Why Be Happy, When You Can Be Normal, by Jeanette Winterson

The writer presents her book in a video

Mercedes Cebrián interviews Jeanette Winterson (video)

Conversation with Bel Olid (video)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (film)

BIOGRAPHY

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and was adopted by a very religious family.

At 16, she discovered she was a lesbian and left home.

Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel, tells us her experiences of her childhood and adolescence in this family. (There’s an adaptation of this book for the television.)

She got a job as an assistant editor for a feminist publisher.

Besides writing and editing, she refurbished a house in Spitalfields, and there she opened an organic food shop.

Other books of hers are The Passion, set in the Napoleonic period, and The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 witch trials in Lancashire.

She had a relation with Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s wife, but it didn’t last, and Pat went back to her husband.

 

INTRODUCTION. The Wrong Crib.

This first chapter of Why Be Happy... is a sort of introduction to the book and presents some questions that are going to appear along the narrative: her adoption, religion, lesbianism, literature, feminism, parental and filial love. But sometimes you think it’s a kind of revenge against her foster parents, especially her foster mother, an authoritarian person obsessed with the biblical religion.

But all in all, the story is about the research of the protagonist’s biological parents and her own identity. And also trying to discover why she was an adopted girl: was she a desired child, was she given in adoption because her mother didn’t have any money? Because she was very young? Because was the fruit of a non-consented relation? But it seems there was another child to be adopted: why was she the chosen one?

She starts telling us she wrote Oranges and that when Mrs Winterson (her foster mother) finds out she got very angry. Jeanette now describes her appearance and personality: a tall, big woman with a paranoic obsession with religion and strict morality. But she has other peculiarities apart from going to church almost every day: she never sleeps with her husband, she keeps a pistol in a drawer, she believes in spirits…

And Jeanette herself is a very singular creature: she can be violent, she deceives her friends, she keeps a part from the rest of schoolmates, she likes reading…

 

And in the next chapters she is going to tell us how she learnt English Literature reading all the books of the library in alphabetical order, how she bought second hand books, and she had to hide them, how Mrs Winterson found them and burned them, and thus she decided to write her own, why she left her home at sixteen, how she earned some money working in a market, how she lived in a Mini, how she felt in love with a she-schoolmate, what were the working-class lives like under Margaret Thatcher, what were her opinions about her, how her Literature teacher took in her house, how she could go to Oxford to study Literature…

What kind of people were Mr and Mrs Winterson, what kind of relationship they had, why they didn’t sleep together, what kind of religion was the Pentecostal church, what kind of books she read…

There are also very interesting remarks about literature: i.e., people who read King James’s Bible could understand more easily Shakespeare because they were written in the same 17^th century English.

But the big part of the story is the research and finally, after a long process and innumerable bureaucratic hurdles, finding out who her mother was, meeting her and tying to accommodate herself with her new relatives.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Do you think there’s always something missing in an adopted child?

-What would you say if a writer used your person as a character for a novel?

-What is for you to be “normal”?

-What can you tell about the story of Philomel?

-The narrator mention “stammering” when you have had a kind of trauma. What do you know about the causes of stammering?

-What can you tell us about these films: Secrets and Lies, by Mike Leigh, and Rosemary’s Baby, by Roman Polanski?

 

 

VOCABULARY

crib, McCarthyism, flare, Pentecostal, bare-knuckle fighter, copperplate, be borne up on the shoulders, duffel-coat. Shift, cover story, flash-dash, terraced house, tick-box, catapult, misfit, forensically, shot, Philomel, blotted, vale, thug, seances, poodle, larder, cap-gun

Carmina Burana, by Several Poets

Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff

Carmina Burana (“Songs of Burana”) is a collection of medieval poetry. It’s the largest and most varied surviving anthology of medieval Latin poetry. The poems belong to the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. They were written mostly in Latin, although some ones are in German because the manuscript was found in Bavaria, in a Benedictine monastery, Benedickbeuern, “Benedictoburanum” in Latin. The poems are about love, sex, gaming and drinking in taverns, and they are bawdy, anticlerical, satirical and irreverent.

They were written mostly by goliards, that is, clergy students that had abandoned the seminar and went travelling around Europe reciting their poems. The word “goliard” seems to come from Goliath, and so meant something bad, or the devil. Some sources say that they were Abelard students. Abelard was a philosopher, poet and theologian, famous for his romantic affair with the nun Heloïse. They had a child, although they supposed to be celibates, and the result of this conflict was that Abelard was castrated by her uncle. A good definition of “goliard” is “a drop-out and spoiled priest gone wild.”

So the goliards were a kind of entertaining travellers, and, contrasting with the troubadours, (who, by the way, wrote in a vernacular language), they praised the physical love.
These were the centuries when the first universities were being built, when reading silently for oneself and without moving the lips (an accomplishment of Saint Jerome which impressed his fourth century admirers) was a growing skill. Latin was an international language, and students used to travel not only to earn their living or to enjoy the life, but in search of teachers and their theories.
However, the Carmina Burana collection wasn’t found until 1803 and published in 1847.
It consists of songs of morals and mockery, love songs, songs of drinking and gaming and two spiritual theatre pieces.
Carl Orff created a musical composition based on some of these poems.
Only a few authors are known:
Hugh of Orléans (1093-1160). He spent his life roaming France. His nickname was Primas because they say he was a master of poetry.
Peter of Blois (1135-1212). He was the secretary of Henry II of England. He taught English in Paris and was Archdeacon of Bath.
Walter de Châtillon (1135-1204). He worked for Henry II and was secretary of the Archbishop of Rheims. He also worked as a teacher in Châtillon.
And a poet called the Archpoet, patronized as Poet Laureate by Rainard of Dassel (♰1165), Chancellor of Frederick I, aka Barbarossa. They say he was the coughing ghost because the word “cough” appears in some of his poems, and we don’t know anything else of him.
Abelard (1079-1142) wrote some poems in his youth, but we don’t know if some of the Carmina Burana poems are his.

Two poems translated from Latin into English by David Parlett

O Fortuna 

O how Fortune, 

inopportune, 

apes the moon's inconstancy: 

waxing, waning, 

losing, gaining, 

life treats us detestably: 

first oppressing 

then caressing 

shifts us like pawns in her play: 

destitution, 

restitution, 

mixes and melts them away. 

Fate, as vicious 

as capricious, 

whirling your merry-go-round: 

evil doings, 

worthless wooings, 

crumble away to the ground: 

darkly stealing, 

unrevealing, 

working against me you go: 

for your measure 

of foul pleasure 

I bare my back to your blow. 

Noble actions, 

true transactions, 

no longer fall to my lot: 

powers to make me 

then to break me 

all play their part in your plot: 

now seize your time — 

waste no more time, 

pluck these poor strings and let go: 

since the strongest 

fall the longest 

let the world share in my woe.

In taberna quando sumus 

In the tavern when we're drinking, 

though the ground be cold and stinking, 

down we go and join the action 

with the dice and gaming faction. 

What goes on inside the salon 

where it's strictly cash per gallon 

if you'd like to know, sir, well you 

shut your mouth and I shall tell you.

Some are drinking, some are playing, 

some their vulgar side displaying: 

most of those who like to gamble 

wind up naked in the scramble; 

some emerge attired in new things, 

some in bits and bobs and shoestrings: 

no one thinks he'll kick the bucket 

dicing for a beery ducat.

 

First to those who pay for wallowing, 

then we layabouts toast the following: 

next we drink to all held captive, 

thirdly drink to those still active, 

fourthly drink to the Christian-hearted, 

fifthly drink to the dear departed, 

sixthly to our free-and-easy sisters, 

seventhly to all out-of-work enlisters.

Eighthly drink to friars deconverted, 

ninthly, monks from monast'ries diverted, 

tenthly, sailors of the oceans, 

eleventhly, louts who cause commotions, 

twelfthly, those who wear the penitential, 

thirteenth, and whose journey is essential — 

to this fat pope, to that thin king — 

who the hell cares why they're drinking!

Drinking tinker, drinking tailor, 

drinking soldier, drinking sailor, 

drinking rich man, drinking poor man, 

drinking beggarman, thief and lawman, 

drinking servant, drinking master, 

drinking mistress, drinking pastor, 

drinking doctor, drinking layman, 

drinking drunkard, drinking drayman: 

Drinking rude man, drinking proper, 

drinking tiddler, drinking whopper, 

drinking scholar, drinking gypsy, 

drinking drunk or maudlin tipsy, 

drinking father, drinking mother, 

drinking sister, drinking brother, 

drinking husbands, wives and lovers

and a hundred thousand others — 

Half a million pounds would never 

pay for all we drink together: 

for we drink beyond all measure, 

purely for the sake of pleasure: 

thus you see us, poor and shoddy, 

criticized by everybody —  

God grant that they be confounded 

when at last the trump is sounded!

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

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