Many Are Disappointed, by V. S. Pritchett

BIOGRAPHY (from last year), by Rafel Martínez

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett, was born in Suffolk, on 16 December 1900, he was the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena. His father, a London businessman, started several businesses, but, due to his insecurity and his tendency to credit and embezzlement, had to close the businesses and disappear, so the family was forced to change their address to different cities, such as Ipswich, Woodford, Essex or Derby, which forced the children to change schools frequently, all to circumvent the persecution of the numerous creditors of Walter, the father.

The family moved to East Dulwich and he attended Alleyn's School, but when his paternal grandparents came to live with them at age 16, he was forced to leave school to work as a clerk for a leather buyer in Bermondsey. The leather work lasted from 1916 until 1920 when he moved to Paris to work as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for The Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. Pritchett, along with his friend and writer Gerald Brenan, is one of the few Englishmen who, in the early 1930s, toured the Spanish territory. From that youthful experience, Pritchett wrote Marching Spain, which appeared in 1928. However, it was not until 1954 that, already a consecrated writer, he published The Spanish Temperament, an excellent travel chronicle about our country.

In 1936 he divorced his first wife and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts, by whom he had two children; the marriage lasted until Pritchett's death in 1997, although they both had other relationships.

During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information while continuing to write weekly essays for the New Statesman. After World War II he wrote extensively and embarked on various university teaching positions in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he published acclaimed biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977), and Anton Chekhov (1988).

Sir Pritchett was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 1975 for "services to literature" and a Companion of Honour in 1993, in addition to other multiple decorations and mentions throughout his life, which makes him the best English author of his time.

Sir V. S. Pritchett died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997.

THE STORY

Four cyclists going on a ride expect to find a bar or a pub at the top of a hill, but they are disappointed because there is only a house with the old sign “Tavern”, that can mean an inn (that is no alcohol), so they won’t be able to have some beers. They have followed this road in the hope of sightseeing an antient Roman way: second disappointment. And thus, so on with some more. In the house there’s a small and frail woman with her daughter, also a little girl. The woman is happy to serve them some tea with some light food, although they would rather have had stronger food. At the end, they are happy with their tea, and they even start to have some feelings for the woman and her child. After tea, they went back again in search of a pub, and the woman feels very happy to have had them at home, and this not only for the money she got from their meal.

I think there are two very interesting features in this story. First, the characters: you don’t find the typical way of composing a story: the narrator begins introducing the characters with a full description, physical and psychological; instead, you have to unite the different pieces of the characters to form them, like in a puzzle. What did the author do this for? And second, the title. In the story, there are a lot of disappointments, and everyone has their own disappointment. But in the end, I think they are satisfied with what they had, at the end disappointment has been disappointed.

Many Are disappointed: Analisys

Many Are disappointed: Review

QUESTIONS

Look for and jot down information about the characters in order to describe them (surname, appearance, personality, age, likes and dislikes…)

Bert
Sid
Harry
Ted
The woman
The girl

What kind of bike are they riding? How do you know?

What different feelings does the woman have for the four different men?

Why does Sid think that he had seen the woman before? Does he want to flirt with her?

In which part of Great Britain is the story situated (look for the toponyms in a map)?

Why is there a confusion between Romans and Gypsies?

Describe the meal.

Why do you think the woman trusts a very confidential thing (she almost died) to Sid?

Do you think the house is really a “tea-house”? Why?

Explain all you know about the ring.

Are the really sportsmen? How do you know?

Why did or didn’t you like the story?

VOCABULARY

dunno, out-building, ruddy, skylark, stubborn, reed, meadows, hedge, wiry, whimper, frail, drab, moist, dumbfounded, sell, gasper, treacle (coloured), drizzle, dazed, dippy, cocksure, splice, flash, dawdle, drably, scabious, bin, boldly, wants, pout

The Demon Lover, by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabet Bowen at the Wikipedia

(We had a previous entry about Bowen, so I have copied some paragraphs.)

Elisabeth Bowen was an Irish-born author, but she did her literary activities within a cultural club in London called The Bloomsbury Group, which had its headquarters in the neighbourhood of the British Museum and whose most famous members were the writer Virginia Woolf and the economist John M. Keynes (whose main idea was that the government had to intervene in the economy to correct the bad effects of the capitalism).

She was born in Dublin in 1899 and spend her childhood in a big country house with a large park. Her family belonged to the Anglo-Irish class that had dominated Ireland for centuries. Her novel The Last September deals with the situation of her class during the Independence War and the Irish Civil War. When she was seven, she went to live in England, where she studied. When she was 24, she married and published her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, that was a great success and encouraged her to go on writing. From then on, she wrote a book every year and a lot of book reviews.

Her stories are usually about the upper class, and she writes in a sophisticated style.

But Bowen isn’t very well-known here: in Catalan you aren’t going to find any translation, and there are only some of these books in Spanish. If you want to find her works in the library, click here.

The Demon Lover

The short story that we’re reading has autobiographic details because during the World War II she worked in London for the War Ministry. In the title we find the word demon; this word has the meaning of "evil spirit", but is also a variant of daimon, that only means "spirit". So, we don't know exactly if the lover is bad or not. The story is about a (happily?) married woman during the Blitz. She had a boyfriend in the WWI, but he was reported missing or dead, and she forgot him. But now, after 25 years, she got a suspicious letter. Could it be from her old boyfriend saying that he wants to fulfil the promise of marrying her? This boyfriend, what kind of person/being was/is he?

The Demon Lover: audio

The Demon Lover Study Guide

The Demon Lover: summary, characters, analysis

Presentation (minutes 00-3.30)

The Demon Lover, (but a very free and enlarged adaptation, minutes 00-52)

QUESTIONS

Which are the first hints of the Blitz?

Why do you think the woman is prosaic?

Why is a “tenseness preceding the fall of the rain” before she read the letter?

Why did she look at the mirror after reading the letter?

Why did she look at it “stealthily”?

Describe the protagonist.

What was the effect of the raining when he opened the chest?

What did she remember best from their last meeting (a physical mark)?

Why did she wish him already gone when they were saying goodbye?

Describe the boy.

Describe their last meeting.

Was she really in love with him? How do you know?

Tell us about Mrs Drover’s life after discovering her fiancée was missing or dead.

Why was she “unable to be with her back exposed to an empty room” and preferred to “sit against the wall”?

A crisis is mentioned: what crisis is it?

Why did she decide to take the objects she had come to fetch and not to run away immediately?

“She tugged at the knot she had tied wrong”: what is its connotation?

What are her feelings now about her old fiancée?

When she is in the point of leaving the house, what reassures her? And in the street? And what scared her before leaving?

Why does the narrator use this expression: “a hinterland of deserted streets”?

What was the appointed time?

What details suggested us that her old fiancée was the taxi driver?

Some people say the story means that “we are always tied to the past”. What is your opinion?

VOCABULARY

boarded up, contemptuous, bedspring, flicker, foresworn (forsworn), plight your troth, (without) stint, score, desuetude, rally, fumbling, to be in a mood, tread, creek, pant, issue, perambulator (pram)

A Visit of Charity, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty at the Wikipedia

A Curtain of Green at the Wikipedia

A Visit of Charity, character analysis

A Visit of Charity, video

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, and died when she was 92.
Jackson is a city now with more 70 % of Afroamerican people, while in the 60s it was the other way round; so the city has experienced big changes in demography and, accordingly, in politics.
Eudora Welty lived all her life in Jackson, save when she studied at Columbia University, New York.
She had a calm life in Jackson, despite all the racial problems, so her stories contrast vividly with the stories by Faulkner or by Richard Wright.
As a child, she was an insatiable reader and she wrote her stories without any particular encouragement. She started writing for a Southern magazine and then, thanks to the persistence of a literary agent, for the Atlantic Monthly and for The New Yorker.
She won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 64 years old for her novel The Optimist Daughter. 
She wrote mainly short stories, but also novels and her autobiography. Besides, she was a photographer and published a book of photograhs about the Great Depression.

A VISIT OF CHARITY

It is a short story from her book A Curtain of Green, published when she was 32. The book includes her first published story, Death of a Travelling Salesman.

The story tells us about a Campfire Girl who pays a visit a to an Old Ladies Home, as a part or her duties as a member of the youth organization, a visit which is going to get her some points in her score. But what people live and how the live in a Home comes as a surprise for her.

QUESTIONS

Why does she compare the Home to a block of ice?
Campfire Girl: have you belonged to an organization when you were young? What do you know / think of the Boy Scouts, for example?
What do you think about the contrast between the nurse’s cold appearance and her “sea-wave” air?
Why does the Campfire Girl have to pay a visit to some (any) old lady?
Gestures: What are their meaning? For instance, the girl pushing her hair behind her ear; the nurse looking at her watch...
The “waves” appear again: “she was walking on waves”. Is there any relationship between the wave on the nurse’s head and the waves on the linoleum?
"The hall smelt like the interior of a clock": what does this image suggest to you?
There’s an identification between old ladies and sheep, but also they are compared to harpies. Why?
What is the effect of the nurse saying “there are two”?
What is the feeling created by the room’s description?
The two ladies don’t agree about the flowers: why? Did the girl know about the flowers?
What expression suggests a clog in the throat?
How does the narrator show the girl’s anxiety?
What can be the meaning of the cameo pin?
What was the matter with Addie? Why was she so angry today?
It was the first time such a thing had happened to Marian: what was this thing?
What is the meaning of “That’s Addie for you”?
What kind of magazine was Field & Stream?
Do you think the nurse’s invitation to Marian to have lunch there is for real? Why?
Why did she hide an apple before going in the Home? And why did she make a big bite out of it at the end of the story?

VOCABULARY

Home (in context), whitewashed, mittens, awry, propelled (propeller), counterpane, square smile, my (in context), multiflora cineraria, ailing, comfort shoes, rigmarole, tan (gum), crow (in context), nickel

"You can't learn a nigger to argue"

I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once, there warn't no getting it out again. He was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see. So I went to talking about other kings, and let Solomon slide. I told about Louis XVI that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that would 'a' been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.
"Po' little chap."

"But some says he got out and got away, and come to America."

"Dat's good! But he'll be pooty lonesome—dey ain' no kings here, is dey, Huck?"

"No."

"Den he cain't git no situation. What he gwyne to do?"

"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French."

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said—not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy—what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuffn; I'd take en bust him over de head—dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man?—er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me dat!"
I see it warn't no use wasting words—you can't learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.

                        A bit of dialogue between Jim and Huck (from Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain)

The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov

 

Anton Chekhov at the Wikipedia

The Lady with the Dog at the Wikipedia

Dark Eyes, film adaptation

Dark Eyes, link to see it

Gurov and Anna, new adaptation

The Lady with the Dog, summary and analysis 

The Lady with the Dog audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov, near the mouth of the river Don, and died in Badenweiler, a spa resort in south Germany, when he was 44 years old.
In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, a reformer, issued the emancipation of the serfs and in 1881 died because of a terrorist attack. Chekhov lived in a convulsed period, but he stayed apart of the political fights.
Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf who bought his freedom. His father had a grocery, but the business went bad and he had to flee to Moscow. He was a drunkard and abused his family. But Chekhov said once he got his talent from his father and his soul from his mother; he said she was an excellent storyteller.
He had two older brothers who were studying at the University of Moscow, and had to remain three years more in Taganrog finishing his studies and selling the house. He earned money doing private lessons, writing stories for the newspapers and catching and selling singing birds. When he was 19 he went to Moscow to study Medicine.
He had to work for his family because his brothers and his father had a lot of problems with their jobs and with alcohol.
Chekhov went on publishing sketches for Alexey Suvorin, who paid much more than his previous publishers and gave him more space in the magazines or newspapers.
He had a change in his literary prospects when Dmitri Grigorovich (a very famous author in his time) celebrated his writings. So he started to consider himself a writer more than a doctor, although he went on practising medicine all his life.
At 24, he started to notice the first symptoms of tuberculosis, but he always hoped for the best.
At 27, he was stressed by overwork and went on a journey trying to get some rest. This trip was the origin of his famous story The Steppe.
When he was 30, he decided to go on a long journey to visit the island of Sakhalin, on the Pacific coast, north of Japan. The island served as a prison, and he wanted to report the situation of the prisoners there. So he got depressed.
Then he went to live in Melikhovo, a place forty miles south of Moscow, in order to improve his health and to have more tranquillity to do his writings. Here he wrote his plays. Now they are splendid pieces of theatre, but in his moment he was very disappointed with the public reception, even as Stanislavsky (the famous theatre theorist) wanted to play them.
He got worse of his TB and went to live in Yalta, a touristic and spa resort in the Black Sea, where he bought a big house, the White Dacha.
At 41, he got married to Olga Knipper, a well-known actress that performed in his plays.
In Yalta, he wrote The Lady with the Dog.
He died in Badenweiler in 1904 after drinking champagne. His body was transported for the funeral in Moscow on a railway-car... meant for oysters, and that caused indignation among the people who loved him. And when the convoy got to Moscow, there was a band playing music, and, at first, they believed that was for Chekhov, but it wasn’t, it was music for a funeral of a general, so another disappointment. As you can imagine, Chekhov's death has been fictionalized a lot of times: his was a glamorous end with a farcical colophon.
 
When talking about narrative techniques, there’s a term often mentioned: Chekhov’s gun. This alludes to a necessary principle of all short stories: you have to remove all superfluous things in a story (or in a play): “If there’s a gun hanging from a nail on the wall in the first chapter, then this gun must absolutely be fired in the second chapter.”
A very important story by Chekhov is The Steppe, because, from the point of view of literature, it is his most accomplished story, for it contains all the poetical elements he developed in his narrative, although the most known is the romantic The Lady with the Dog.
His plays were also revolutionary, because they weren’t “plot” plays, but “mood” plays, so a lot of people of his time didn’t like them because “nothing” happened in the story.
The play The Three Sisters has inspired films as Interiors, by Woody Allen.

 The Lady with the Dog

This is the story of a romance between a womanizer and a younger lady married to a dull husband, in a spa resort in Yalta. The woman felt that this was only adultery and dishonourable, and he at first thought that this affair would be the same as the others, something temporary. But it happened the other way round; they discovered what love really was and they decided to go on with their relationship, so he forgot all other women, and she mastered (somehow) her guilty feelings. This is very different from Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, where the affair ends badly for the woman. In Chekhov there is hope for them both.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:
Dmitri Gurov
Gurov’s wife
Anna Sergeyevna
Anna’s husband
What do you think is the function of the Pomeranian dog in the story? Would the story be possible without this dog? What kind of dog is a Pomeranian dog?
What can you say about:
Yalta
Oreanda
the Black Sea
How did Gurov classify women?
What were her/his feelings after making love? What is the meaning of the water-melon?
Why “Gurov got bored already, listening to her”?
What were their feelings after visiting Oreanda?
When she went away, there “was already a scent of autumn”. Why?
“The season brings back the days of one’s youth”. Personal question: do you think our memories are always false memories?
Why did winter, evening stillness, storms, make Gurov think about Anna?
He decided to confide his love to someone: Why? In the short story The Kiss something similar happens. Why is the reason for this need?
What decided him to go to S***?
Why did he want to go away from the “fence adorned with nails” outside Anna’s house?
What do you know about The Geisha?
Personal question: do you think all that is interesting in us rests on secrecy?
Describe the meetings of the two lovers in Moscow.
Do you think theirs would be an eternal love?
“Why did she love him so much”?

VOCABULARY

amiss, staid, in the long run, eager, gait, made up, coaxing, hue, groyne, scales, flunkey, grasshopper, lofty, taunt, fix, stoop, thaw, kernel

Errand, by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver at the Wikipedia

Raymond Carver: bibliography

Errand: review

Errand: summary and analysis: enciclopedia

Errand: enotes

Short Cuts (trailer)

Jindabyne (trailer)

Birdman (trailer)

Everything must go (trailer)

A little bit of biography

Raymond (or Ray) Carver was born in a milltown in Oregon (on the West coast), in 1938 and died when he was 50 years old of lung cancer.
His father was a millsaw worker and a heavy drinker, and his mother worked as a waitress and a clerk, so they were a lower class family.
Raymond also worked with his father in the millsaw. He also learned to fish, so fishing is a theme that appears in some of his stories.
At 19 he got married to Maryann Burk, 16 years old. We have to suppose that they married because they had a baby the same year. Then they had another next year.
Both, Raymond and Maryann, had different jobs and they try to go on studying; Maryann finished her studies, but Raymond never finished any of his courses. Besides temporary occupations, he got precarious jobs as a writing teacher or university teacher, but because of his alcoholism he finished working as a janitor in a hospital and writing in his spare time.
At 34 he fell in love with Diane Cecily, editor at university, and he started drinking heavily and abusing his wife.
When he was 38 he began to date Tess Gallagher, a writer who later will become his wife. In this time he had to go to the hospital several times because of liquor intoxication. He realized that he had to stop drinking, and he started his second life thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous (but he never stopped smoking marihuana and even tried cocaine).
At 44, he got divorced (he was already living with Tess).
Six weeks before dying at 50, he got married to Tess.
He published his first short story when he was 23 and was studying at Chico Public University. It was called The Furious Seasons and bore a strong influence of William Faulkner.
His first short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published when he was 38. But although it was shortlisted for the National Book Award, he didn’t sell many copies.
He had more collections of short stories, and the most famous are What We Talk When We Talk About Love and Cathedral.
When we talk about Carver we talk about minimalism and dirty realism. Minimalism means avoiding all rhetoric, and that if you can say something in ten words, please, don’t use twenty. And dirty realism implies that in your stories you are going to use characters that belong to the lower classes of the society, that your heroes are going to be anti-heroes, e.g., isolated marginalized people, people with alcoholic problems or difficult relationships or broken families. So we have to suppose they are sad stories.
Everyone can feel the influence of Hemingway minimalism in his work, but he said his main influence was D. H. Lawrence.
It’s an irony, but the last story he wrote, before dying, is Errand, where he narrates an anecdote of Chekhov, another famous short story writer, just before his own death.

Errand

In this story, very different from his other stories because it’s almost “classical”, Carver writes about the last days of the life of Chekhov, a Russian writer revered by most short story writers. Chekhov was having dinner with Suvorin, a publisher, in Moscow, when he started bleeding from his mouth. The Russian author knows that his life is in danger and travels first to Berlin with his wife Olga Knipper, where he sees a doctor who doesn’t help him, and then to Badenweiler, a spa resort where he says he expects to get some recovery (although he doesn’t really believe it). He and his wife are staying in a hotel, and the doctor who treats him, Dr Schwörer, realizes that there’s no hope and orders champagne as the last honour to the famous writer. The author drinks and dies, and then there is a change in the way of telling the story, because we see the situation through the eyes of his widow Olga. Then, after a wake until morning, she asks a waiter who had come into the room to bring a vase of flowers to go and fetch the mortician. The story has a special ending, but I’m not going to be a spoiler revealing it.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters according what it is said about them in the story. But what do you know about them as historical people? Did they know Chekhov or his writings?

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Suvorin

Maria Chekhov

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Olga Knipper

Dr Karl Ewald

Dr Schwöhrer (and his presciptions)

The waiter (the young blond man)

What happened at the restaurant in Moscow?
What were the characters’ feelings about the TB?
Personal question: Do you have an opinion or a belief about the immortality of the soul?
What do you know about TB?
Where is Badenweiler?
Explain the courtship between Olga and Anton.
What can you say about The seagull and The Cherry Orchard?
Why did Chekhov mention the Japanese?
Summarize in one sentence Chekhov’s death.
What do you think is the meaning of the “large moth”?
What is the meaning of “history” in the sentence “Dr Schwöhrer picked up his bag and left the room and, for that matter, history.”
What happened with the bottle’s cork?
Describe the scene between Olga and the young man at Anton and Olga’s room.
What is the meaning of the title Errand?
In the last paragraphs, there is a change in the verbal tense: the past tense has changed into “would”? Why?
What do you think is the meaning of picking up the cork in the last sentence of the story?

VOCABULARY

private, take in (took in), stanch, jest, sleet, well-wisher, out-line, junk, bearskin, numbered, reckless, on the mend, complexion, Moët, grapple, mortician

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