Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome

BIOGRAPHY
Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, West Midlands, in 1859, but when he was two years old, his family moved to London. He was the fourth child of a family with economic difficulties, but he got some education in a grammar school. His father lost all his money because his mines business failed; then he became an ironmonger and a lay preacher. He died when Jerome was 13, and his wife when he was 15. From the moment he was an orphan, he had to earn his living. He got a job in a railway company, where he worked for four years, sometimes collecting coal.
When he was 18, he tried to be an actor, and then a journalist, but his writings were rejected. He also worked as a teacher, a packer and a solicitor clerk. But finally, when he was 27, he got his Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow published. They were a collection of humorous essays that had appeared in a weekly London magazine.
Two years after this, he got married to a divorced woman with a child, Just after the wedding, they went on their honeymoon on a boat along the River Thames, where he got his inspiration for his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published the next year.
The book is a kind of humorous travelogue, or “riverlogue”, that narrates the adventures of three men and a dog on a boat; they go rowing from a quarter in the south of London to Oxford and back, covering a distance of 125 km going. The book was first intended to be a Thames touristic guide, but then became a farcical novel.
Later he tried the same formula about a journey by bike around Germany in his Three Men on the Bummel, but it wasn’t so successful as the first one. He also wrote several plays.
Three Men in a Boat is a kind of classical book, because its comical situations are still making people laugh today.
He volunteered for the WWI, but he was rejected because he was 55, but then he got a post driving an ambulance in the war.
He died at 68 years old from a cerebral haemorrhage.
 
SUMMARY

This is a group of three friends talking about how unwell they feel. Our hero starts wondering at its reason, and then remembers a time when he read about illnesses and started feeling he had all the illnesses described…, all but one called the housemaid’s knee. He went to see a doctor, and the doctor gave him a prescription to have a healthy life: nice food and exercise. Then he remembers that when he was a child and had a problem with the liver, whose main symptoms were laziness, the best remedy was a nice slap.
The group of friends realizes that they feel unwell because they have worked too much, and so they need a rest. One of them proposes to go on a sea trip, but they discard it because of the sea-sickness. At the end, they decided to go up the river on a boat. And thus our story begins.

 
QUESTIONS
-Try to make a definition for all the diseases mentioned on the first pages of the first chapter.
-How hypochondriacal are you? What illnesses are you most afraid of?
-Why don't we say now “natural death” and we prefer to attribute the death to some malfunction?
-What other road movies, or road trip novels, do you know? And what about “river trip novels or films”?
-For you, what is the best way to relax: what kind of holidays are your favourite? What is your opinion about the “dolce far niente”? According to you, is it possible to have a healthy life without working?
-What do you know about Captain Cook and Sir Francis Drake?

VOCABULARY
rolling deep, seedy, it was borne upon me, listlessness, sift it to the bottom, slight, chum, a good turn, pass away, butted, oblige, hampers, clumps, hearth-rug, charge-sheet, humpy, wan, gunwale, return, berth, somersaults, Sheerness, leeward, second mate, my!, to a “T”, sensible, bally

Three Men in a Boat, film. Wikipedia.

The film

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Matrilineal, by Tessa Hadley

Art Pepper

SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

At the very beginning of Matrilineal, we know that Helen had left her husband forty years ago.

At that time, she was married to Phil, and they had two little girls: Nia and Sophie.

The family lived in an apartment at the top floor of a house situated in a nice street of a good neighbourhood. There were beautiful trees and gardens around the building.

To get to their flat, it was necessary to climb up an exterior metal staircase which produced a strong noise at every step they take, no matter how carefully they were. A retired Reverend lived on the flat below theirs. He was always looking through the curtains when the family went up and down, and also complained when they speak aloud, or play music or made some noise on the top floor.

The couple was not very well off, only Phil worked. He was a jazz musician; he played the alto saxophone and gave lessons at a college. Helen was a dancer before having the girls. Since then, she worked at home, took care of Nia and Sophie, took them to play in the gardens or went shopping with them for what was necessary at home, or to visit her mother by bus.

Helen had kept the physical aspect of a dancer and had a natural condition for spontaneous elegance.

The story explains that one grey afternoon Helen was at home; Sophie was sleeping and Nia playing with her doll. Helen used that quiet moment for scrubbing the floor. Unexpectedly, Phil arrived early: one lesson had been cancelled, and he returned happy at home to practise with his alto.

But Helen was not pleased at all with that possibility. They started an old quarrel, about playing music at home, the Reverend complaining, the difficulty of changing home…

When Helen met Phil, she fell in love with him because of his music, his body and movements on stage, the attraction he had over the audience. Now that all seemed evaporated, he accused Helen of killing him, and she threw the scrub at him hitting his head. Nia was astonished.

That same evening, Helen left home with her children and arrived to her mother’s apartment. The father was dead and, the lady, Nana Allen, lived on top of a hairdresser’s and also worked there. Helen didn’t have a close relationship with her mother, they were quite different.

Anyway, that evening the grandmother was helpful with the three visitors. She prepared something to eat, put the girls to sleep and talk to Helen for hours, although they saw facts in different ways.

Nia is who remembers those facts forty years later. By then, Phil was dead (he died of a heart attack in his fifties), Sophie got married and had three children; Nana Allen also died long ago, and Helen is in her sixties. She’s still an elegant woman, has had two important relationships, but didn’t get married again.

When Sophie tells her mother her memories about that evening, Helen didn’t remember it at all; she sincerely believes she was in love with Phil, she loved his music and, besides, she could have had a career as a dancer (not her idea when married).

Nia proposed Helen a trip to New York, to visit a painting exhibition, and there they went.

Nia had started to be worried about that trip because Helen could get ill, or they both could start arguing, even if they went normally well together.

After a rainy arrival at New York, little by little they got confident with the hotel and the city, did many visits and enjoyed the museum. Helen seemed completely satisfied when, after visiting the Met, they got back to the hotel. Nia went out for some food because her mother preferred to stay in bed. Finally, they ate, enjoyed watching television and felt asleep early.

When Nia woke during the night, she perceived the heat and presence of her mother, as when she was a small girl, and happily felt asleep again.

Perhaps the idea of Matrilineal is that some things are transmitted along generations from mother to daughter, in spite of differences and distance, and they need each other along lifetime, mainly when life becomes hard.

QUESTIONS

-“Forty years ago, Helen left her husband.” The narrator doesn’t use the word “divorced”. Do you think they got back together for some time, or they got divorced immediately? How do you know?

-Think about where they live. Why is this scenery important ?

-Can you tell us what mum advices her children about clothes? Do you think it’s a good piece of advice?

-Do you think Helen left dancing because she had children, or because she didn’t like dancing so much?

-They had problems with their neighbours downstairs. What are the typical problems with neighbours?

-“Helen left Phil at about half past six.” Why do you think the narrator tells us the time so exactly?

-In your opinion, did the weather have any influence in the incident between Helen and Bill?

-The narrator says they were poor. What details give us this idea?

-What is your experience / opinion about practising music at home?

-What do you know about Art Pepper?

-Why does Phil attract people? Do you think that is enough to be in love with someone? What do you do with a person of only one quality or talent?

-The college had complained about Phil’s hair. What can you say about etiquette at work / school?

-What method do you have to calm yourself down when you feel extremely irritated?

-When Helen imagined him dying in an accident after a concert, do you think she really wanted him dead?

-In your opinion, do their children understood what happened?

-Does the physical constitution determine a person’s character? I mean, do fat people are nicer / funnier than thin people? Or is it only a cliché?

-Mrs Allen has a special pronged fork. Do you have a very special object, tool, instrument… ? What is the meaning of this tool in the story?

“Love is such a lie. In marriage, it’s a lie.” Is this a universal truth, or only a moment of irritation?

-Singing / writing about love, does it mean one knows what love is?

-Do you think we can efface from our memory moments of our life because they were annoying us or because we feel remorse?

-What do you know about Greenham Common?

-What do you need to do to have a good trip in company?

-What do you travel for? What are you looking for when you travel?

-What is the meaning of the visit to NY in the story?

 

VOCABULARY

pollarded, matching, nonchalant, cut and line, valet, patent, intimation, driftwood, backcombed, slacks, hilly, tugs, chunky, soundproof, portentousness, off-beat, alto, insane, cot, starkly, moorland, muffled, fleece, thrush, leading rein, buoyant, wary, retail, bill, wig, poised, quivering, stubbornness, bleat, nana, quilt, barrel, special pronged fork, adamantly, seersucker, matted, puckery, crossly, perm papers, cheated, crumble, whorls, rougher, dado, pampered, rough, cornered, conveyor belt, shredder, skewed, rakishly, Ladies, surly, seediness, courtroom drama

 

I Want to Know Why, by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson at the Wikipedia

I Want to Know Why: Summary

I Want to Know Why: Analysis

I Want to Know Why: Review

I Want to Know Why: Audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio.

He was the third of seven children. His mother died in 1895 and his father had started to disappear for weeks, and Sherwood took a number of jobs to support his family. Anderson's talent for selling was evident, he was very successful in this type of business.

In 1898, he signed up for the United States Army, and his company was sent to the war in Cuba. He met Cornelia Pratt, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio businessman, they were married and had three children, and he ran a number of businesses.

In November 1912, Anderson had a mental breakdown, he left his wife and their three children and decided to become a creative writer. He divorced Cornelia in 1916; later he got married to Mitchel, they divorced, and he got married again to Elizabeth; they divorced in 1932 he got married again to Eleanor Copenhaver.

In 1916, Anderson's first book, Windy Mc Pherson's Son, was released in 1916, and Anderson's most famous book, Winesburg, Ohio, was released in 1919. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, where he explored the new sexual freedom. Dark Laughter appeared in 1925, and it was his only bestseller.

Anderson died in Panama in 1941 during a cruise to South America. He was buried in Marion, Virginia. The writing on his gravestone reads "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure".

ANALYSIS

In Beckersville, county of Kentucky, there lived a 15-year-old boy, who loved race horses. He sensed that a horse was going to win the race because, when he noticed it, it was difficult for him to swallow and his throat hurt. He was so excited about the horse racing environment, that every morning he would go to Ed Becker's stable to watch the horses training.

At the time of horse racing in Beckersville they only talked about horses, new foals, jockeys, races in Lexington, Louisville, Saratoga, etc...

This boy and three friends ran away from home to watch the great Mulford Handicap horse race in Saratoga.

In this race, the Sunstreak horse ran; it was one of those horses that caused a sore throat to the boy from Beckersville and was trained and ridden by Jerry Tillfort, a rider whom the boy admired for how well he treated the horse and how professional he was.

As expected, Sunstreak won the race. At night, the boy followed Jerry Tillford and his drunken friends to a farm where there were women with a bad reputation. There he saw his idol Tillford kissing one of them and saying that the race had been won by him and not by the horse.

So, the boy asks himself the question "I Want to Know Why" a man so good at horses could kiss a woman so bad.

I really liked the description

-first, of the hobby, enthusiasm and delusion for a certain event or job.

-second, of an important event that takes place in a certain location,

-and third, of the disappointment that a boy has when his idol lets him down.

 

QUESTIONS

Nigger is an offensive word. So, what do you call a person who is black? What do you call foreign people?
What are black people good at (according to the story)? What a black person (nigger in the story) would do and what wouldn’t he do?
Describe Bildad Johnson.
Do you know more clichés about black people or about different social groups?
“I wish I was a nigger”. Did you ever wish to be another person or to have another nationality or belong to another social group?
How far is Beckersville from Saratoga Springs? Explain their trip.
Talk about these characters:
--The protagonist
--The protagonist’s father
--Henry Rieback
--Henry Rieback’s father
Harry Hellinfinger’s jokes: can you explain them?
How does the narrator know when a horse is going to win? Do you have this kind of intuition for something, or do you know anybody who does?
Who’s Jerry Tillford?
What is the best smell in the world, according to the narrator? And for you?
Tell us about Sunstreak.
Describe the rummy looking farmhouse.
What happened when Jerry and his friends arrived at the rummy farmhouse? And when they were inside the house?
What do the protagonist and Jerry have in common?
What do you think or do when a person you hate (or you don’t like) love the same things as you? What are your feelings?

VOCABULARY

freight train, (race) track, nigger, scratch around, wheedle, colt, outfit, livery barn, lay low, cut out, be nabbed, squeal, give you away, gambler, sheet writer, faro, thoroughbred, gimlet, stunted, spunk, gobble, lit out, plow, gelding, Sam Hill, post, sire, itch, jawed, paddock, bugle, untrack, stallion, plunk, skin, rummy, fantods, homely, brag, 

The Swimmer, by John Cheever

John Cheever at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer at the Wikipedia

Analysis, summary, characters, themes... click here

More analysis: click here

Another study guide (clear and to the point): click here

The Swimmer audiobook (from minute 3.31 on)

The Swimmer (film) at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer (trailer)

Presentation, by Begoña Devis

Biography

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His father was the owner of a shoe factory, which went bankrupt with the crash of 29, and the family fell into relative poverty. After this fact, the father left the family, and the young Cheever lived for a time in Boston with his brother. During that period he survived by publishing articles and stories in various media.
He was expelled from the academy for smoking, which ended his education and this was the core of his first short story, Expelled, which Malcom Cowley bought for the New Republican newspaper. From that moment, Cheever devoted himself entirely to writing short stories that progressively found space in several magazines and newspapers, and finally in the famous magazine The New Yorker, with which he maintained, until the end of these days, an intense relationship.
He was called the Chekhov of the suburbs, because many of his stories occurred in the middle class neighbourhoods that were born around New York during the recovery of the economy after the Second World War.
In 1957 he won The National Book Award for his first novel, and in 1971 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his compilation of stories. He wrote primarily about the decline of the American dream, alcoholism and homosexuality, and sometimes his characters had dubious moral.
A movie was made from his short story The Swimmer in 1957, played by Burt Lancaster. At the time it was unsuccessful, but now it is considered a cult film by cinephiles.
John Cheever died in New York in 1982 at the age of 70.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer is a short story by John Cheever about a relatively young and handsome man who decides to go back to his home, 8 miles from where he is at the moment, swimming. For this he plans a tour along the pools of his various friends and neighbours, a route that he will call “Lucinda River” in honour to his wife. This wild idea will take him on a personal journey with surreal overtones. As the journey progresses, the character’s disorientation, his temporary alterations and the doubtfulness of his feat are revealed. At first his neighbours are friendly and accommodating, but there comes a time when everything gets worse, being forced to cross a public swimming pool, later when a neighbour accuses him of being  an intruder and in the last pool he sees how an old lover looks at him with disdain, and she doesn’t even offer him a drink. When he finally gets home, we do not know if a day, a month or a year, later, he finds it closed and empty
In my opinion, it is a metaphorical journey, in which the protagonist wants to return home but cannot find the way to do so. Alcoholism is always present, and the sinking in it (and not in the pools) is what increasingly disorients him and prevents him from getting where he would like. A journey on a magnificent sunny day, in which an attractive young man is about to do something heroic, but instead he finishes as a defeated man who has lost his home, family and even his memories.

It is a dark and desperate story, but of great narrative force and with a dreamlike and surreal component that makes it especially attractive.

QUESTIONS

Characters:

Neddy Merrill

Mrs Graham

Enid Bunker

Grace Biswagner

Shirley Adams

Mr and Mrs Halloran

Helen and Eric Sachs

Places:

At Westerhazy’s

At Levys’s garden

At Lindleys’s

At Welchers’s

At the Recreation Center

At home

Can you point out the hints the narrator give us along the story about the decline and fall of the hero?
What social class do the characters belong to?
What do they drink?
What is the National Audubon Society?
Can you find parallels between this story and the Odyssey or a Pilgrimage?
What season is the story situated in?
What is a point of no return? And what is the point of no return in the story?
Greetings: he kisses women and shakes hands to men. What do you think of this kind of greetings, one for men and another for women?
Where do you prefer to swim: swimming pools, the sea, rivers, reservoirs?

 VOCABULARY

golf link, artesian well, cumulus cloud, dogleg, hurl, choppy, saddle, hoist, portage, bony, de Haviland trainer, spigot, cordite, put sb out to board, tool (v), bask, roughhouse, cerulean

Unseen Translation, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson at the Wikipedia: click here

Kate Atkinson website

Unseen Translation: review

Not the End of the World at the Wikipedia: click here

Not the End of the World (The Guardian): review

Kate Atkison and detective Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs)

Case Stories (trailer)

Presentation, by Dolors Rossell

Kate Atkinson was born the 20^th of December 1951 in York, the setting for several of her books. An avid reader from childhood, she studied English literature at the University of Dundee in Scotland, gaining her master's degree in 1974. She remained at Dundee to study postmodern American fiction for a doctorate. Though she was denied the degree because she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage, her studies of the postmodern stylistic elements of American writers influenced her later work.
Throughout the late 1970s and for much of the ’80s, Atkinson held various jobs, from home help to legal secretary and teacher, few of which enabled her to make use of her literary interests.
In 1981–82, however, she took up short-story writing, finding the brief narrative form an effective outlet for her creative energy.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year and went on to be a Sunday Time bestseller. Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, the surprising twists and complicated plots, and often eccentric characters.
Atkinson has criticised the media's coverage of her work – when she won the Whitbread award, for example, it was the fact that she was a "single mother" who lived outside London that received the most attention.
Atkinson now lives in Edinburgh
 
UNSEEN TRANSLATION
Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short stories mostly set in Scotland, and is an experiment in magic realism  (a style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements, often deals with the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality).  The collection was first published in 2002.
It contains 12 loosely connected stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surface of our consciousness. A world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality. Each of these stories shows that when the worlds of material existence and imagination collide, anything is possible.
Unseen Translation-summary:
Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a glamour model Romney Wright, a B-list celebrity more concerned with the state of her bank account than with her son's development. His father is the lead singer of the rock band Boak. Then an enigmatic young nanny named Missy introduces him to a world he never knew existed. Arthur's father is on tour in Germany and Missy is to take Arthur to visit him.
 
Reviews:
“Following the considerable success of her novels, what a pleasure it is to find Atkinson luxuriating in her original genre. Let’s hope she enjoys her return to it so much that many such inspired collections follow.”
I'm willing to bet that Kate Atkinson didn't colour inside the lines when she was a little girl. She's a born subversive, and her charming, alarming, crazy quilt fiction catches the reader off-balance.
The narratives are neither clearly connected nor totally distinct (Atkinson doesn't do anything conventionally). Occasionally she recycles characters:
Usually I prefer my "magical" and my "realism" well separated, like carrots and peas on a dinner plate. But Atkinson is so adept and her narrative voice so persuasive that after a while I began to enjoy the sudden shifts from ordinary life to fairy tale, from anxiety to horror, from a bad day to the end of the world.

Unseen Translation

(some helpful images)

QUESTIONS

What do you think it’s the relation between the title and the story?
Talk about the characters in the story
    Missy
    Arthur
    Arthur’s mother
    Arthur’s father
    Otto
What do you know about these mythological beings?
    Artemis
    Athene
    Aphrodite
    Meander
    Echo
    Pan
    Nymph
John Berger, in his book Ways of Seeing, says museums and galleries are modern churches because when you enter them you have to show respect, keep silence and touch nothing. In the story they say that museums are soporific. What are your experiences with museums?
What do you know about these places?:
    Natural History Museum
    National Gallery
    British Museum
    V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Missy said that a bit of stoicism is good. What is stoicism?
Explain the scene at the newsagents.
Tell us about the different ideas they have to name the girl just born.
What books do they buy for their flight to Munich?
What happened at the Bayerisher Hof?
What did Missy and Arthur do in Munich?
After Munich, where did they want to go?
How does the story end?
 
“The list of worse is endless. That’s not grammatical, by the way.” What isn’t grammatical?
 
“Fell in love with the master who had a mad wife in the attic and who became hideously disfigured in a fire?” What does it refer to?

 VOCABULARY

stags, avian, window shopping, tidal, stroll, smorgasbord, spoilt, mar, trouble-shooter, NHS, SAS, grating, stage school, tabloid, stuck (stick), Camelot, whorl, wanker, bet, elbowed, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, held off (hold off –the rain), hauling (haul), love-rat, cocoon, skim-read, as high as a kite, dawdle, china, porcelain, round-the-clock, kraut, sated, shot, nonchalant, primeval, scuffed, queue /kiú/, coiling (coil), tannoy