The Thing's the Play, by O. Henry

Audiobook

SUMMARY

The story starts with a conversation between a journalist and the narrator. They are in a theatre watching a show. On the stage, there is a man playing the violin. The journalist tells our narrator he had to write a humorous column about the violin player, but his story was so sad that he only could be able to write a tragedy.

But after hearing the story, our narrator disagreed and said he could make a funny tale of it. And here you go:

Frank Barry and John Delaney were bosom friends. They both were in love with the same woman, a girl of 18 called Helen. But as Helen only loved Frank, she got married to him and John was just the best man. However, after the wedding ceremony, when the happy couple were on the point of going on their honeymoon, John ran to see Helen while she was alone in her room to declare his passionate love for her, entreating her to run away with him and forget her husband. But Helen didn’t think at all about forgetting her husband and rejected Frank outright. John, desperate, apologized and said he would disappear into exotic countries to try to make up for his disappointment.

But casually, Frank saw John kissing Helen’s hand to say goodbye forever and thought his just married wife was having an affair with his best friend. Frank, desperate, run away from Helen’s home and never came back.

Twenty years passed by without any news from Frank or John. Helen Barry was now the owner of her mother’s shop and lived alone. She was 38, but her beauty never had faded. She got proposals, but her answer was always, “I’m a married woman.”

However, the business didn’t go so well as before, and she had to rent two rooms of her house.

She didn’t have to wait long for tenants. One of them was a violin player called Ramonti who was looking for a quieter place to live in, and Helen’s house was perfect for his ears.

After a time, another tenant came. This man was very chatty and told Helen a lot of stories and showed certain admiration for the landlady. Helen thought that he could be her lost husband, but she didn’t want to betray herself so early: he wanted to punish him a little for his long absence.

But one evening, Ramonti stated his love for Helen. He was a quiet and friendly man, but he had amnesia: he didn’t know exactly who was and what was his previous life because he had had an accident and had lost all his old memories. He only knew how to play the violin and that he loved her devotedly.

Helen felt joyous again, as when she was young. Still, she rejected him with the old sentence “I’m a married woman”, and he had to go back to his room and play the violin.

An hour later, the second tenant appeared and revealed to Helen who he was: he was John Delaney and his love for her was intact. He knelt down before her as twenty years before and kissed her hand asking her to marry him. He also told her that that fateful wedding day he met her husband on the street and, out of irrepressible jealousy, punched him; Frank fell down, hit his head on the ground, was unconscious and had to be carried to a hospital. Nevertheless, John didn't know for sure if Frank was dead or alive.

And all of a sudden, all was clear for Helen ―she knew what she had to do.

 

 

QUESTIONS?

-Is it possible to love two men or two women at the same time? Have you seen the film Keeping the Faith?

-The narrator says one should get elated if one had had a secure husband and, in addition, a devoted admirer. Would you feel the same way? Have you seen Beröringen, by Bergman?

-In which context does Hamlet say the sentence “The play is the thing”: I’ll have grounds / More relative than this —the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King? What does the phrase exactly mean? Why in our story is it the other way round, “The thing is the play”?

-What do you know about The House that Jack Built?

-What stories do you remember about amnesic people?

 

VOCABULARY

fell down on, write up, hooks, curtain raiser, stationery, best man, gibbering, hominy, fire-escape, babble, amaranth, galluptious, legal cap, quaint, innuendo

The Buyer from Cactus City, by O. Henry

Audiobook

Movie (only the first scenes)

SUMMARY, by Glòria Torner

As many others stories by O. Henry, this one, The Buyer from Cactus City, is placed in Old South settings and New York, with an exposition of the life of ordinary people, using local colours and a realistic dialogue.
The story begins with a description of Cactus City (Texas), a rich town of twenty thousand people where the important building from Navarro & Platt is located. It’s a big store full of different things you can buy.
Every year, the older partner, Navarro, is going to New York to buy new merchandises for his emporium. But this year, as he feels a little tired, he wants to stay at home. Then, he orders his junior member, called John Platt, to make the trip to the Big City, (New York) to buy for his department store goods, especially, women’s suits.
Two weeks later, Platt, a wealthy and handsome Westerner, called ironically “Mister Texas”, a ranch man who has become a businessman, arrives in New York and enters the wholesale trade from Zizzbaum & Son, located in Broadway, to purchase some things for his business. Old Zizzbaum receives Platt, who is not impressed by New York. For that reason, Zizzbaum tells his son, Abey, to show him different places of Broadway that evening.
The next day, Zizzbaum, who wants to encourage his customer in sales, calls a sophisticated model from his trade, Helen Ashley, and commands her to try on different dresses in front of Platt. The model, aware of her duty part, agrees. Immediately, he finds her very beautiful. At that moment, the narrator says: “Platt felt for the first time the wonderful bright light of romance and glory descend upon him.”
Following with his plan, Zizzbaum arranges a dinner at 7:00 p.m. between John, the customer, and Helen, her employee. Now, John notices that Helen is his ideal. He is a young, rich business Westerner in love with a model. He imagines and tells her he will buy a beautiful car and a house, but she, disgustedly, replies she “has heard that before”.  For Helen, this evening is just following her working day and, frankly, she informs Platt she is only out with him to play this role, otherwise she’ll lose her job.
Platt insists and declares his love and gives her a diamond ring he has bought. Misunderstanding him, she reacts by getting angry because she believes he wants to abuse her. Immediately, she wants to leave the restaurant telling him to take her to the boarding house where she lives. There she slaps his face. But the persistent Westerner, who only wants about marrying her, increases his infatuation looking for an honest, sincere relationship and... just then a ring falls at her feet, but it isn’t the same ring: she sees that it is actually a wedding ring.
As many times in the stories of this author, the plot goes on in one direction, and just when the reader thinks they can predict the ending, finally, it turns to another different direction.
Surprise ending?  Does she change her mind because she realizes her mistake? Is there a change of reaction when she wants to know where is Cac, Carac, Caracas City?

QUESTIONS

-Do you think a mercenary marriage could be happy? And a marriage without romantic love?
-In your view, is the girl in the story, Helen, treated like an object by her boss? In your opinion, are some jobs (like models) offensive for people’s dignity?
-Helen doesn’t mind going away to live in an unknown place. What conditions you wouldn’t agree with for a marriage, or for a job?

VOCABULARY

obtain, be sneezed at, tan, shied, whirl, lay-down collar, wholesale, smuggled, crowbait, incidentally, oilily, evening gown, tulle, Don’t get fresh 

Witches' Loafes, by O. Henry

Video (an amateur film)

Summary and analysis

Analysis

Themes

SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

The story is about Miss Martha. She is a single middle-aged lady who runs her own bakery. She has a good heart and she sympathizes with one of her customers, a man with a German accent, who only buys two loaves of stale bread, two or three times a week.

Miss Martha finds him attractive. The man, Blumberger, doesn’t seem rich in any way. His clothes are mended in some places. Despite that, he looks neat and is very polite. She is sure that he is an artist, and very poor, because once she saw a red and brown stain on his fingers.

Miss Martha imagines the artist sitting in the middle of his empty room, having the stale bread and water for his meals. She falls in love with the idea of helping him and maybe creating a relationship.

One day, Miss Martha changes her old apron for a blue-dotted silk one, and behind the counter, she looks more beautiful. She also prepares a mixture of seeds and borax for her complexion, to make her more attractive to him. Then the customer arrives for his stale bread, and while he is distracted by a fire-engine outside, Miss Martha puts some fresh butter inside the stale loaves and gives them to him without him noticing. She imagines how he will enjoy the surprise of finding the fresh butter after his painting work. 

A few hours later, the outside bell rings. Two men are standing there. One is a young man smoking a pipe, the other is her favourite customer. He is upset and very angry. He is shouting, accusing her of mocking him, and insults her with German words. 

Poor Miss Martha! She feels ashamed and guilty… She removes her apron replacing it with the old one and throws the mixture out of the window. The romantic bubble has burst.

Some reflections

Some people have a tendency to make assumptions based on appearances, and there is a danger of acting on those assumptions without fully understanding a person’s situation. Miss Martha’s sympathetic heart and her desire to help the artist are admirable, but her actions are wrong and hurtful. 

The story’s title “Witches’ loaves” gives the association between women and evil enchantment. Perhaps the title suggests that Martha has attempted to “bewitch” Blumberger with butter in order to try to win him as her husband.

QUESTIONS
How can you recognize a genius?
Are pictures an exact representation of reality? (Think about Canaletto and his Venetian pictures, or about Stubbs and his running horses.)

Do you believe in first impressions? When, or how, can you decide you know a person? Imagine you go to a blind date and you meet someone new: When and why do you decide to go on with the meeting, or to stop it?

On your view, what are the essencial qualities a shopkeeper must have?

Why being single was a shame (mostly for a woman) in older times?

 

VOCABULARY

sympathetic, darned, stale, garret, chops, showcase, Sally Luns, quince, complexion, nickel, dairyman, fluttering, edibles, dwelt, easel, viciously

  

October and June, by O. Henry

SUMMARY, by J. Guiteras

The captain, who had kept his uniform worn out by time and service in a closet, was enchanted by the sweet and smiling lips of a woman.

He received a letter from this woman telling him that she would not marry him because of the age difference between them.

The captain, who was rich and handsome, did not resign himself to this refusal and took a train to see her so that she could reconsider.

She stood firm in her decision, arguing that within a few years one of them would want to be quiet at home and the other would be crazy about going out to parties.

The captain was sad because he had lost the battle and returned home.

The next day he reflected and came to the conclusion that Theo, the woman, was right, since one of them was 28 years old and the other was only 19 years old.

 

Reflection: I feel sorry for them because a younger person can always learn a lot from another one who is older and with experience and has a lot to teach to a youngster.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why was the age gap very important in the past, and now isn’t so?

-Do you think we’ll be able to overcome all the clichés? Are prejudices good or bad for daily life?

-In your opinion, what is the relation of the title with the story?

 

VOCABULARY

gloomily, rugged, squared, ‘Pon

BIOGRAPHY, by Begoña Devis

William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina in 1862 and died in New York in 1910. He was a great writer known as O. Henry after a cat he lived with for a time. He is considered one of the masters of the short story. His admirable treatment of surprise narrative endings popularized in English the expression "an O. Henry ending".

He had an eventful life. His mother died when he was three, and he and his father moved to his paternal grandmother's house. As a child he was a good student, and a great reader. He graduated from his aunt's school, who continued teaching him until he was 15. He then began working in his uncle's pharmacy and finally graduated as a pharmacist.

In 1882 he went to Texas, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his persistent cough. There he worked there as a ranch hand, as a cook and as a nanny. When his health improved, he went to Austin, where he worked as a pharmacist and where he began writing short stories. He was popular in the social life in Austin for his storytelling and musical talent. At this time, his problems with alcohol abuse began. In 1887, he eloped with the young Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1888 they have a child, who died. In 1889, a new daughter, Margaret, was born.

In 1894, Porter founded a humorous weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone.  Then that magazine collapsed, and he moved to Houston, where he was a journalist at the Houston Post.

The most transcendental event occurred in 1895, when he was accused by the First National Bank of appropriating money that he had under his responsibility. On the eve of the trial he sailed for Honduras, where he lived for seven months, and where he wrote several stories, many of which appear in the book Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term «banana republic», phrase subsequently used to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.

In 1897 he returned to Austin when he knew that his wife was dying, and after a few months he was arrested and convicted, spending three years in the Columbus (Ohio) prison. There he continued writing short stories to support his daughter. When he was released from prison, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York, where he lived until his death.

In New York, the city the writer loved and the setting for many of his stories, O. Henry gained public recognition, but he had a deep problem with his alcoholism. Indeed, there is an anecdote that his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", was written under the pressure of a deadline, in just three hours and accompanied by a whole bottle of whiskey.

From December 1903 to January 1906, he wrote a story a week for the New York World, his most prolific period. He remarried in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Colem, who left him in 1909.

O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was held in New York and he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.

In the United States, the O. Henry Award for short stories, one of the most important in the world, was created in his memory. Among other writers, it has been awarded to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.

Philomela, by Emma Tennant

Literary biography

BIOGRAPHY

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937, from an aristocratic family. She spent the Blitz in a fake gothic house in a Scottish glen. Then she came back to London; after her school time in London, she went to study in Oxford for some years. When she was older, he lived for some years in Corfu, where her parents had built a house, and she wrote a book about it.

She got married four times, the last one when she was 71 to a man of 33. She also had an affair with Ted Hughes.

Although she descended from the nobility, she was a staunch supporter of the Labour Party.

She died at 80 from a form of Alzheimer.

She worked as a travel writer for a magazine and was the editor of Vogue.

She wrote her first novel when she was 26, The Colour of Rain, and submitted it to the Formentor Prix. The chairman of the jury, Alberto Moravia, said it was a horrible novel, and Emma Tennant suffered a writer’s block for ten years. A curious detail is that she wrote it under a pseudonym, composed with the Ouija. Later, she used again this device as a help to write her novels.

After these ten years, she started writing again and she published a lot. Her books are usually versions of classical stories or prequels and sequels of famous books. For example The French Daughter’s Bastard, about the daughter of Mr Rochester (the protagonist of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë), Pemberley, a version of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, or Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. Sometimes, in her versions, she changes the masculine characters for feminine ones and vice versa, and she adds magic and feminism to the original narratives.

 

SUMMARY

Philomela was originally published in 1975 in the literary magazine Bananas, whose editor she was.

It tells the classical myth of Philomel, or Philomela, that appears in The Metamorphoses, by Ovid. The narrator is Procne, Philomela’s sister. She tells how she married Tereus, from Thrace, and thus had to move out of Athens leaving her loving sister there. Procne wasn’t very happy in her marriage; after a while she had a son called Itylus, but she continued feeling sad. So her sister offered to go and live with her in Thrace, but, in the end, she didn’t go. Tereus, a man who only liked war, decided to go to Athens to fetch her sister’s wife. But he came back with the bad news that Philomela was dead. Procne was sadder and sadder; she had another child, but the children weren’t a comfort to her. Her only entertainment was to take care of her garden: she would have liked to show it to her sister…

After a time, a foreign slave went to see her and gave her a cloth. The cloth was a kind of tapestry which depicted how Tereus raped her sister, cut her tongue and locked her up in a castle.

But Procne didn’t tell anything about it to her husband and sent two loyal slaves of hers to rescue Philomela. They got her and came back to Thrace secretly.

When Tereus saw Philomela he was astonished, but he plucked up courage and said that he had committed a mistake and that he was very sorry for it, that he really believed Philomela was dead. Philomela didn’t reproach him anything.

In Tereus palace, everyone respected and feared Philomela because she was dumb, because in that time, someone who had a peculiarity was revered by the rest.

Although Procne and Philomela behave as if nothing had happened to the latter, they were planning their revenge. Itylus was an exact replica of his father, and thus he was to be the object of their retaliation.

When Tereus came from the war, and while he was celebrating his victories, the sisters killed Itylus, boiled him, made a pie with his body and gave it to Tereus in a banquet. The sisters were satisfied, but we don’t know what happened to them once Tereus knew about his heir.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Choose a Greek myth and tell us the story. (A list)

-Do you know any other story or tale where somebody eats human flesh?

-Imagine you are in a dire strait and the only way to survive is eating human flesh; would you do it?

-Sometimes the psychoanalysis recurs to the myths and legends to explain the human behaviour. Remember the Oedipus complex. What kind of complex could be Philomela complex? I mean: if the Oedipus complex tries to explain the child’s jealousy towards his dad, what kind of problem could Philomela’s story reflect?

-In the cave, the sisters said there was a dead monster. How do you imagine this monster?

-Sometimes, when somebody has a flaw (dumbness, blindness…), people think they have magic powers. What can be the origin of this belief?

-Do you know more examples of love / loyalty between sisters, or brothers?

-What are the differences between the original myth and the story by Tennant?

Myth audiobook

VOCABULARY

bearable, moped, palling, lurked, hangings, listlessly, advanced on, groves, importantly, drifwood, boulder, shift, seeped, limpets, wince

The Fishing-boat Picture, by Alan Sillitoe

BIOGRAPHY

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928 to a working-class family. His father was an illiterate, couldn’t keep a job for long, and was usually violent. His mother worked in factories and, for a short time, as a prostitute. They had, besides Alan, four more children. They often moved house because they couldn’t pay the rent.
Alan left school at fourteen because he failed the entrance exam for the grammar school (the secondary school at the time). He worked in the factories of the county for four years, and then he joined the RAF, although he didn’t serve in the WWII because he was too young. But he did serve as a wireless operator in the war against the rebel communists in Malaya.
When he got back, he discovered he had TB. While in the hospital, he read a lot, but with no judgement nor model, and decided he wanted to be a writer.  He got together with the poet Ruth Fainlight (whom she married ten years later). Then, with a pension from the government, he travelled to France and Spain to try to get over his disease. When he lived in Majorca, he met Robert Graves, who helped him in his career as a writer. Thus, he started writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1958. The novel is about the Saturday night-life of a factory worker who gets involved in a booze competition and in a love affair with is mate’s wife, and then, the next morning, the hangover shows him the reality of life.
His other famous novel is The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, published in 1959. It's about the life in a Borstal, a youth detention centre.
In 1968, he was invited to visit the USSR as a working-class writer, but there he denounced the human rights abuses in the communist system, surprising this way the soviet authorities. But, on the other hand, he always supported Israel in front of Palestinian movements.
He belongs, although he doesn’t like being classified like this, to the “angry young men” of the 50s in the UK, a group of artists and intellectual people who rejected the middle-class morals of the post-war Great Britain. He avoided all literary awards, although he accepted honorary doctorates from some universities.
He had two children from his wife.
Alan Sillitoe died in 2010 in London, of cancer. He was 82.
 
SUMMARY

This is a working-class story: the characters are working people, simple, with poor entertainment and poor ambitions, and it typically ends sadly.
Our hero is Harry, a postman who takes his life easily and doesn’t get emotional for anything. His only hobby is reading, mostly books about geography. When he gets a steady position in the post office, he says yes to get married to Kathy, a girl four years older than he.
For six years, they live happily together, although with a lot of rows, sometimes a bit violent. Then, after these six years, they had a silly argument: Kathy throws his book to the fire, he hits her, and she goes away for good. But afterwards he discovers that she had been cheating on him, at least for a year, with a housepainter across the street.
He isn’t sad or angry with Kathy’s departure, and he gets used to living alone, and feels, if not happier, more comfortable. He goes on doing his rounds and reading his books without any of the usually ups and downs of the life.
After six years more, his wife appears again out of the blue. She says she was around there and thought it was worth paying him a visit. Nevertheless, neither of them is excited about this sudden meeting; perhaps they only feel a bit of nostalgia. They sit and have a chat, all the time keeping the distance, but without any resentment. Kathy shows some interest in a picture of a fishing boat hanging on the wall, the last of a collection of pictures her brother gave them as a wedding present, and Harry decides to give her the picture, although at the beginning she declines the offer. They used to say the picture was the last of the fleet.

Some days later, he sees the picture in a pawnshop window; a bit surprised, he buys it and hangs it at the same place, again with any kind of rancour.
Kathy keeps paying him short visits, and all the time their meetings are cold and distant. Initially, neither of them mentions again the picture. Now and then, the postman gives her money and cigarettes, although he only smokes a pipe.
Asked about the housepainter, Kathy tells him he died a long time ago of lead-poisoning. Now, she says, she lives alone in a small flat and has different jobs.
In the end, she asks again for the fishing-boat picture, and he gives it to her again. Afterwards, he finds it again in the window of the same pawnshop, but this time he doesn’t rebuy it.
One day, a lorry runs over her, killing her. The postman goes to the hospital, and there they give him her belongings, and with them there is the fishing-boat picture, broken and dirty with blood. In the cemetery, besides her relatives, there comes a stranger. Harry finds him again in her place, collecting his things: he had been living with Kathy all these six years.
At home again, he thinks he could have kept their pictures and also kept Kathy, and feels that his life had been a waste of time.
At the end, he wonders about the meaning of life, of his life: is it worth living one’s life?
 
QUESTIONS

-What is your advice for a dating couple in order to know each other better and help them to decide on living (or not) together?
-What is better for a couple: a lot of love, or a lot of peace?
-Why do you think the protagonist liked living alone after his wife ran away?
-According to your opinion, why the wife didn’t ask him money?
-What does the picture symbolize for the couple along the story?
-Do you think that, for some people, unhappiness is a kind of happiness?

VOCABULARY

mash-lad, cheeky-daft, ruffled, down payment, hire purchase, prising, rammel, duck, allus, daft, nowt, bleddy dead ‘ead, clocked, skipped off, confined, on the dole, knocking on, clubfoot, rounds, draughts, fag-end, aerials, scooting, in the clock of the walk way, sarky, rouge, wireless, bob, hit it off, in the lurch, dresser, fag, five-packet, dished, wry, triplet, out of pop, doddering skinflint, mildewed, feyther, chinning, measly, scuttle, nippy, got the sack, mystified, blackout, shrapnel, picture house, bloke, sexton, potty, booze, pitted, knight

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (film)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (film)

Obituary in The Guardian

Hotel des Boobs, by David Lodge

BIOGRAPHY AND SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

David Lodge (January 28, 1935, London, England) is an English novelist, literary critic, playwright, and editor renowned for his satiric novels about academic life.
Lodge was educated at University College, London, where he got his degree in Literature and where he is an Honorary Fellow.
He travelled to the United States, where he taught, and received his doctorate at the University of Birmingham, where he was professor of Modern English Literature from 1960 to 1987.
He left this university to dedicate entirely to writing.
Lodge is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received numerous honours, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.
His early novels and fiction works go back to 1960, continuing with novels in which the writer satirizes academic life.
Lodge co-authored different plays and moreover produced works dealing in literary theory, essays written for The Washington Post and The Independent, and other books containing essays, lectures, reviews, and a diary.

 

Mentioning some of David Lodge literary works:

The Picturegoers (1960)

Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962)

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)

Out of the Shelter (1970)

How Far Can You Go? (1980)

Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975)

Small World: An Academic Romance (1984)

Nice Work (1988)

Paradise News (1991)

Therapy (1995)

Thinks… (2001)

Deaf Sentence (2008)

Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011) are based on the lives of writers Henry James and H.G. Wells, respectively.

The prolific writer David Lodge lives in Birmingham.

SUMMARY

This story takes place in some French Riviera hotel; Hotel des Pins seems to be its real name.

But some habits there make Harry, one of the guests, propose a different name: Hotel des Boobs.

Harry and Brenda are a British couple on holidays. They have always gone to spend the summer at Brenda’s parents, in Guernsey, with their children. 

This year, the children have already grown independent, and the couple is well off; thus they consider new options, and finally they end up going to a little hotel with swimming pool near St Raphael.

As Harry’s friends have mentioned, and Harry knows somehow, in some areas of the Mediterranean, at that time, women had started to practice topless. But what Harry finds and experiences there is beyond his previous suppositions.

First of all, there is Harry’s strong personal attraction for women’s breasts, since he’s always spending time and thoughts about this part of the female figure.

Already at the hotel, Harry can observe and enjoy more or less discreetly all the women by the swimming pool.

For instance, Harry remains peeping through the window in the couple room, getting Brenda so angry that she sends him down to the pool “to have an inspection” directly there.

Harry begins to characterize all the women at the hotel swimming pool, according to their nationalities, companions and activities while they sunbathe, but manly according to the shape, size, movement or aspect of their breasts. 

Harry carries a book, that in fact he doesn’t read, and a pair of dark sunglasses, the elements he considers useful to disguise his curiosity over topless women, who only avoid using the upper part of their bikinis by the swimming pool, and immediately cover themselves when moving to other areas of the hotel.

Harry entertains various ideas centred in nakedness, for example, what the other men there could feel, that the women would imagine their topless could arouse those other men... At the end, he gets enthusiastic and excited with the idea that Brenda, who has good boobs, should go topless before the holidays ended. The other men could look, but only he would be allowed to touch. Following this strong desire, Harry offers to buy Brenda some beautiful and expensive dress they saw in St Raphael, if she agrees to take her top off.

 

At this point of the story, there is a sudden change: in fact, there is a writer by the swimming pool, under an umbrella, and he is writing about the created couple Harry and Brenda, and about all the others there, the women in topless, the other guests, the waiter, all of them reflected in a pile of written pages.

But suddenly and unexpectedly, the local mistral wind starts to blow causing the written pages to fly all over, fall onto the water, disappear beyond the tall trees…, a true disaster for the writer, who feels violated.

Some of the presents manages to bring back a few pages to the author, and a lady sends her children to run and try and collect more papers.

The author (unknown name) doesn’t want the papers back and goes to his room to wait the return of his wife (unknown name) from St Raphael, where she has bought a nice, although not so expensive, dress.

The husband explains to his wife about the flying parts of the book, and wants to leave the hotel immediately, just in case someone could read what he has told in the lost pages.

His wife doesn’t consider it is a problem, but wants to know what the end of the story would be.

“Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless”, the author says. The wife doesn’t believe it would happen.

The writer then continues telling the end of the story: Brenda doesn’t go to bed with Harry, she disappears for two hours, gets from Antoine the bouquet-prize for the best breasts, goes to his room where they make love, and Brenda considers Antoine much better lover and much better equipped than Harry.

The author's wife says that is the worst ending.

But then the author goes on saying that Brenda has invented that story, that nothing has happened. But Harry remains disturbed thinking Brenda doesn’t appreciate his male attributes and, shaking his head, he gazes at the blue breastless margins of the pool.

Harry’s obsession about women breasts has changed to anxiety about his own body.

Finally, the writer’s wife asks him if he would like her to go topless, and he answers of course not, but he doesn’t sound really sure, or true. 

*

In this story, there are two couples and one story inside another.

Perhaps in some aspects, the writer uses Harry to express his own feelings or preferences.

Perhaps similarities or differences can be found between the four of them. 

The story gives the chance to think about what women breasts signify in different cultures or societies. From naturally exhibited, to denied or hidden. Female breasts as tender and essential for a baby, or charged with sexual attraction. 

At the beginning of topless time, many people considered it totally indecent and didn’t approve or follow the new style.

For some people, to go naked to the beach is an act of freedom and naturalism.

For others, it means discomfort and shame. 

As the psychoanalysts explain, sexuality is a big and unknown mystery for human beings. 

QUESTIONS

-What ideas do you have to stop the “binge tourism”?

-Do you consider disrespectful / offensive / sexist / anachronistic the beginning of the story?

-Do you think nakedness is sexy only according to the situation?

-“May a cat look at a king?” I mean, can a gaze / stare be bothering? Do you have to ask permission to look at someone / something?

-The writer is telling his wife the story he’s going to write, so what is the difference between a story casually told and a work of art?

 

 

VOCABULARY

Peeping Tom, squint, Geddit, Knockers, were... off, pricey, extravagant, filched, weaned, pore, snooty, tubby, lathe, belied, matey, foolscap, wont, Schadenfreude, longhand, mistral, Paperchase, hard-on