Cecilia Awakened, by Tessa Hadley

San Miniato al Monte

SUMMARY AND IDEAS

This is another story about a singular girl: the intellectual, clever, plain, rejected by her schoolmates, shy girl, and her getting free of this secluded scholar life.

Cecilia, a 15-year-old girl, is the only daughter of an elderly couple, a librarian (Ken, the husband) and a historical novels' writer (Angela, the wife). This couple brought up their daughter in their likes, habits and culture, rather apart from ordinary or not so cultivated people. But while a child, Cecilia has liked this kind of life (reading thick books, going to the museums…), although for her mates and even for her teachers she has been a bit of a smart-arse or too goody-goody.

The story is situated mostly in the family stay in Italy, where they spend a week holiday, although it goes backwards, and forwards again. In this trip, Cecilia awakens to her adolescence when he sees how absurd it’s that she’s still sleeping in the same room as her parents, she doesn’t dress as a teenager and she does cultural tourism. Now she’s abroad, she feels deep inside her that she’s a kind of weirdo, she sees that they are a nuisance for the local people and notices the contrast between herself and the local girls.

She spends all the week in Florence sulking, although she doesn’t oppose openly to her parents’ opinions and proposals. But the last day of her stay, she has an epiphany, a moment of revelation when they go and see a church away from the most touristic and crowded places. There she likes the building and its pictures, and she sees clearly what a pest is the tourism. After the moment of calm bliss, a monk chides them for being there when local people are meeting to say a prayer, and she doesn’t want to be there any more because she thinks the monk is right; so she asks her parents to go back to the hotel alone. She has awakened, she wants to break free from her family and from her childhood.

The ending is very peculiar because the narrator doesn’t tell us what she’s doing, but what her mother imagines she’s doing.

 

I think there are some interesting topics in this story. One of them it’s the beginning: as we can see, it isn’t unusual for Tessa Hadley to start the story in medias res; it’s a classical way (e.g. Odyssey) and it’s useful to attract the reader’s attention.

A resource we don’t find in this story is the weather to create some mood in the atmosphere: sadness, melancholy, action… Perhaps in Italy, the weather doesn’t change so often to give us a variety of moods.

We can see the story has some similarities with “A Card Trick”, because the star is also a weirdo shy intellectual girl that wants to get out of her cocoon. But in the present case, the girl is not the absolute protagonist: she shares this role with her mother. Angela had to fight her own mother, because she didn’t want to be a traditional woman, and now she feels that her daughter also wants to fight her because maybe she wants to be more like the other normal girls, so maybe every generation has to reject the previous one.

Another interesting question is the reason or the meaning of the characters’ names. Does Angela want to be a guardian of her daughter, as an angel? Saint Cecilia, besides being the musicians’ patroness, is (according to some sources) also the patron saint of blind people: was Cecilia blind (or voluntarily blind) to other girls, to the world, and now she can see it because of a miracle / epiphany?

And we have also some mysteries: why does the narrator focus our attention in Angela’s mother’s lipstick? What is the meaning of San Miniato martyrdom (he was beheaded, but then he carries his head on his trunk)? And what about St. Placidus being rescued from the water?

QUESTIONS

-What do you think are the features of rearing a child when he or she is the only child and with their parents a bit old?
-Did / do you do any collection? What do you collect? What for?
-Have you read Middlemarch? And what about Dickens novels? What can you tell us about them?

-Why do you think the writer had chosen such big physical changes in Cecilia’s puberty?

-Cecilia’s family liked the past and didn’t like the present. What do you prefer, and why, past, present of future? Is there an age for each preference?

-Is there a cliché in the story about what men and women see in museums?

-“Angela wasn’t a feminist, grateful to be liberated from the tyranny of pleasing.” What does it mean for you?

-The father is “getting early English books online.” Do you know what is Project Gutenberg?

-Do you think that some people are more attractive with a cup / cigarette in their hands?

-As you see it, is Signora Petricci correct in her opinion about Cecilia’s father? Or was it only a teenager’s imagination?

-Cecilia has a trick to get rid of a fear. Do you have one? Can you tell us?

-May you say that the writer has chosen the character’s names for any reason?

-What message could the sound of Petricci’s bracelet have sent to Cecilia?

-“She wasn’t beautiful.” When and why do we decide that a person is beautiful?

-According to your point of view, intellectual people are always shut out of the world?

-When you travel as a tourist, do you feel rejected? How much tourism is too much tourism?

-What do Abraham and Isaac symbolize in the story?

-What do you know about Caravaggio? And about San Miniato al Monte?

-What is for you the best way to learn to appreciate art, books and music?

-What are the meanings of these revelations for Cecilia: 1-San Miniato, 2-Vespers song, 3-the monk?

-Why does Angela remember her mother’s lipstick when Cecilia has gone to the hotel?

-Does San Placidus rescue have any meaning for the end of the story?

VOCABULARY

dummies, squalling, stinks, showed her off, finicky, wizened, fey, sprite, Poundworlds, identikit, dozed, jazzed it up, plotters, reëntering, harbouring, static, slacks, hooking, pull-out bed, swarthy, truckle, checked, derided, crop, scowling, swooning, unassailable, printouts, sweltering, reprieve, thawing, skeins, Verpers, doom, quailed, scourging, puny, foreboding, snooping, nub, stamped-out

A Card Trick, by Tessa Hadley

 SUMMARY

This is a capital story of the collection; with it, Tessa Hadley won the 2005 O. Henry award.

Gina, a 47-year-old scholar and writer, is revisiting Wing Lodge, the house where John Morrison, her favourite novelist, whose works she has deeply studied and about whom she has written a book, lived during the last and most productive years of his life.

There she remembers her holiday at her mother’s friend (or client), Mamie. Mamie has a glamorous family of three boys and a daughter. Although Mamie belongs to the high class, she and her children are natural, free and easy, frank, kind and welcoming; but they aren’t much into culture, literature and art, and haven’t gone to university, so their academic education is a bit limited; however, they aren’t silly and can have interesting conversations. In the other hand, Gina is very clever about these subjects, and she’s a very good student, but she’s socially clumsy and shy; moreover, she feels awkward in her body, because she’s tall and a bit plump.

There, in their house near the beach, she spent two weeks, but she didn’t go much to the beach, neither did she take part in their open-air entertainments; instead, she pretended to study to prepare her exams and spent most of the time alone in her room; but, when the family is away, she roams the house searching and prying and making herself comfortable with food, drink, cigarettes and lying on the sofa.

One day, believing she was alone at home, she discovers that Josh, the less glamorous of the brothers is at home. She had some feelings for him. Gina doesn’t know what to do and spends a lot of time shut in her room.

But the last day of her holiday there, she feels a lot more confident. One of the sons is in London, Mamie and two other children have gone to see some friends, and Tom is staying at home building houses of cards; as he cannot finish a difficult one, Gina offers to show him a card trick. The boy is astonished and enraptured at the trick. For Gina, this meeting is a kind of symbolic sexual encounter.

The next day, she went back home and never again met anybody of Mamie’s family. Afterward she will know that Mamie got divorced and, after some time, she died, and one of her sons also died drowned; so perhaps a glamorous family has also their misfortunes.

But now, as she remembers this fortnight in a coastal village, she isn’t that awkward 18-year-old girl any more: she’s a tall woman, perhaps not beautiful, but “statuesque”, who has had some success in her field and feels confident with her life and her body. In John Morrison’s house she gets emotional when she sees a manuscript with a scene that has been erased in the published book: a middle-aged woman, daughter of the man just dead in bed, declares her love to the doctor who has taken care of him until the last moment; the doctor, who is married, feels disgusted and, amazed, rejects her.

The end of the story is a bit mysterious. Something (and insect, the lady guide) calls her attention, and the memories of that holiday come back to her, and she regrets that isolate life of hers when she could cheat someone to be her friend. Maybe, as she’s now a public person, she can play tricks no more to anyone.

QUESTIONS

-Why Gina’s appearance is important for the plot?

-What is Wing Lodge? (Compare to Lamb House). Have you ever visited a house of a famous person? Do you like visiting museums? Somebody said museums were like churches: do you agree?

-What can you say about Mamie and her family?

-Is a friendship between people of very different social classes possible? Why do you think so?

-Do you follow a diet? For your health or for your body shape / weight? Do / did you trust your diet?

-What are A levels and S levels?

-Is it usual that rich people don’t go to university? Do you think everybody should go?

-Do you know who were Walter Gropius, Conrad, Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Mansfield, Pound?

-What kind of books do you imagine John Morrison wrote?

-What different talents (from the protagonist) did Mamie’s children have?

-Do you feel curiosity about how authors write? (I mean technical aspects: computer, pen, with music…) Do you know any singular case?

-What does “a Spartan boy carrying the fox under his shirt” refer to?

-What are “Honey” and “19”?

-Can you describe Tom?

-What do you know about “Derek and the Dominoes”?

-What good memories do you have about your holidays?

-“It was her mother fault”. What do you think of your parents’ responsibilities for our successes and failures?

-“It feels more sympathetic”. What can this mean when talking about a pack of cards?

-What do you think it’s the best way to break the ice in an embarrassing situation? For instance: “Charming day, isn’t it?” “Pray, don’t talk about the weather. Whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.”

-Do you know an easy card trick?

-What is it the meaning of the card trick for Gina’s maturing?

-How did Gina change over the years?

-What kind of novel was “Winter’s Day”?

-What books did made you cry?

-At the end, who is the victim in this sentence: so that your victim wouldn’t be able to put a card down wrong?

 

VOCABULARY

clothes-wise, Laura Ashley dress, pinafore, hair slide, toppling, glass-topped wicker table, raid, S level, awe, duffers, retakes, disingenuous, pushbike, wetsuit, fitting, sundial, gnarled, conkers, sparely, ferreting, off-handedness, frowsty, herbs, scuttled, fry-up, double declutching, sec, loo, tipsily, estate hands, drawn out (coffee), till, entropy, takeover, longhand, overspill, floundering

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

 

Dog, by Graham Swift

 

SUMMARY AND COMMENTS

The plot is very simple: a 56-year-old father, remarried to a woman half his age, takes their baby daughter to the park in her pram; there, a fierce dog attacks another child, and he runs to the baby’s defence and fights the dog with a violence so extreme that in the end he kills it. Then he takes his child back home.

But the story has more issues than this terrible incident.

The protagonist is a self-made man who has made a lot of money, has had a family of three grown up and independent children, a divorce and some love affairs. Then, in his fifties, he got married to a young woman and had a child with her: a daughter whom he loves devotedly. It seems that, once he finished bringing up a family, he stars a new life, a new family and feels young again.

But perhaps the most important theme of the story is the man’s character. We can see that he has been someone who was able to control everything: money, love…, and that taking things in control was his worthiest feature. But now, when he has fulfilled his life (money, family, children) and he’s starting a new one, it looks like as he had lost this control, so he isn’t able to master his life any more: he can’t help adoring, doting on his child with a passion so intense that he even can’t refrain his fury when he kicks the dangerous dog. In the past, he thought he would be happy mastering money and feelings, but now he discovers that this breaking free of his emotions can make him happier.

QUESTIONS

What is for you the relation between money and happiness?

What do you think of giving allowances to your children? And what about the “social salary”, I mean, about the idea of the right to have a salary because you are a person, not because you work?

Do you think it’s a good definition of growing up, “gaining more and more control”?

Do you have a pet? Are you in favour to have a pet when you have small children? Is it a good idea walking the dog in a children’s park?

Do you think that it has to be forbidden to have potentially dangerous dogs?

Is it a good idea to consider your pet as a member of your family? Do you have a dog? What is its position in your household?

“People had dogs in order to have the illusion of mastery and control”. What is your opinion about this?

The scene in which the narrator kicks the dog to save a small child is a bit distressing. Why? Too much violence? But wasn’t he saving a baby from a fatal attack?

The narrator was all the time talking about control. Why do you think he lost control in the park? Was there any other motive besides from trying to save a child from a dog?

What do you imagine Julia’s reaction to the news is going to be?

 

VOCABULARY

utterance, feather-bedded, estranged, inveigled, entrancing, bumps, swerves, put her feet up, crocuses, dab, chunks, notch, graph, dire, threshold, toppled, full-tilt, heave, breed, headsets, bellowing, contraptions, stab, teeter, mauling, writhed, far-fetched, paean, grapevine

Mother's Son, by Tessa Hadley

SUMMARY, by Montse Puigvert

 

Christine, Thomas’s mother, works as a literature teacher at the university and lives on her own in a flat in London. She is working at home, as she usually does on Thursdays, when she suddenly remembers about what someone told her the previous evening while having dinner with some friends of hers: Alan, Thomas’s father, is going to get married to a young girl half his age, in fact she could be his daughter.

Immerse in her thoughts, she receives by surprise the visit of Thomas. He’s got himself in a bit of a mess and needs to talk. He usually doesn’t tell her about his worries, which means that something important must be going on. At first, she thinks it is concerning Alan’s wedding, but it is not, he’s actually happy about it. He’s having an affair with a girl she met at work called Annie, curiously the same name as his girlfriend, Anna. He feels so comfortable talking with this girl, she is very bright, but not as good-looking as Anna. He hasn’t told anything about it to his girlfriend yet, as he wants to be sure, rather than upsetting her for no good.

Furthermore, he is not quite convinced with his work as an assistant of a Labour member of parliament, whom he really doesn’t believe in. Due to that, he is thinking about leaving the job and going away by himself to live abroad, in Prague or Budapest.

He starts to be impatient to leave. Christine knows he is going to meet Annie without even telling her. Remembering the way he has talked about her before, she feels he is so infatuated.

She feels herself reflected on Annie and revives the relationship she had with Alan. They had an affair by the time he was married and with two children. For a short period of time, Alan left his family to live with Christine, and that’s when Thomas was conceived. The relationship hadn’t worked out because they quarrelled continuously and Alan missed his children. So he came back home, leaving Christine alone while she was pregnant. They only kept their relationship from time to time to manage things about Thomas. In one of those meetings, they had a huge discussion on how to educate his son. From that day, their relationship broke definitely.

In the following morning after Thomas went to see his mum, Anna visits her at the university and tries to know what’s going on. Obviously, even caring about her, Christine feels that her loyalty is towards Thomas’s confidence. That’s why she only tells Anna about his worries concerning his job, whether he was doing the right thing working on it. But Anna keeps jostling for more, in fact fighting for their relationship. Christine only adds what he said about the possibility of going on holiday to Europe, and supposedly on his own. Anna is very sad, and she will try to talk to Thomas to get the truth.

Deep inside, Christine envies the Anns for having this struggle over him, the game of pursuit and being pursued, and the feeling of possession, a possession which she, as a mother, had from the very first moment when Thomas was born and which is now no longer available for her.

QUESTIONS

-She had the news about Alan, she forgot them, she remembered next day, but then she only thinks about her place. Why remembering Alan make her meditate about her place and how she likes it?

-Why did she use Mondrian to decorate her flat?

-How do you know she liked her son’s visit?

-Can you make a summary of Alan’s love live?

-Why does the narrator give us information about the husband if the key history it’s his son’s?

-“Being good might be another kind of lie”: When or where can you apply that?

-Why does he prefer Annie to Anna?

-Christine longed those storms caused by her relationships long time ago. Why can anyone miss some herd times in their lives?

-Could that mother (stormy in her youth) be a good adviser?

-For our children, what is it better, a simple or a complicated life?

-Bearing a child is always a good experience?

-Could you say the Alan was a bit sexist, or he was a product of his time?

-What would you say to a child who asked you about death?

-Do you think parents can / have to solve love problems of their children?

-Is “being extra nice” a sign of a lie?

-Do you think Anna pays too much attention to her body?

-What is the meaning of the rotten egg at the end of the story?

-When you had a mess, is it a good idea phoning somebody to tell the about it to try to forget it?

VOCABULARY

bristling, thriving, entertained, slate, cost the earth, brogues, pull a sickie, cropped up, wagged, dummy, popped, slick, BFI, tame, pebbles, dabble, prig, mew, truce, patching, moody, jostling, swivel, rump, shallot, bleached

Buckets of Blood, by Tessa Hadley

 

SUMMARY AND OPINION, by Begoña Devis

Hilary and Sheila are two sisters, both daughters of a vicar's large and poor orthodox family. The memories of their childhood and youth are not exactly happy: endless queues to use the bathroom, scant food, a heater that hardly heats up, fear of his belongings being stolen by his brothers, and, especially, the figure of their mother, overwhelmed, permanently dishevelled, pregnant and with a wild appearance that made people look at her in the street.
For all these reasons, when they both confess to each other that they no longer believe in God, they decide that, in no way, they are going to follow the family model, to have a conventional family, or pregnancies, or children, or anything that remotely reminds them of how their childhood has been. As escaping from this pattern is not so easy, because of their status as women, they decide that Sheila, always more courageous and determined (and probably the older one) will be the one to lead the way by going to the university, so that, later on, Hilary would be also able to move away from the place where they still reside.

When Sheila is already at the University of Bristol, Hilary embarks on a hopeful bus trip to visit her. It is her first time away from home, she is shy and rather unfriendly with people because she doesn't know how to interact with them, and the trip makes her sick, but, despite this, she feels happy. She hopes to meet her sister waiting for her at the station, and then to go together to the Manor Hill residence, where she will be happily ensconced.

But nothing goes as she expected. Instead of her sister, a young man who seems ugly, short and very inattentive, comes to pick her up at the station. She is forced to follow him through innumerable streets, leaving behind the tower of the University, to reach a filthy building, poorly lit, with hardly any water, where her sister and a group of friends live illegally. Sheila is suffering great pains at this time, and everywhere there are small buckets of blood, because she is having a miscarriage. The discovery that her sister has had sexual relations, has become pregnant (by Neil, the ugly boy who has been waiting for her in the

station, and who is not helping at all in that situation) makes Hilary to be in shock, and changes their relationship forever. On the other hand, her classmates seem to her unattractive, and more concerned with drinking in pubs and consuming joints than studying. Hilary has a great disappointment. She can’t understand how people who are on the lucky side of life can behave so rudely and inappropriately, and she can even less understand the attitude of her sister, always willing to please Neil, despite the fact that he did nothing for her during her miscarriage, and that he is always arrogant and pretentious. Hilary can’t recognize in Sheila the girl who had always been her sister.

Finally, after a few days, Sheila accompanies her sister to the station for the trip back home. They have made it very clear that the family will never know anything about what happened, and they won’t ever talk about it again.

On her way home, Hilary thinks that her life will never change as much as her sister’s has, and she feels bewildered. Suddenly, the landscape that she sees from the window seems beautiful to her, and she is saddened by thinking that, when she'll die, she will stop seeing it; then she thinks that she is already dead, and she cannot see it any more, but somehow she is allowed to return to life, and so she decides to enjoy everything while she has the opportunity to do it, down to the smallest detail.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

I think that Hilary and Sheila are very different, even though they are sisters.

The only thing that unites them is the fact of not wanting to form a family that follows the pattern of which they belong, and the need to flee from there.

When Hilary visits Sheila at the University, her hopes are dashed and her wishes changed. That was not the kind of life she expected there, and much less the life she wanted for herself. For this reason, during her trip back home, she suddenly finds herself appreciating the present: she doesn’t like the past, and the future is uncertain, so she decides to appreciate every second and every opportunity that the present offers to her.

QUESTIONS

-“She worried that she smelled of home.” Does every house / home have a different smell? Why does she say “home” and not “house”?

-What do you think of priest getting married and having a family? (Have you seen the film “Keeping the Faith”, “Más que amigos” in Spanish)

-How can you notice that someone has dressed up to be admired?

-Why did both sisters want to get far away from their home and not to become like their mother?

-But Sheila is studying Classics, a bit as her father. What kind of relationship is there between her and her father?

-Has religion or your opinions of the existence of God to be a private question? Why do you think so?

-Do you think there is trust in a family when the children don’t tell one another?

-In your opinion, why is their mother so disarranged?

-Why their mother’s pregnancies were humiliating for both sisters?

-How can you define “provincial”?

-Why does the author describe the hospital as something “sobering and impassive”?

-What do you think of the squatter movement?

-What do you know about Bluebeard story?

-Did you feel a difference between secondary school and university in the students’ attitudes in front of subjects and exams?

-To go to university is being in the “lucky side”?

-What is for you the event that changes a child or a teenager into an adult?

-In the story, Neil seems to be the “alpha male” because of his intellectual power or his coolness? Is this kind of rank going to disappear in the future?

-What do you know about the Oresteia? Do you think it’s a kind of symbol in our story?

-When Hilary goes back home, the weather is cheerful. What is the use of this for the story?

 

VOCABULARY

drawstring, navy school, school mac, Mothballs, Germolene, spots, dribbled out, remonstrated with, fleshpots, flaunt, surreptitious, reading, permed, hand-me-down, wellingtons, paltry, picked, palsy, entrist, beach rounders, twin-tub washing machine, playpen, dun, larked, ropy, maimed, pinstriped suit jacket, blue-rinsed, embossed, Brownie belt, squeak, dogged, daunting, quaint, racked, bundling, toppling, leering, shifty, Hills, Shuggs, kicked out, mould, reel, buckings, the halls, fractious, potties, tummy bug, studded, jug ears, lumpish, duffel coat, perfunctory, estate, fumy, slum, debunking, beeting, harrowed, heaved over, Brummie, small talk, shrank, gawky, lectures, skeins, haze, hummocky