Going Up in the World, by Graham Swift

Going Up in the World

The story tells us about the lives of two friends, Charles Yates and Don Abbot, about their friendship, their partnership in business of cleaning windows in skyscrapers and how do they improve their status and their lifestyles. Now that they are nearly sixty, are they happy with their lives. The path they have followed, is it worthy of their effort? 

QUESTIONS

-According to the narrator, Charles Yates is a toff’s name. What do you know about names? Did you find anything curious about your name? Do you have prejudices about names? How did you choose your children’s name? Would you like to change your name? Do you celebrate your name’s day?

-What do you know about these places: Wapping, Blackheath…? In the story, they mention “cross the river”. What is the meaning of this phrase for the Londoners? They say it’s a “good move”.

-They play nine holes: Do you play any sport? Do you think that a sport defines the character of a person, that is, according to one’s personality there is a different sport for them?

-There was a time when everybody wore a chain round their neck, and now we consider it out of fashion. How does fashion change our minds?

-There are three generations of jobs in the story: docker, window cleaner (self-employed), liberal profession. What is it different between our jobs and our parents’ jobs? And what about next generation?

-What do you think about boxing? Do you think it should be banned, or banned in the Olympic Games, at least?

-Describe Charles Yates (appearance and personality)

-Describe Don’s character.

-Talk about Charles’s jobs.

-In the story, they say he can climb like a monkey. Do you have vertigo? What do you know about people who don’t feel vertigo?

-They mention something about “smiling differently”. What can be its meaning? Sometimes you cry when you are very happy. Is it possible to laugh when you are very sad?

-What is the double meaning of the title?

-At the end of the story, there’s a mysterious phrase: “whole fucking world”. What is the meaning of this in relation with the story? What is for you the final idea of the story?

 

VOCABULARY

toff, crisp bright, heath, brow, nine holes, sloppy, docker, chunky, nipper, bantamweight, oil rig, roofer, steeplejack, girders, giddiness, birdman, clincher, sprees, cuddling up, stashed, twigged, hunch, wheeler-dealer, muck about, contraptions, gentry, take your pick, barrow boys, whoosh, ref, cumbersome, lumbering, easy-peasy, tingle      

Fireworks, by Graham Swift

Fireworks

This story deals with the feelings of a father when his only daughter is about getting married. Bur two weeks before the appointed wedding, there is the famous missile crisis. Are they going to celebrate the wedding, or they prefer waiting for the end of the world? A few days after, it’s the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes Day, but now the celebration will be a bit different and perhaps not so happy as in previous years.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know of the crisis of the missiles in Cuba?

-How do you think the world will end? Do you think it’s going to be and end for the humanity? What is, according to your opinion, the best literary end of the world?

-Is Monday the worst day of the week, or it is a cliché? Do you have a favourite day? And a day you hate? Do you know the origin of the prejudice against Fridays (in Anglo-Saxon countries) or Tuesdays (as for example in Spain)?

-About news: Why are they all the time negative? Is there a secret objective? Or is it simply because people don’t like good news?

-Can you see an analogy between the pair of presidents and the pair of fathers-in-law?

-Do you keep old clothes or do you prefer donating them? Is there any piece that you love specially and want to keep it forever?

-What do you know about Guy Fawkes Day? And about Guy Fawkes?

-Is there an analogy between Guy Fawkes Day and a wedding?

-There had been a worldly alarm of a nuclear explosion, and at the end there were only fireworks. Do you think the author wanted to mean something with this?

-What was your experience with weddings? Have you been in a very unusual wedding?

 

VOCABULARY

flippant, distraught, forked out, crackling, tantrum, chucking it down, glued, aimer, get into flaps, grizzling, fixture, thrill, regalia, give it a miss, foible, slouching, juddering, rant, plonked, Bovril, debriefings, swig

Mrs Kaminski, by Graham Swift

Mrs Kaminski

This is a very short story about a woman who went dizzy in the street, fell over and was taken to a hospital. There’s a sad/funny dialogue between the woman and the doctor because the woman is very old, and also a bit confused, and the doctor very young.

 

 

QUESTIONS

Tell us the story of Mrs Kaminsky.

What can you say about Tooting?

And about Lodz?

What do you know about Polish pilots in the RAF?

What do you know about Polish people migrating to the UK? Have you seen the film Moonlighting, starring Jeremy Irons?

Is the woman senile? Can you tell some anecdotes about senile people?

Is it easy for a young person to understand a very old person? What do you think they are the points where it’s easy to have misunderstandings or difficulties in understanding between them?

 

VOCABULARY

(funny/nasty) turn

boilerman

dab

 

England and Other Stories, by Graham Swift

Graham Swift FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) was born in 1949 in London, England. He was educated at Cambridge, and later the University of York.

One of his most important works is Waterland (1992), which was adapted as a film, starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (father of the actor Jake Gyllenhaal and of the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal).  It’s the story about a teacher in a secondary school, and it’s situated in the Fens, a marshy region in the east of England. The teacher, a tormented person because he feels guilty of a sad incident, teaches history and mixes his lessons with the history of his family.

Another novel that has also adapted as a film is Last Orders (1996), starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Hellen Mirren. It’s about a group of friends who have to scatter the ashes of a deceased friend in the sea. The story goes backwards and forwards, this way remembering the old days of their dead friend. The novel got the Booker Prize in 1996 and this was a cause of controversy because of its similarities with the novel As I lay Dying, by Faulkner. The title of Swift novel alludes to the will of a defunct and also to the phrase said by the bartenders at 22:55 to prompt the patrons to order one last drink, because at 23:00 the pub will be closed.

He wrote several novels more, and also two collections of short stories: Learning to Swim and England and Other Stories.

Swift is more an English than a world writer, because he writes mostly about English subjects and situates his stories in British soil. The events (murder, adultery…) of his novels are treated with decorum, in an almost puritanic fashion. We can use the saying “Still waters run deep” for his narratives: at first sight all is calm, but the tragedy is underneath. His characters are “typical British”, phlegmatic people.

Technically, Swift does not innovate. His novels are mostly conventional. And that means he is understandable to everyone. But his novels are full of mystery: you don’t know the reasons why the people act and react, and these reasons will be revealed only gradually. In this case, sometimes you think that the author is playing with you: if he knows the solution, why doesn’t he tell us about it from the beginning?

 

About him:

He went to live in Greece for a year with the purpose of becoming a writer, and he went back to England with a horrid (according to him) manuscript.

He was influenced by Isaac Babel when he was younger, and kept a photograph of the Russian writer on his desk.

 

About himself:

“I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, “I know exactly what I'm doing”.”

“I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths.”

“When you're reading a book, you're on a little island.”

 

About England and Other Stories

“All these stories are bits of England, but they are bits of different Englands.”

His short stories are an affectionate chronicle of everyday lives.

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories.

In most of the stories, ‘Englishness’ has a less concrete nature, a bittersweet quality.

This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny.

The Raft of the Medusa, by Julian Barnes

Théodore Géricault

The Raft of The Medusa at the Wikipedia

Julian Barnes at the Wikipedia

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters at the Wikipedia

Analysis

New York Times review

The short story you’re going to read is a bit different from the ones we have read until now, but don’t get scared, because I’m going to help you.

The story has two very different parts.

The first part narrates the shipwreck, so it has a lot of naval vocabulary (there is a glossary below), but don’t worry about it: to understand what happened you don’t even it to look up these words in a dictionary: just go on reading. The event is more or less like this: in the year 1816 a group of four French ships sailing from a port near La Rochelle were heading south along the African coast. Due to the incompetence of the commandments and/or adverse winds, the group of ships got separated, and the last one got stuck in a reef and couldn’t go on sailing at all; so the commandments ordered to leave the ship, but, as there were not enough boats for all the passengers and crew, they decided to build a raft that would be towed by the boats. But the raft couldn’t support so much weight, and they had to throw away some food and drink; even so, when everybody was on board, the raft was more than half a metre under water, and almost everybody on the raft had their legs under water. But the worst was that the boats cut the ropes that were tied to the raft to tow it, abandon it to their own fate and went away. The situation on the raft was desperate: they didn’t have instruments to navigate, neither rows nor a sail; they fight for better positions on the raft and for food and water; during the night it was a storm; a lot of people died or were murdered or committed suicide; there were cases of cannibalism… At the end, only a few survived on the raft and were rescued by the ship Argus. The survivals had decided to write down the events, and so now we know a lot of details of the story.

The second part narrates how Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa (Medusa being the name of the stranded ship) and what was the public opinion about the painting. This second part of the story doesn’t have vocabulary problems (I think), but perhaps it isn't as moving as the first one, and it demands an effort extra as it goes into art.

Julian Barnes is very keen on art and has a book of essays about paintings and painters called Keeping an Eye Open and the novel The Man in the RedCoat with a lot of art inside, or The Noise of the Time about the Russian musician Shostakovich… So in his books we find a lot of history, art and also politics.

This is the cover of the book I bought thirty years ago. In it, you can see the Ark of Noah and a part of a spaceship floating in a stormy sea in an intent to convey the contents of the book: the history and the sea. The idea of the book is similar to another famous book by Stefan Zweig: Decisive Moments in History: Twelve Historical Miniatures. So, Barnes tells us about ten “and a half moment” in the History (real or literary) of the world but under a fictional vision with a short story form.

QUESTIONS for the first part of the story 

Tell us in your words what the bad omen was.

What happened in the Canary Islands?

Why was Senegal important for the French?

What do you know about famous rafts? What do you know about the raft of Odysseus?

Do you remember other famous shipwrecks?

What do you know about the myth of Medusa?

When the raft was ready with all the people on it, they shouted “Vive le Roi!” What political moment was France in?

Tell us about the sufferings of the shipwrecked people.

What cruel or repugnant but necessary actions did the shipwrecked do? What would you do in your case?

What happened to the people who didn’t want to abandon the ship?

Who rescued the shipwrecked, and what did the survivors do afterwards?

 

QUESTIONS about Scene of Shipwreck, by Géricault

 

Do you remember any film or novel about catastrophes? Why do you think we like this kind of films if we already know how they end?

What do you know about Géricault (not the biography, but some curious or interesting fact)?

Géricault shaved his head in order not to see anyone and be locked in his studio working. Do you know more cases of artists who had to do something radical to keep on working?

What human resources did Géricault use to paint more realistically his painting?

What can you tell us about Delacroix?

“You can tell more by showing less”: What does this saying mean? Can you give some examples?

What do you think about the title “Scene of Shipwreck”? What other title would you have given to the picture?

Who is Venus Anadyomene?

What differences do you remember between the painting and the real facts?
As we can see that cannibalism is taboo in most societies, do you think eating meat would be so in some years?

(some) VOCABULARY (in context)

portent = augury
porpoises = sea mammals similar to dolphins
frigate, corvette, flute, brig = different kind of ships
banian fig
shallows = not deep water
lead = heavy metal used to measure the depth
ensign = junior lieutenant
luffing = losing wind
have a heel = incline to one side
astern = behind
pinnace = boat
soundings = measuring (the depth of the water)
billows = big waves
tags = strips of (e.g.) metal
pewter = metal mixture of tin and lead
supernumerary = extra

The Teacher's Story, by Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta at the Wikipedia

Review

Another review

A comment

Gita Mehta, The Teacher’s Story, by Elisa Sola

 

Gita Mehta, biography

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer and documentary filmmaker. She was born in Delhi in 1943 into a well-known Odia family. She’s alive, and she’s 79 years old.

Odia people are native to the Indian state of Odisha, which is located in Eastern of India, and they have their own language, Odia, which is one of the classical languages of India. India is an independent republic since 1950, and Odisha, formerly Orissa, became independent into the republic of India on April 1936.

Gita’s father, Biju Patnaik, was an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Odisha, and her brother, Naveen Patnaik, is the Chief Minister of Odisha since 2000. In 2019 Gita Mehta was nominated for one of the highest civilian awards in the field of literature and education, the Padma Shri, but she declined, because the general elections were coming and she didn’t want to harm her brother.

She was educated in India and in the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In her professional career, she has produced and/or directed 14 television documentaries for UK, European and US networks. During the years 1970–1971 she was a television war correspondent for the US television network NBC.

She is the widow of Sonny Mehta, former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, whom she married in 1965. She has one son, Aditya Singh Mehta. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and been on the bestseller lists in Europe, the US and India. Her fiction and non-fiction writings focus exclusively on India - its culture and history - and on the Western perception of it. Her works reflect the insight gained through her journalistic and political background.

She has published 5 works: Karma Cola in 1979, a non-fiction book about India and its mysticism; Raj, her first novel, in 1989, which is and colourful historical story that follows the progression of a young woman born into Indian nobility under the British Raj. In this novel, she mixes history and fiction. The next work is A River Sutra, published in 1993, a collection of short stories, including our story, “The Teacher’s Story”. Her latest work was Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, in 2006, which is a collection of essays about India since Independence.

Mehta divides her time between New York City, London and New Delhi.

 

The Teacher’s Story

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer that she has written about Indian culture and society. In this short story, the author shows us how the life in India is. We know the paanwallah, the paan leaves, betel leaves, the samosa, the paisa, the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin, the tanpura, the raga, the street hawkers, the goats and shepherds in the marble mausoleum of the Victoria Memorial…

The Teacher’s Story is one of the six stories that make up the novel A River Sutra. These stories are: “The Monk’s Story", “The Teacher’s Story”, “The Executive’s Story”, “The Courtesan’s Story”, “The Musician’s Story” and “The Minstrel’s Story”.  Every main character of the novel represents a particular community.

These six stories are presented by a nameless narrator who is in dialogue with his close friend Tariq Mia. In this novel, Gita Mehta uses not only one narrator, but sub-narrators. For instance, in the Monk’s Story the narrator is the nameless narrator, but in The Teacher’s Story the narrator is Tariq Mia, an old Muslim Mullah who is the best friend of that narrator. Therefore, the story is told from third person point of view and makes the narration omniscient. The technique of the novel is similar to the epic Mahabharata because these narrators aren’t involved in the novel as a character. However, they know omnisciently everything that happens, because they have been told or witnessed.

The kind of narration, very simple on the surface level, with flat characters, seeks to give moral lessons to the people, and it roots with the ancient Indian tradition of story-telling. In ancient times' story telling was a skill, and Gita Mehta wants to tell a traditional story with its moral message.

The main character of The Teacher’s Story is Master Mohan, a very sensitive person who sees broken his dream to become a famous singer when he was child because of his tuberculosis. Due to that, he became a teacher’s music like his father, who couldn’t see his dream come true. However, Master Mohan, despite not having fulfilled his dream and being blamed for it by his wife and children, is not a bitter man and continues to look for a way to live with his goal. On this path, he meets Imrat, a blind and poor boy with a great ability to sing: good voice and good hearing, and they both immediately make a bond.

Master Mohan teaches little Imrat to turn him into what he couldn’t be: a splendid singer, and they both form a family, the sweet family that they don’t have, because they both are orphans in some way (Master Mohan is rejected by his family and the boy is abandoned by his sister because she can’t raise him).

In the end, the boy achieves fame in the form of a record contract, but his voice is so pure that he is murdered out of envy, in an act of much cruelty that has a moral explanation: “such voice is not human. What will happen to music if this is the standard by which God judges us?”

If I had to compare this little story with a piece of music, I would do it with de Ravel Bolero, because it rises in tone to the final ecstasy: the pure voice of Imrat who can’t survive in this world of evil and is silenced with a sword.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

-Master Mohan

-His wife

-His father

-His children

-Mohammed-sahib

-The paanwallah

-Imrat

-Imrat’s sister

What are the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin?

Why did Mohan keep Imrat?

Can you tell us about the attacks from Mohan’s wife and children against Imrat?

What do you know about the taboo against eating pork? What other taboos you know that are strange for us?

What do you think about children’s cruelty? Is it something biological, or something that they learn from society, family, school?

Try to make a description of the Victoria Memorial Park in Calcutta.

What’s the Ochterlony’s Needle?

Who was Amir Rumi?

What kind of song did the boy sing? I mean, what was the topic of the songs?

Tell us adjectives for Imrat voice.

What is Tansen’s tamarind tree?

When did the miracle of an offer for a recording contract happen?

Don’t you think there is a contradiction singing for God and at the same time singing for a recording contract?

In your opinion, what happened to Imrat at the end? How do you know?

 

VOCABULARY

paanwallah, paan, betel, sahib, yoked, taunts, paisa, muffling, drilling, relishing, struts, tablas, sheikh, prodded, welling, pimp, puffed up, clumsiness, greed, drone, tanpura, raga, hawkers, samosa, pandering

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, by P. D. Wodehouse

P. D. Wodehouse at the Wikipedia

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, at the Wikipedia

Video

Radio adaptation (from 1:50:00 to 2:15:00)

P. D. Wodehouse, by Begoña Devis

BIOGRAPHY 

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born on the 15^th of October 1881, in Guildford (UK). He was the son of Eleanor Deane, from a landed family, and Henry Ernest Wodehouse. The Wodehouse had been based in Norfolk for many centuries. His lineage is ancient, going back to as far back as 1227, when Sir Bertram of Wodehouse fought with Eduard I against the Scots.
He was a prolific writer, author of more than 90 narrative books (70 novels and 20 collections with a total of 200 stories), another hundred short stories in magazines, 400 articles, 19 plays and 250 song lyrics for 33 musicals of Broadway as well as adaptations and screenplays.
Until the age of two, he lived in Hong Kong, where his father was a British government judge. Back in London, he grew up with his two older brothers practically as am orphan, under different family guardianships, especially aunts, since his parents continued to reside in Hong Kong until he was 15 years old. That’s reflected in his abundant production: in his work there are no mothers but aunts, and there are also few fathers and their relationship with their children are scarce and comical. On the other hand, his biographer revealed that, as a young man, he pretended to be almost mentally retarded, when in reality he has intelligent, complex and educated. Thanks to that false naive disguise, he was able to concentrate on what he really liked: writing.
Having studied at Dulwich College, his first paid paper was “Aspects of Game Captaincy”. He was unable to follow his brother to Oxford because the family finances began to have difficulties. So, instead of a university degree, in September 1900, he reluctantly took a job at the London office of the Bank of Hong Kong and Shanghai. To disassociate himself from this job that he did not like at all, he began to write about sports and humorous stories in the press and magazines. As a great sportsman, he represented Dulwich College in boxing, cricked and rugby, sports which, along with golf, figure directly or indirectly in many of his stories.
Although he had already visited New York in 1904, it was during another visit in 1909 that Wodehouse sold “two short stories to Cosmopolitan and Collier’s magazines for a total sum of $500, much more than he had ever made”. That decided him to leave the United Kingdom and settle in New York. In 1914, he married Ethel Newton, a widow he had met in New York two months earlier and whose daughter, Leonora, he adopted.
The following year, he was hired as a theatre critic by Vanity Fair magazine. By this time, his first novels had met with some success, and, from 1909, Wodehouse was living between Paris and the United States. His reputation as a humorous novelist was established with his work Psmith in the City. He maintained his enormous popularity through almost a hundred novels, in which a series of curious and very British characters were almost always idle young people disoriented by the absurd and comical situations. In 1919, he begins what will be his most famous series of novels and stories, with My Man Jeeves. This character, a shrewd valet who always rescues the reckless Mr Bertie Wooster, who almost always is the victim of some conspiracy by his aunt.
In 1934, Wodehouse, already very successful as a writer, and to avoid double taxation on his income, moved to live in France. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, instead of returning to the UK, he decided to stay in his house on the coast at Le Touquet. In the summer of that year, Wodehouse had gone to Oxford to be made an honorary doctor, and shortly after his return to Le Touquet. The German authorities interned him, in his late sixties, as an “enemy alien”, first in Belgium, then in Upper Silesia (now in Poland). After that, the British government, despite having a report by a senior M15 exonerating him of treason (which was not published until after his death), denounced him as a Nazi collaborator, and the media continued to accuse him of being a traitor for a long time, and some public libraries banned his books, and even some prominent authors criticized him harshly. Wodehouse, disgusted by the treatment received by his country, never returned to the United Kingdom, and in 1955 he obtained American citizenship.
PG Wodehouse is considered one of the best English humourists alongside Jerome K. Jerome, Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe. An edition of his complete works is practically impossible, since in more than seventy years of constant literary work (from 1902 to1975) Wodehouse did not let a day go by without writing something. 
In the year of his death, the great Wodehouse was made Sir. He died in Remsenburg, Long Island (United States) on the 14^th of February 1975. He was 93 years old.

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend 

Despite glorious weather, Lord Emsworth is miserable; it is August Bank Holiday, which means the annual Blandings Parva School Treat. The precious grounds are to be overrun with fairground rides, tea-tents and other amusements for the throngs, and Emsworth is will be forced by his sister Constance to wear a stiff collar and a top hat, despite the warm weather and his strong protests.
On top of that, Head Gardener Angus McAllister is determined to carry out his project of putting gravel in the garden. Emsworth, who loves his mossy carpet, loathes the idea, but his sister is in favour, and the stronger personalities overpower the elderly man.
After that, while visiting Blandings Parva to judge the flower displays, Emsworth is frightened by a large dog, but he is rescued by a small girl named Gladys. They chat and become friends, especially when she reveals that, having been seen picking flowers in the Castle grounds, she hit McAllister in the shin with a stone to stop him chasing her.
When the fête begins, Emsworth is uncomfortable as ever in his formal clothes, and he’s worried about the speech he will have to make. In addition, at the tea-tent, his top hat is knocked off by a cleverly aimed rock cake, and Emsworth flees, taking refuge in an old shed. In there, he finds Gladys, miserable; she has been put there by his sister Constance, for stealing from the tea tent something to take to her brother Ern, barred from the fête for biting Constance on the leg.
Delighted by this family, Emsworth takes Gladys into the house, and provides her a hearty tea, and also a feast to take back to Ern.  Gladys requests to pick some flowers to take home too. Emsworth hesitates, but cannot refuse her. As she is picking flowers, McAllister rushes up in a fury, but his master, encouraged by Gladys’s hand in his, stands up to the man, saying that the flowers belong to him, and that he also doesn’t want gravel in the garden, putting him in his place.
Constance approaches then, demanding Emsworth return to make his speech, but he refuses, saying he's going to put on some comfortable clothes and to visit Ern with his friend Gladys.
In my opinion is a really naive story, with sense of humour and ridiculous situations, as in almost always stories of the writer happen. In that story, the powerful aristocrat behaves like a boy, under the strict supervision of his sister (who could very well be his aunt), while his saviour is a little girl. Thanks to her, he finds the courage to do and say what he really wants.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the main characters

-Lord Emsworth

-Lady Constant Keeble

-Angus McAllister

-Gladys

-Ern

-Beach

What happens in August Bank Holiday?

Tell us about the gravel path.

What opinion does Lord Emsworth have about Scottish people?

Why does Angus have the upper hand with Lord Emsworth?

Can you explain the scene with the dog?

What are Lord Emsworth’s resources as to deal with people of the other sex?

What is the meaning of “season” for a “classical lord”?

What kind of relationships does Lord Emsworth have with women?

Talk about Lord Emsworth’s Panama hat.

What was the problem with his collar?

What is the reference for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?

According to Lord Emsworth, what are the characteristics of a London child?

Why Gladys and her brother were excluded from the garden party?

What do you know about the Battle of Bannonckburn?

When did Lord Emsworth feel like a true lord again?

“Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.” What do you think of this proverb?

 

VOCABULARY

summer morning, beaming, kippered, marquees, potter, evenfall, dodge, dodder, hemlock, peers, filling station, blistering, clutches, kink, number twelve heel, flout, demeanour, confidence trick, wizened, velveteen, pick, tenantry, ‘ahse, josser, plice, arf, sharted, ‘air-oil, todiy, stror, rummage-sale, ballyragged, Jno., gave at the knees, squeaker, cut both ways, rig-out, dickens, Saturnalia, goggling, vouchsafed, tough egg, curate, back-chat, squint, tumbril, slicer, dooce, shirk, lidy, gorn, Gad, pliying, dorg, fit, spineless, excursions

The Three Horsemen, by G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton at the Wikipedia

Review

The Paradoxes of Mr Pond at the Wikipedia

Audiobook (part 1. From minute 3)

Audiobook (part 2. From minute 3)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by Lídia Gàllego

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington in 1874. He was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox”. He wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays. He created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and its writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour.

Chesterton was a large man, standing 1.93 m tall and weighing around 130 kg, who became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. He was educated at St Paul’s School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. Chesterton also took classes in literature at University College London, but did not complete a degree in either subject. He declared himself agnostic in matters of religion.

He married Frances Blogg in 1901. Chesterton allowed Frances to lead him back to Anglicanism, though he later considered Anglicanism to be a “pale imitation” of Catholicism. He entered full communion with the Roman Catholic Church in 1922. The couple never had children.

In September 1895, Chesterton began working for the London publisher George Redway. One year later, he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period, he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. Early on, Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writings show a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images.

Chesterton was part of the Detection Club, a society of British mystery authors founded by Anthony Berkeley in 1928. He was elected as the first president and served from 1930 to 1936.

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the14th June 1936, aged 62. Near the end of Chesterton’s life, Pope Pius XI invested him as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great. The Chesterton Society proposed his beatification.

 

The Three Horsemen

Mr. Pond, a government official and old friend of the author’s father, explains, in a meeting between acquaintances, a case he had to solve a few years ago: Marshal Von Grock, who leads a regiment of Prussian hussars in occupied Poland, considers that Paul Petrowski, a Polish poet and singer, must be executed because his public demonstrations of patriotism are a danger. For this reason and considering that the poet is about to be released, he sends a messenger, Lieutenant Von Hocheimer, with precise orders for his execution shortly before the arrival of the Prince. The Prince knows that this act would have international repercussions, would make Petrowski a martyr and would cause them a lot of trouble, so he decides to send a messenger with a pardon to stop the marshal’s order. Nevertheless, the marshal remains convinced that Petrowski must die for the safety of the Prince and the homeland, so he secretly sends a third messenger, Sergeant Schwartz, to prevent the pardon from arriving. Eventually, no messenger will arrive, and the poet Petrowski will be released. Mr. Pond tells his acquaintances why he thinks it happened so.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters:

-Mr Pond

-Paul Petrowsky. Why is he dangerous (for the Prussians)?

-Marshal Von Grock: physical appearance and personality.

-Lieutenant Von Hocheimer

-His Highness

-Arnold Von Schacht

-Sergeant Schwartz. Why did Grock choose him for the mission?

What is a paradox? Can you give some examples?

What in life is a lot but never too much? Why?

The narrator say that Captain Gahagan seems to belong to a past when being a duellist was more common. What duels in fiction do you remember the best?

“It was his one compliment to poetry.” What do we have to understand by this sentence?

Grock says they must serve (different from obey) His Highness? What does it imply?

What do you know about the Ems telegram (or dispatch)? So when do you think the story is situated?

What is the meaning of this sentence: “Death is the fact of all facts”?

What is the relation between Goethe and Weimar?

“The world is changed not by what is said, but by what is done”, said Grock. Do you agree? Why?

Why does the narrator use this image: “The sergeant felt vaguely the presence of some primordial slime the was neither solid nor liquid nor capable of any form”?

What do you know about Rops?

What does that mean: “an act is unanswerable even when it is indefensible”?

 

VOCABULARY

creepy, dapper, random, owlishly, abreast, couriers, laid waste, wilderness, spick and span, baldric, reprieve, asinine, scoff, thwarts, chargers, Fatherland, overriding, orderly, marksmanship, scum, etcher