesan’s Story”, “The Musician’s Story” and “The Minstrel’s Story”.  Every main character of the novel represents a particular community.

These six stories are presented by a nameless narrator who is in dialogue with his close friend Tariq Mia. In this novel, Gita Mehta uses not only one narrator, but sub-narrators. For instance, in the Monk’s Story the narrator is the nameless narrator, but in The Teacher’s Story the narrator is Tariq Mia, an old Muslim Mullah who is the best friend of that narrator. Therefore, the story is told from third person point of view and makes the narration omniscient. The technique of the novel is similar to the epic Mahabharata because these narrators aren’t involved in the novel as a character. However, they know omnisciently everything that happens, because they have been told or witnessed.

The kind of narration, very simple on the surface level, with flat characters, seeks to give moral lessons to the people, and it roots with the ancient Indian tradition of story-telling. In ancient times' story telling was a skill, and Gita Mehta wants to tell a traditional story with its moral message.

The main character of The Teacher’s Story is Master Mohan, a very sensitive person who sees broken his dream to become a famous singer when he was child because of his tuberculosis. Due to that, he became a teacher’s music like his father, who couldn’t see his dream come true. However, Master Mohan, despite not having fulfilled his dream and being blamed for it by his wife and children, is not a bitter man and continues to look for a way to live with his goal. On this path, he meets Imrat, a blind and poor boy with a great ability to sing: good voice and good hearing, and they both immediately make a bond.

Master Mohan teaches little Imrat to turn him into what he couldn’t be: a splendid singer, and they both form a family, the sweet family that they don’t have, because they both are orphans in some way (Master Mohan is rejected by his family and the boy is abandoned by his sister because she can’t raise him).

In the end, the boy achieves fame in the form of a record contract, but his voice is so pure that he is murdered out of envy, in an act of much cruelty that has a moral explanation: “such voice is not human. What will happen to music if this is the standard by which God judges us?”

If I had to compare this little story with a piece of music, I would do it with de Ravel Bolero, because it rises in tone to the final ecstasy: the pure voice of Imrat who can’t survive in this world of evil and is silenced with a sword.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

-Master Mohan

-His wife

-His father

-His children

-Mohammed-sahib

-The paanwallah

-Imrat

-Imrat’s sister

What are the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin?

Why did Mohan keep Imrat?

Can you tell us about the attacks from Mohan’s wife and children against Imrat?

What do you know about the taboo against eating pork? What other taboos you know that are strange for us?

What do you think about children’s cruelty? Is it something biological, or something that they learn from society, family, school?

Try to make a description of the Victoria Memorial Park in Calcutta.

What’s the Ochterlony’s Needle?

Who was Amir Rumi?

What kind of song did the boy sing? I mean, what was the topic of the songs?

Tell us adjectives for Imrat voice.

What is Tansen’s tamarind tree?

When did the miracle of an offer for a recording contract happen?

Don’t you think there is a contradiction singing for God and at the same time singing for a recording contract?

In your opinion, what happened to Imrat at the end? How do you know?

 

VOCABULARY

paanwallah, paan, betel, sahib, yoked, taunts, paisa, muffling, drilling, relishing, struts, tablas, sheikh, prodded, welling, pimp, puffed up, clumsiness, greed, drone, tanpura, raga, hawkers, samosa, pandering

A Lecture Tour, by Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun at the Wikipedia

A Lecture Tour: analysis

Knut Hamsun, by Dora Sarrión 

Biography

 
Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen in Lom, in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway, in 1859. He was the fourth of seven children. His family were very poor, so, when he was three, they moved to Hamarøy in Nordland County, to farm a land of an uncle.
At the age of nine, he was sent to live with his uncle Hans Olsen, who used to beat and starve him. Later, Hamsun stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874, he escaped from his miserable life, back to Lom; for the next five years he did any job for money: he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, and an elementary-school teacher.
At 17, he became a ropemaker's apprentice; and, although he had almost no formal education, he started to write. He asked the businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908).
He left Norway for the United States twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. There, he travelled and worked in various jobs, falling in every project he began. His bitter experience in the American territory led him to write in 1889 a book full of negative comments about the life in that country, From the Spiritual Life of Modern America.
Although this was his first writing, it wouldn’t be released until his next novel, Hunger, was published in 1890. This semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in Kristiania (now Oslo), the Norwegian capital.
Hunger introduced the typical structure of Knut Hamsun stories: a nomadic protagonist who does not fit in with the people around him, who seeks to return to his origin, drawing inspiration from his own experiences.
Following the success of this novel, there were many other interesting works: Mysteries (1892), Victoria (1898), Under the Autumn Star (1906), A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909) and Wayfarer (1929).
Hamsun achieved his greatest popularity in 1917 with his publication The Blessing of the Earth. Thanks to this work, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1920.
In 1898, he married Bergljot Göpfert, with whom he had a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1906. Three years later, he married Marie Andersen, who was 23 years younger than him. They had four children.
Hamsun had strong anti-English views, and openly supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Due to his professed support to the German occupation of Norway, he was charged with treason after the war. In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. 
During the more than 70 years in which he was writing, he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays, and some of his works have been the basis of 25 films and television miniseries adaptations.
Hamsun is considered to be “one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years” and “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun”. He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
 
A Lecture Tour
 
The story, written in first person, is about a professor of Literature who was short of money and decided to go to Drammen, to give a lecture about the novelist Alexander Kielland, one of the most famous Norwegian writers of the 19th century, to earn some extra money.
After reaching Drammen and looking for a hotel, he visited an editor and a lawyer. Both of them put him on the alert that there wasn’t much interest in literature in the city, and he probably would lose money on his business. Furthermore, the same day that he scheduled to give his lecture, an anti-spiritualist was doing his show with apes and wild animals, and it would attract a crowd.
Despite these warnings, he rented one of the pavilions, he paid for an insertion in the newspaper giving the date, place and topic of his lecture, and hired a man to hang cards with publicity around the city, advertising the event.
By chance, both the narrator and the anti-spiritualist stayed in the same hostel.
Each of them talked about what their show was like, and the anti-spiritualist asked him to work on his show because he needed a man to introduce the animals. The narrator didn’t accept it because he thought the anti-spiritualist “was afraid of the competition and was worried that he would steal his audience away from him”.
The day of the show, only the lawyer came to the lecture on literature because almost everybody was watching the show with apes and wild beasts.
When the narrator got tired of waiting for his spectators, he returned to his hostel ashamed and disappointed and aware that he didn’t have any money for the train going back home.
In the middle of that night, the anti-spiritualist, after his show was finished, came into the narrator's room and inquired him about how his lecture had gone. With a bit of embarrassment, he said that he had cancelled it. After that, the anti-spiritualist gave him details about how many problems he had with his presenter that evening and offered him once again the occupation as a presenter of the beasts.
One more time, the narrator found this offer offensive. “Never would I be a party to such vulgarity!!! A man had his honour to consider”, he thought.
The following day, the anti-spiritualist offered him some money if he looked over the speech about the beasts, correcting the grammar and brushing up the language.
It was impossible for the narrator to refuse this offer because “he was doing the man a favour really, and it was, after all, a service in the cause of literature”, and, the most important, he needed the money.
Not only he remade the speech from the beginning to the end, but also accepted to do the speech during the show.
Although the show ended up being a success and the anti-spiritualist was pleased and thanked him warmly for his support, he refused to pay him unless he accepted to appear in his show the next evening. But the narrator decided not to continue with this business and return to his city.
In our story, the protagonist believes that literature itself can bring great benefit to people's souls, and that it doesn’t matter what their real needs are. But the harsh reality shows him that his work can only be successful if it’s adapted to the tastes of the people who are going to receive it.
The citizens of Drammen work hardly during all day, and, in their free time, they only desire to entertain themselves with any activity that will help them forget about their daily routine. They don’t want to be educated.
The protagonist failed his initial approach on his literary tour and was wildly successful when he adapted to the crowd, but I'm not sure if he learned anything from this experience.
I wonder what the real usefulness of literature in our current world is, and if different types of literature are necessary, depending on the social or cultural class of the person.

QUESTIONS

Who was Alexander Kielland?

What’s the present name of Kristiania?

How did the porter guess that our protagonist was a poor man?

What other lecture was taking place at that moment in Drammen?

How can they warm the blankets?

What did our protagonist do to leave the posh hotel?

Where did he want to give his lecture?

What did the anti-spiritualist offer him at first? And what was his answer?

The literary lecture: how did it work? Why?

Why, according to the anti-spiritualist lecturer, cannot a local man present the beasts in the lecture?

Why did our protagonist accept to give the lecture about animals at the end?

This lecture was a serious exposition or only quackery? How do you know?

Was the lecture a success or a failure? How is it described in the text?

What happened with the hyena?

“That’s the power literature has to move men’s minds”. Do you think literature, or a book, or some books can change your life (remember Werther)?

How do you feel when you read something worth of reading, and you know its author is a Nazi?

 

VOCABULARY

took stock, befitting, catered, outgoings, carpetbag, touting, venue, furrier, outlay, swarming, foreboding, posh, butt, dozed off, breeding, scoffed, pelting, standing-room, badgers, marten, Jack of Clubs, mangle, houses, undertaking