Dido's Lament, by Tessa Hadley

Dido's Lament, on The New Yorker (text, and audio, read by the author)

SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteras

Lynette was 30 years old, she was tall, with brown freckly skin; she was original and eager, and she was wearing a wool coat that she had found in a charity shop.

It was winter at 5 pm, after work, when she went into John Lewis store to buy some things she needed. Leaving the stores and heading to the corridors and subway platforms, a man making his way through the crowd hit her, causing great pain in her ankle, so she decided to follow him to demand an apology, but, when she touched him, she realized that it was Toby, her ex-husband whom she had left 9 years ago, possibly because he wasn’t her type. Toby was glad to see her, and Lynette saw that Toby had changed: he has gone from being shy with the air of a country boy to seeing himself as a mundane and prosperous man. Currently, he had created a new production company that brought him a good income.

She had failed in the attempt to being a singer since her voice did not meet the conditions. Now, she had a temporary job at the BBC: in short, things were not going very well for her.

Toby told her that he had married Jaz, and they had two daughters and that he and his wife were very happy. Lynette lied when she said that she had a good boyfriend.

The bars were full of people, so Toby invited her to his house in Queen’s Park because his wife and his daughters had gone to her sister’s house. The house was located in a good area, the exterior appearance of the house was perfect and, inside, it was spacious with an old and modern decoration, and beautiful functional furniture. She realized that what the house contained was Toby’s liking.

Toby thought that he had done well to take Lynette home since in a bar he would have fallen into a flirtation under Lynette’s control, while, in his family’s house, everything was more transparent.

Before leaving, Lynette wrote her phone number on a blackboard. When Toby was left alone at home, he erased the phone number because he did not want to put everything together, family, work and home to maintain a relationship with Lynette. Lynette went to a bar near Toby’s house and saw that she had left the cheap clothes she had bought at John Lewis in Toby’s home.

She thought that Toby would call her, or maybe not. Lynette came to the conclusion that it was better to be free and, if she wasn’t, it was necessary.

QUESTIONS

-Bearing in mind Lynette’s physical appearance, what can you say about her personality?

-Do you think Toby didn’t notice he struck somebody going into the tube?

-The way you see it, what are Lynette’s reasons to follow obstinately the man who struck her?

-In your opinion, did he know somebody was following him?

-Can you always justify someone’s unconsciousness / abstraction?

-What do you think were the reasons for their divorce? Was one of them guiltier than the other?

-Did Toby prosper more than Lynette because of their divorce?

-Her having ancestors from Sierra Leone, does it have any relevance for her personality, for her divorce, for the story?

-She says she isn’t of the marrying kind nor the mothering kind. Don’t you think these situations come from chances rather from our will?

-Why did she lie about having a boyfriend and about meeting some friends of her?

-According to you, why did he invite her to his house, and why did she accept?

-To your mind, why didn’t she tell him about his clashing her in the tube?

-“She was afraid that his loving kindness might enclose her too entirely, like a sheath.” When can love and tenderness be scary?

-She was also afraid of his subordination. Why?

-“Men always run their women together into a continuum.” What does this sentence mean?

-Why does she think “Toby had opted for an easy, chummier life”?

-What is the author’s purpose when she mentions the car accident?

-Do you think that Lynette, when she wanted the divorce, resorted to the old cliché of not being free to give herself to work completely?

-What do you know about Dido’s Lament and about Dido and Aeneas?

-What do you imagine is the relation between the title and the story?

-Can you explain why she gave him her telephone number? And why did he erase it immediately?

-She forgot a bag in Toby’s house and Toby hid it to prevent his wife to see it. Did he still have any feelings for Lynette? What’s his relation with Jaz like?

-Do you think the story has an open ending, or it’s definitely finished?

 

VOCABULARY

John Lewis, fuming, funnelling, tartan, branded, hem, forging, trudging, tearing, Oyster card, escalator, filled out, wizened, dilapidated, smug, temp, temping, Sierra Leone, wincing, thrumming, children's teatime, devious, earnest, taking in, scuffed, rocking horse, goaded, barley sugar, simpering, chummier, juggernaut, ruddy, russet, guesting, accretions, Calpol, ranting, chalkboard

Dido's Lament, from the opera Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell

Forgotten Dreams, by Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig at the Wikipedia: click here

👉Presentation, by Elisa Sola

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 and he died in Petrópolis (Brazil) in 1942, three years before the end of the Second World War. He was born into a wealthy Jewish family: his father was a textile manufacturer and his mother was a daughter of a Jewish banking family. The wealth of his family allowed him to cultivate the great passion of his life: travelling. He studied philosophy and history of literature. Zweig was a humanist and an intellectual who spoke many languages (he translated Paul Verlaine, Ch. Baudelaire, É. Verhaeren... Therefore, he believed in internationalism and Europeism. He met, also, many intellectuals of his time: his friend and pacifist Romain Rolland, Jules Romain, Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, M. Gorki, R.M. Rilke, A. Rodin…, A little anecdote about the friendship with Strauss: It is said that Zweig wrote the libretto for the Richard Strauss’s opera The silent Woman, and Strauss refused to remove the Zweig’s name from the programme, despite the orders of the Nazi regime. As a result, Goebbels refused to attend this opera, as he planned, and the opera was banned after three performances.

Stefan Zweig married Friederike Maria Von Wintermitz in 1920 and they divorced in 1938, but in the late summer of 1939, Zweig married his secretary Elisabet Charlotte, known as Lotte. They committed suicide in 1942 with an overdose of barbiturates in their home in Petrópolis (Brazil).

S. Zweig was a novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and wrote biographies, such as Joseph Fouché, Mary Stuart and Marie Antoniette (adapted by Metro-Goldyn-Mayer), among others, but Zweig is best known by his novellas: The Royal Game, Amok and The Letter from an Unknown Woman (filmed in 1948 by Max Ophulus). Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before his suicide.

In a biopic film about Stefan Sweig, Adiós, Europa, a film directed by Maria Schrader the exile of Stefan Zweig is explained: the last years, when he and his second wife moved to New York and then, finally, to Brazil. It is explained, too, how he helps his first wife and other friends to run away from Germany. In the end, he couldn’t overcome the pessimism of seeing the decline of Europe and he and his wife committed suicide. He left a little farewell letter: 

“By my own will and in full lucidity

Every day I have learned to love this country more, and I would not have rebuilt my life anywhere else after the world of my own language collapsed and was lost to me, and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.

But starting all over again when you've turned sixty requires special forces, and my own strength has been wasted after years of homeless wanderings. So I prefer to end my life at the appropriate time, upright, like a man whose cultural work has always been his purest happiness and his personal freedom, his most precious possession on this earth.

I send greetings to all my friends. May they live to see the sunrise after this long night. I, who I am very impatient, leave before them.

Stefan Zweig

Petrópolis, 2/22/1942" 

Forgotten Dreams

The story begins as a fairy tale: a woman (the princess) is living (or sleeping) surrounded by beauty and peace (“outside the sleeping house / drowsy”), a locus amoenus, but it’s a false appearance, because there is no happiness in this frame… Then the man (or the prince) comes and kisses her hand and wakes the princess from her enchantment: she realizes her mistake and with her confession the character progresses and matures.

In my opinion there are three characters in the story: the delicate woman, the vigorous man, and the landscape. The landscape’s descriptions are crucial to define the mood of the characters. Therefore, the frame is worth to explain the story. One of the things I want to highlight in linguistic work (and one I’ve liked the most) are personifications: the association of human qualities to inanimate objects:

“the quiet avenues breathed out salty sea air”

“the waves lapped against the tiered terraces…”

“the Vistulian Pines standing close together, as if in intimate conversation”.

Another thing I wanted to highlight is the large number of words about the concept of brightness: houses gleamed/ bright, glaring colours/ veiled glow / dazzling torrent / her eyes sparkle…

Light, as in painting, is very important in the description. In fact, the scene is like a delicate painting that begins with a very bright light and fades at the end: “the glow in her eyes has become deep and menacing”...  And in the last sentence: “the smile on her dreaming lips dies away”. This “dies away” is definitive to express the loss.

I would say another thing about the scene. There are two kinds of silence expressed by the environment:

1.      The first silence, before the lover’s meeting, is full of hope: “there was silence except for the never-tiring wind singing softly in the treetops, now full of the heavy golden midday light”. This golden midday light is full of hope and warmth.

2.      The silence after the lover’s conversation is full of sexual or emotional tension “there is a profound silence, broken only by the monotonous rhythmical song of the glittering waves breaking on the tiers of the terrace bellow, as if casting itself on a beloved breast”.

This movement, these waves, I think is the emotional tension between them. 

I could continue, but surely you have a lot to say!

Two interesting links I’ve found:

A review to read and listening: https://www.insaneowl.com/forgotten-dreams-by-stefan-zweig-short-story-analysis/

A trailer of Maria Shrader’s film: https://youtu.be/RGGm8ny4zBM

(I saw it on Filmin for 2,95 EUR)

🚩From Wikipedia: "Critical opinion of his oeuvre is strongly divided between those who praise his humanism, simplicity and effective style, and those who criticize his literary style as poor, lightweight and superficial: Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing."

👉What's your opinion about Zweig's wtitings or Zweig's style?

Critical article "pro": click here

Critical article "against": click here

Italian Villa

 

Tasks / topics:

Summarize the story in 3 words or less

Summarize the story in a sentence

What were the woman's dreams?

What where the man's ideals?

Did the woman's dreams come true? How?

Did the man's dreams come true? How?

Hints in the first pages that something or somebody is going to come.

If the woman is the "careful construction of an artist", what's she like?

There's a change in the tense of the verbs when the man appears: why?

Hints that they felt sorry for the forgotten love.

 

Vocabulary:

Vistulian pine, obsequious, take in, recall, peal, humdrum, yearning, guess, sweeping dress, cramp