Remember This, by Graham Swift

Remember This

The story has two very different parts.

First: A just married couple go to see a solicitor to make their will. They feel elated making this great document with an attorney that is a really nice person. But, after the appointment, the weather isn’t so nice: the sky is threatening with clouds and rain. All the way, they went to celebrate it, and make love twice and spend the rest of their day off at home because of the rain. There they discuss what they’ve just done and how can a solicitor be so nice and inventing a family for him.

Second: In the evening, while his wife is sleeping, the husband gets up and decides to write a love letter to his wife, because he has never written one. The beginning is easy, but he doesn’t know how to go on. So it’s only three lines long and signs it. He puts it in an envelope with only his wife’s name on the address, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Was he giving it to her? In the end, he hides it, waiting for a special moment to delivery it. But he never does, because they get divorced, and in these circumstances it wouldn’t be a good moment. And he keeps the letter forever.

 

I think this story is a very special one because in it the divorce isn’t a kind of catastrophe, but something that will happen in the course of any marriage. It’s as if a divorce was a regular phase in the life of everybody who is married. In my opinion, the key of the story is the written document that tells our legacy. They make their will to give their possessions to the other, and the husband writes a letter to remember all the love he felt for his wife, even when they got divorced. And not “love” in general, but the love they experienced for each other in that Friday when they made their will. So that day off was the treasure, the diamond, of their love. And then, like a testament, he will never deliver it while living. Perhaps his heirs will.

QUESTIONS

Have you done your will and your last orders? Do you recommend doing it? Why?

When do you usually dress up? Did you find in an embarrassing situation because of your clothes?

What do you think about formalisms? When are they necessary, and when are they old-fashioned? A dress/position, does it change your personality?

In your opinion, why is the husband thinking about his wife’s bum when they were going to the solicitor and even at the beginning of their meeting?

What can be the difference between “grow older” and “age” (verb)?

What is the symbol of the umbrella in this context?

After the meeting with the solicitor, “the clouds had thickened” and while they were having lunch, “the sky turner threatening”. What does it suggest?

Why do you imagine this day was more a celebration for them than even their wedding?

So much thinking about Mr Reeves, what can be the author intention for this? Can another person’s character change your points of view?

Do you regret that the habit of writing love letters has been lost? Do you think it’s better the modern way with WhatsApp or emails? Examples of love letters.

What do you think it’s better for a love letter, the details or the solemn statements and promises?

“The essence of love letters is separation”. How true is this sentence?

Are you a person who procrastinates? Do you think it is a serious problem and that it can be solved? How can it be solved?

The way of destroying a letter: Do you approve of rituals, or do you think they’re unnecessary formalisms?

Do you have a secret place at home?

“It was like looking at his own face in the mirror, but not at the face that would  […] replicate what he might do”. What do you know about “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”, by Oscar Wilde?

Why do you think that at the end he says he was a “poor sad fool”?

 

VOCABULARY

solicitor, giggly, grim, steered, drafted, pending, commitment, clingy, common, enhanced, slithery, shrug, pelt down, stair rods, starter home, sopping, Welsh rarebit, lingeringly, inkling, smitten, welling, nuzzled, woo, assailed, random, stash, fountain pen, release, bland, snags, prickly, chocking, faltered, yearning /longing, misdeed, spilled, fitted, propped, endorse, anointing, poker, quilted, penned, last ditch, warped, fabrication, concocted, smirking, mustered

The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse