Philomela, by Emma Tennant

Literary biography

BIOGRAPHY

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937, from an aristocratic family. She spent the Blitz in a fake gothic house in a Scottish glen. Then she came back to London; after her school time in London, she went to study in Oxford for some years. When she was older, he lived for some years in Corfu, where her parents had built a house, and she wrote a book about it.

She got married four times, the last one when she was 71 to a man of 33. She also had an affair with Ted Hughes.

Although she descended from the nobility, she was a staunch supporter of the Labour Party.

She died at 80 from a form of Alzheimer.

She worked as a travel writer for a magazine and was the editor of Vogue.

She wrote her first novel when she was 26, The Colour of Rain, and submitted it to the Formentor Prix. The chairman of the jury, Alberto Moravia, said it was a horrible novel, and Emma Tennant suffered a writer’s block for ten years. A curious detail is that she wrote it under a pseudonym, composed with the Ouija. Later, she used again this device as a help to write her novels.

After these ten years, she started writing again and she published a lot. Her books are usually versions of classical stories or prequels and sequels of famous books. For example The French Daughter’s Bastard, about the daughter of Mr Rochester (the protagonist of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë), Pemberley, a version of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, or Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. Sometimes, in her versions, she changes the masculine characters for feminine ones and vice versa, and she adds magic and feminism to the original narratives.

 

SUMMARY

Philomela was originally published in 1975 in the literary magazine Bananas, whose editor she was.

It tells the classical myth of Philomel, or Philomela, that appears in The Metamorphoses, by Ovid. The narrator is Procne, Philomela’s sister. She tells how she married Tereus, from Thrace, and thus had to move out of Athens leaving her loving sister there. Procne wasn’t very happy in her marriage; after a while she had a son called Itylus, but she continued feeling sad. So her sister offered to go and live with her in Thrace, but, in the end, she didn’t go. Tereus, a man who only liked war, decided to go to Athens to fetch her sister’s wife. But he came back with the bad news that Philomela was dead. Procne was sadder and sadder; she had another child, but the children weren’t a comfort to her. Her only entertainment was to take care of her garden: she would have liked to show it to her sister…

After a time, a foreign slave went to see her and gave her a cloth. The cloth was a kind of tapestry which depicted how Tereus raped her sister, cut her tongue and locked her up in a castle.

But Procne didn’t tell anything about it to her husband and sent two loyal slaves of hers to rescue Philomela. They got her and came back to Thrace secretly.

When Tereus saw Philomela he was astonished, but he plucked up courage and said that he had committed a mistake and that he was very sorry for it, that he really believed Philomela was dead. Philomela didn’t reproach him anything.

In Tereus palace, everyone respected and feared Philomela because she was dumb, because in that time, someone who had a peculiarity was revered by the rest.

Although Procne and Philomela behave as if nothing had happened to the latter, they were planning their revenge. Itylus was an exact replica of his father, and thus he was to be the object of their retaliation.

When Tereus came from the war, and while he was celebrating his victories, the sisters killed Itylus, boiled him, made a pie with his body and gave it to Tereus in a banquet. The sisters were satisfied, but we don’t know what happened to them once Tereus knew about his heir.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Choose a Greek myth and tell us the story. (A list)

-Do you know any other story or tale where somebody eats human flesh?

-Imagine you are in a dire strait and the only way to survive is eating human flesh; would you do it?

-Sometimes the psychoanalysis recurs to the myths and legends to explain the human behaviour. Remember the Oedipus complex. What kind of complex could be Philomela complex? I mean: if the Oedipus complex tries to explain the child’s jealousy towards his dad, what kind of problem could Philomela’s story reflect?

-In the cave, the sisters said there was a dead monster. How do you imagine this monster?

-Sometimes, when somebody has a flaw (dumbness, blindness…), people think they have magic powers. What can be the origin of this belief?

-Do you know more examples of love / loyalty between sisters, or brothers?

-What are the differences between the original myth and the story by Tennant?

Myth audiobook

VOCABULARY

bearable, moped, palling, lurked, hangings, listlessly, advanced on, groves, importantly, drifwood, boulder, shift, seeped, limpets, wince

Fear and Trembling, by Amélie Nothomb

BIOGRAPHY

This is a slightly different biography, mixing Wikipedia and other sources with my personal opinion of her.

Amélie Nothomb is a very interesting writer, quite different from the others writers I know. She stems from a Belgian noble family. Her father was the Belgian diplomat Patrick Nothomb, and she is the grandniece of Charles Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian Foreign Secretary (1960–2001), and the great-granddaughter of the writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She is a Commander of the Order of the Crown and has had the title of Baroness bestowed upon her by King Philippe of Belgium.

But I have said that she is a very different person for other reasons. Let’s see. For starters, she has two places and two dates of birth. According to some sources, she was born in Etterbeek (Brussels) on 9 July 1966, Belgium, but according to herself, she was born in Kobe (Japan) in 1967. It is a metaphorical statement, since her childhood memories begin in Japan, where she lived from the ages of two to five, the time that most deeply marked his character, due to his learning at school, and his close relationship with his beloved Nanny.

After living in Japan, she lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, The United Kingdom and Laos, and finally in Belgium. All these transfers were due to his father’s profession (a diplomat, as I said) and undoubtedly marked her character. In Biographie de la faim, at one point in the novel she writes: “the majority of international terrorists are children of diplomats. It does not surprise me”. Her sense of humour, cynical and intelligent, is one of her main characteristics.

She has a brother and a sister, and she has always felt very close to the latter, with whom she takes refuge imagining fictional worlds (and both writing about that) during their childhood, in which they saw the horror of hunger and misery of places like China or Bangladesh.

At the age of 17, she discovered Europe, and more specifically Belgium, where at first she felt like a foreigner. She studied Romance Philology at the Free University of Brussels (with liberal socialist tendencies), where she found it difficult to integrate because her last name evokes her family’s extreme right-wing past. She refers to this experience in her novel Antichrista.

After graduating at the age of 21, she returned to Tokyo and worked for a year in a large Japanese company. She recounts this experience in her novel Fear and Trembling. When she returned to Belgium, she wrote her first novel, Hygiène de l’assassin, which was very well received by the critics and the public. From that moment, she devoted herself exclusively to writing. According to her own explanation, she spends four hours a day writing, and she writes three novels a year, of which she only publishes one. She has written more than thirty novels and almost 20 short stories.

In 2012, Luca Chiari directed the documentary Amélie Nothomb: une vie entre deux eaux (“A Life Between Two Waters”) about Amélie’s return to Japan, where she rediscovered the beauty of its landscapes, its peaceful rites, the sadness of Fukushima, but especially, where she met again her Japanese nursemaid, Nishio San.

She is, as I have already said, very special even by the way of presenting herself.  In her photos on her books, she always appears dressed in black and wearing a big hat, which gives her a distant, even cold appearance.

In my opinion, perhaps it’s the way of creating a character that allows her to stay hidden, and also away from fashion. As she explains in her numerous autobiographical books, Amélie does not consider herself beautiful at all, but she admires beauty, especially feminine beauty, and that way of showing herself, always just her face and little else, protects her from her unattractive appearance (according to her, who also says that she is quite short and suffers from scoliosis).

All her novels are interesting, especially the autobiographical ones, and almost all of them are short and easy to read because they are captivating and full of surrealism and intelligence.

Try reading this author, because I am sure you will enjoy her a lot.

 

SUMMARY

 

I’m going to make a general summary of the entire book, in order to awaken your curiosity and your desire to read it. I hope I get it without too many spoilers. For that reason I’ll focus on explaining what was happening around the book at that time, especially the motivation that led Amélie Nothomb to go to Japan, and the feelings she had during that year.

Firstly, in my opinion, we are faced with a book about love, about crazy, excessive, disproportionate and absurd love. All these adjectives also serve to describe the content of the book.

At the age of 20, Amélie Nothomb was in love with Japan, or more precisely with an idea of Japan, the one she had of the Japan of her early childhood, between two and five years old, with a loving nanny, a school she loved attending and using a language she found sublime. In some of her books, she speaks with pride of the Japanese language, with a forceful pronunciation and significant ideographs, instead of the pitiful language her brothers were forced to study at the same time (English), a “boiled” language, according to her, in which some words mix with others forming a broth that is sometimes unintelligible (I agree, by the way). She remembers herself writing at school, and reading Japanese books (not children’s stories but books for adults) with enthusiasm.

Isn’t it incredible that someone could write and read fluently in Japanese at that age, and that her memories of that time are so clear? However, that is what she describes very clearly in at least two of her books: Le sabotage amoreux (1999) and Biographie de la faim (2004), both autobiographical. In both she makes it clear, and still considers it so, that the separation from Japan to go living in China (the communist China of the eighties) was the most painful and traumatic separation of her life. That was the reason why, after having finished his studies in Romance Philology, she made every effort to obtain the degree of Japanese translator, so that she could go to work for one of the most important corporate companies in that country for a year.

And, at that point, the book begins. During that year, she will go from being practically nobody, with no one below her, to being much less than nothing, suffering an endless number of hilarious, humiliating, absurd and degrading situations. And she overcame all of this for love, for her love to Japan.

Instead of rebelling, as would be expected of someone with her character, she tries incessantly to understand, and even justify, these tyrannical behaviours of unlimited cruelty based on absurd rites of honour, which despise Westerners in general and women in particular (Japanese women are not exempt from this either, within a deeply sexist and classist society). And she tells us this with a great sense of humour, often close to sarcasm and surrealism, and with a great feeling of acceptance, even with a rare and almost inexplicable pleasure. 

In my opinion, the thing we have to thank that year in Japan for is that Amélie Nothomb decided that, after her return to Europe, she would dedicate herself exclusively to writing. The countless times she committed metaphorical suicide by jumping into the void through the company bay windows (a little spoiler, sorry), and flying over the wonderful landscapes of her beloved Japan, stimulated her imagination (already prodigious) and helped her to make that decision.

If you try reading Biographie de la faim and Fear and trembling you will be able to know Nothomb childhood and early youth, and perhaps to begin to appreciate his particular way of writing, and even of her being hedonistic, solitary, caustic, surreal and as fun as difficult to understand.

 

QUESTIONS

-What is the relation of the title with the novel? Does it have any relation with the book by Søren Kierkegaard?

-Why the reference to Aristotle?

-What do you know about the Japanese culture? Have you been there? Nothomb observations, are they clichés or real habits?

-Nothomb mentions Cleopatra and her nose. Do you think a so small detail can change the History?

-If you were to live abroad, what would be more important for you, to keep your culture and traditions, or to adapt to your new situation?

VOCABULARY

spat me out, bay window, open-plan, scornful, tore it up, output, refrain, umpteenth, brimmed, complexion, carnation, mourned, downfall, lair, ashen, dumbfounded, losing face, probed, slumped, kanji 

Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome

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

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

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

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

Three Men in a Boat, film. Wikipedia.

The film

Read more

The Fishing-boat Picture, by Alan Sillitoe

BIOGRAPHY

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928 to a working-class family. His father was an illiterate, couldn’t keep a job for long, and was usually violent. His mother worked in factories and, for a short time, as a prostitute. They had, besides Alan, four more children. They often moved house because they couldn’t pay the rent.
Alan left school at fourteen because he failed the entrance exam for the grammar school (the secondary school at the time). He worked in the factories of the county for four years, and then he joined the RAF, although he didn’t serve in the WWII because he was too young. But he did serve as a wireless operator in the war against the rebel communists in Malaya.
When he got back, he discovered he had TB. While in the hospital, he read a lot, but with no judgement nor model, and decided he wanted to be a writer.  He got together with the poet Ruth Fainlight (whom she married ten years later). Then, with a pension from the government, he travelled to France and Spain to try to get over his disease. When he lived in Majorca, he met Robert Graves, who helped him in his career as a writer. Thus, he started writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1958. The novel is about the Saturday night-life of a factory worker who gets involved in a booze competition and in a love affair with is mate’s wife, and then, the next morning, the hangover shows him the reality of life.
His other famous novel is The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, published in 1959. It's about the life in a Borstal, a youth detention centre.
In 1968, he was invited to visit the USSR as a working-class writer, but there he denounced the human rights abuses in the communist system, surprising this way the soviet authorities. But, on the other hand, he always supported Israel in front of Palestinian movements.
He belongs, although he doesn’t like being classified like this, to the “angry young men” of the 50s in the UK, a group of artists and intellectual people who rejected the middle-class morals of the post-war Great Britain. He avoided all literary awards, although he accepted honorary doctorates from some universities.
He had two children from his wife.
Alan Sillitoe died in 2010 in London, of cancer. He was 82.
 
SUMMARY

This is a working-class story: the characters are working people, simple, with poor entertainment and poor ambitions, and it typically ends sadly.
Our hero is Harry, a postman who takes his life easily and doesn’t get emotional for anything. His only hobby is reading, mostly books about geography. When he gets a steady position in the post office, he says yes to get married to Kathy, a girl four years older than he.
For six years, they live happily together, although with a lot of rows, sometimes a bit violent. Then, after these six years, they had a silly argument: Kathy throws his book to the fire, he hits her, and she goes away for good. But afterwards he discovers that she had been cheating on him, at least for a year, with a housepainter across the street.
He isn’t sad or angry with Kathy’s departure, and he gets used to living alone, and feels, if not happier, more comfortable. He goes on doing his rounds and reading his books without any of the usually ups and downs of the life.
After six years more, his wife appears again out of the blue. She says she was around there and thought it was worth paying him a visit. Nevertheless, neither of them is excited about this sudden meeting; perhaps they only feel a bit of nostalgia. They sit and have a chat, all the time keeping the distance, but without any resentment. Kathy shows some interest in a picture of a fishing boat hanging on the wall, the last of a collection of pictures her brother gave them as a wedding present, and Harry decides to give her the picture, although at the beginning she declines the offer. They used to say the picture was the last of the fleet.

Some days later, he sees the picture in a pawnshop window; a bit surprised, he buys it and hangs it at the same place, again with any kind of rancour.
Kathy keeps paying him short visits, and all the time their meetings are cold and distant. Initially, neither of them mentions again the picture. Now and then, the postman gives her money and cigarettes, although he only smokes a pipe.
Asked about the housepainter, Kathy tells him he died a long time ago of lead-poisoning. Now, she says, she lives alone in a small flat and has different jobs.
In the end, she asks again for the fishing-boat picture, and he gives it to her again. Afterwards, he finds it again in the window of the same pawnshop, but this time he doesn’t rebuy it.
One day, a lorry runs over her, killing her. The postman goes to the hospital, and there they give him her belongings, and with them there is the fishing-boat picture, broken and dirty with blood. In the cemetery, besides her relatives, there comes a stranger. Harry finds him again in her place, collecting his things: he had been living with Kathy all these six years.
At home again, he thinks he could have kept their pictures and also kept Kathy, and feels that his life had been a waste of time.
At the end, he wonders about the meaning of life, of his life: is it worth living one’s life?
 
QUESTIONS

-What is your advice for a dating couple in order to know each other better and help them to decide on living (or not) together?
-What is better for a couple: a lot of love, or a lot of peace?
-Why do you think the protagonist liked living alone after his wife ran away?
-According to your opinion, why the wife didn’t ask him money?
-What does the picture symbolize for the couple along the story?
-Do you think that, for some people, unhappiness is a kind of happiness?

VOCABULARY

mash-lad, cheeky-daft, ruffled, down payment, hire purchase, prising, rammel, duck, allus, daft, nowt, bleddy dead ‘ead, clocked, skipped off, confined, on the dole, knocking on, clubfoot, rounds, draughts, fag-end, aerials, scooting, in the clock of the walk way, sarky, rouge, wireless, bob, hit it off, in the lurch, dresser, fag, five-packet, dished, wry, triplet, out of pop, doddering skinflint, mildewed, feyther, chinning, measly, scuttle, nippy, got the sack, mystified, blackout, shrapnel, picture house, bloke, sexton, potty, booze, pitted, knight

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (film)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (film)

Obituary in The Guardian

Hotel des Boobs, by David Lodge

BIOGRAPHY AND SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

David Lodge (January 28, 1935, London, England) is an English novelist, literary critic, playwright, and editor renowned for his satiric novels about academic life.
Lodge was educated at University College, London, where he got his degree in Literature and where he is an Honorary Fellow.
He travelled to the United States, where he taught, and received his doctorate at the University of Birmingham, where he was professor of Modern English Literature from 1960 to 1987.
He left this university to dedicate entirely to writing.
Lodge is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received numerous honours, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.
His early novels and fiction works go back to 1960, continuing with novels in which the writer satirizes academic life.
Lodge co-authored different plays and moreover produced works dealing in literary theory, essays written for The Washington Post and The Independent, and other books containing essays, lectures, reviews, and a diary.

 

Mentioning some of David Lodge literary works:

The Picturegoers (1960)

Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962)

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)

Out of the Shelter (1970)

How Far Can You Go? (1980)

Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975)

Small World: An Academic Romance (1984)

Nice Work (1988)

Paradise News (1991)

Therapy (1995)

Thinks… (2001)

Deaf Sentence (2008)

Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011) are based on the lives of writers Henry James and H.G. Wells, respectively.

The prolific writer David Lodge lives in Birmingham.

SUMMARY

This story takes place in some French Riviera hotel; Hotel des Pins seems to be its real name.

But some habits there make Harry, one of the guests, propose a different name: Hotel des Boobs.

Harry and Brenda are a British couple on holidays. They have always gone to spend the summer at Brenda’s parents, in Guernsey, with their children. 

This year, the children have already grown independent, and the couple is well off; thus they consider new options, and finally they end up going to a little hotel with swimming pool near St Raphael.

As Harry’s friends have mentioned, and Harry knows somehow, in some areas of the Mediterranean, at that time, women had started to practice topless. But what Harry finds and experiences there is beyond his previous suppositions.

First of all, there is Harry’s strong personal attraction for women’s breasts, since he’s always spending time and thoughts about this part of the female figure.

Already at the hotel, Harry can observe and enjoy more or less discreetly all the women by the swimming pool.

For instance, Harry remains peeping through the window in the couple room, getting Brenda so angry that she sends him down to the pool “to have an inspection” directly there.

Harry begins to characterize all the women at the hotel swimming pool, according to their nationalities, companions and activities while they sunbathe, but manly according to the shape, size, movement or aspect of their breasts. 

Harry carries a book, that in fact he doesn’t read, and a pair of dark sunglasses, the elements he considers useful to disguise his curiosity over topless women, who only avoid using the upper part of their bikinis by the swimming pool, and immediately cover themselves when moving to other areas of the hotel.

Harry entertains various ideas centred in nakedness, for example, what the other men there could feel, that the women would imagine their topless could arouse those other men... At the end, he gets enthusiastic and excited with the idea that Brenda, who has good boobs, should go topless before the holidays ended. The other men could look, but only he would be allowed to touch. Following this strong desire, Harry offers to buy Brenda some beautiful and expensive dress they saw in St Raphael, if she agrees to take her top off.

 

At this point of the story, there is a sudden change: in fact, there is a writer by the swimming pool, under an umbrella, and he is writing about the created couple Harry and Brenda, and about all the others there, the women in topless, the other guests, the waiter, all of them reflected in a pile of written pages.

But suddenly and unexpectedly, the local mistral wind starts to blow causing the written pages to fly all over, fall onto the water, disappear beyond the tall trees…, a true disaster for the writer, who feels violated.

Some of the presents manages to bring back a few pages to the author, and a lady sends her children to run and try and collect more papers.

The author (unknown name) doesn’t want the papers back and goes to his room to wait the return of his wife (unknown name) from St Raphael, where she has bought a nice, although not so expensive, dress.

The husband explains to his wife about the flying parts of the book, and wants to leave the hotel immediately, just in case someone could read what he has told in the lost pages.

His wife doesn’t consider it is a problem, but wants to know what the end of the story would be.

“Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless”, the author says. The wife doesn’t believe it would happen.

The writer then continues telling the end of the story: Brenda doesn’t go to bed with Harry, she disappears for two hours, gets from Antoine the bouquet-prize for the best breasts, goes to his room where they make love, and Brenda considers Antoine much better lover and much better equipped than Harry.

The author's wife says that is the worst ending.

But then the author goes on saying that Brenda has invented that story, that nothing has happened. But Harry remains disturbed thinking Brenda doesn’t appreciate his male attributes and, shaking his head, he gazes at the blue breastless margins of the pool.

Harry’s obsession about women breasts has changed to anxiety about his own body.

Finally, the writer’s wife asks him if he would like her to go topless, and he answers of course not, but he doesn’t sound really sure, or true. 

*

In this story, there are two couples and one story inside another.

Perhaps in some aspects, the writer uses Harry to express his own feelings or preferences.

Perhaps similarities or differences can be found between the four of them. 

The story gives the chance to think about what women breasts signify in different cultures or societies. From naturally exhibited, to denied or hidden. Female breasts as tender and essential for a baby, or charged with sexual attraction. 

At the beginning of topless time, many people considered it totally indecent and didn’t approve or follow the new style.

For some people, to go naked to the beach is an act of freedom and naturalism.

For others, it means discomfort and shame. 

As the psychoanalysts explain, sexuality is a big and unknown mystery for human beings. 

QUESTIONS

-What ideas do you have to stop the “binge tourism”?

-Do you consider disrespectful / offensive / sexist / anachronistic the beginning of the story?

-Do you think nakedness is sexy only according to the situation?

-“May a cat look at a king?” I mean, can a gaze / stare be bothering? Do you have to ask permission to look at someone / something?

-The writer is telling his wife the story he’s going to write, so what is the difference between a story casually told and a work of art?

 

 

VOCABULARY

Peeping Tom, squint, Geddit, Knockers, were... off, pricey, extravagant, filched, weaned, pore, snooty, tubby, lathe, belied, matey, foolscap, wont, Schadenfreude, longhand, mistral, Paperchase, hard-on

A Family Supper, by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on the 8th of November 1954. He went to live in Great Britain in 1960, when his father began to research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. As a boy, Kazuo enjoyed television, Westerns and spy stories, and wrote easily without entertaining any serious ambition of becoming a writer.

The great creative awakening of his adolescence came at the age of 13, when he discovered the songs of Bob Dylan. He spent the next years learning to play guitar, writing songs and studying the work of Dylan, Cohen... and other singer-songwriters of the time. After graduating in 1973, he took a year off to travel around the United States and Canada, and to make the round of record companies with demos of his songs, but these efforts were unsuccessful.

Although he still planned a career in music, Ishiguro studied literature and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating, he moved to London. He supported himself by working in a homeless shelter in Notting Hill. While working at the shelter, he also met a young social worker, Lorna MacDougall. They fell in love and married in 1986.

Early novels

Ishiguro went to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in England. He began writing full-time following the success of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which it is a first-person narrative of a Japanese widow living in England.  Ishiguro’s next novel was An Artist of the Floating World (1986). These two novels reflected on life and culture in post-World War II in Japan. However, for his next novel, he wanted to write for an international audience. So he chose an iconic British character known throughout the world: the English butler. The themes of guilt and regret are seen in the butler’s lost chance for love in The Remains of the Day (1989). This novel won the Booker Prize for fiction (1989), a prize dedicated to the best novel published in the United Kingdom and written in English. The novel was adapted to a film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. 

 

Later Work

Ishiguro continued to experiment with different genres and styles in his subsequent novels, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000). Taking the leap to science fiction, Ishiguro wrote a tale about genetic engineering and human cloning in Never Let Me Go (2005). Although he’s best known for his novels, Ishiguro has also published a collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), and several screenplays, as The White Countess (2005).

His most recent book, The Summer We Crossed Europe in The Rain (March 2024), is a collection of lyrics written for the jazz singer Stacey Kent. Ishiguro and Kent have been friends and collaborators for a long time, and he wrote lyrics for a handful of songs on Kent’s Breakfast on the Morning Tram.

Ishiguro has won many awards, perhaps most notably the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he is a British citizen and lives in London with his wife and his daughter Naomi, who is also an author and published the book Escape Routes.

 

SUMMARY

This is the story of a Japanese family. The protagonist is a young man who returns to Tokyo from California to visit his father and his sister, Kikuko. At the beginning, the protagonist describes “Fugu”, a type of poisonous fish and its dangerous properties, if you don’t prepare it correctly. He tells us how his mother died two years ago because she ate “Fugu” prepared by a friend. When his mother died, he was living in California and he didn’t attend the funeral.

The son’s father picks him up from the airport and tells him the circumstances in which his mother died. His father is a very intimidating man, and he is proud of the pure samurai blood that runs in his family. He is a man who values a traditional family and is very strict. He and his son don’t have a good relationship; for this reason, the son did not return to his country until two years after his mother’s death. While they are waiting for the arrival of Kikuko, they talk a little about his father’s business partner, Watanaba, who killed himself and his family after the firm’s collapse, because he didn’t wish to live with the disgrace.

Soon after, Kikuko arrives. She is a student in Osaka. Despite the fact that the brother is much older, the siblings had always been close. They decide to go for a walk in the garden, while their father prepares the supper. Kikuko smokes a cigarette and tells him about her boyfriend and his plans for them to hitch-hike in America; she also tells him that their mother always blamed herself for him leaving Japan, that she thought she hadn’t raised him correctly. They have an open conversation, talking about their lives, childhood and recalling events like when he thought there was a ghost living in the garden near the well.

After this, the father calls Kikuko into the kitchen and tells her to help him with the final preparations of the supper. Then the father takes his son to another room to discuss his regrets about how he raised his children and how he should have been a more attentive father.

When the food is ready, the father encourages the son to eat a lot of the fish that he and Kikuko have prepared. During the meal, the son discovers a photograph on the wall with an old woman in a white kimono. His father reveals that it’s their mother, who resembles the ghost he used to see when he was younger. After the meal, Kikuko prepares some tea while the son and his father speak about the son’s future plans.

The story ends with a peaceful supper and a serious dialogue. The father expresses his hope that his children will come back home to live with him.

 

Some Reflections

It is possible that the father has made a decision: to repeat his partner’s actions. Perhaps he realizes that he could no longer manage the situation and decides to commit a form of suicide, and his children don’t know anything about it.

I think that the author wants to show how rebellion is an escape from social conventions and family expectations. Japanese culture puts a lot of pressure on children. They are usually raised very strictly, and we begin to understand why the protagonist left Japan and his family. Now his younger sister intends to do the same as her brother did in the past.

 

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about the poisonous fish “aranya” they fish in Blanes?

-What do you think it happened to the protagonist’s mother?

-What is it for you, the “honour”? Was Watanabe a man of principle? What is your opinion of the celebrated sentence “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.”?

-In your view, what was the ghost in the well or in the garden?

-According to your opinion, why did the son go back to Japan?

-What is the meaning of the mother’s picture in the story?

-What do you think it’s going to happen after supper? Why?

 

VOCABULARY

gutting, haunted, swayed, giggle

Analysis