Dossier curs 2014 2015

English Book Club Dossier del curs 2014 - 2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc Montgat

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

READING SCHEDULE 2014 - 2015 DATES

AUTHOR

TITLE

September 5th

First meeting

October 10th

Coetzee, J.M.

Summertime: scenes from provincial life

November 14th

Auster, Paul

Sunset Park

December 12th

Fitzgerald, F. S.

The great Gatsby

January 9th

Articles

February 13th

Tóibín, Colm

The master

March 13th

Roy, Arundhati

The Good of small things

April 10th

Hemingway, Ernest

The old man and the sea

May 8th

Nafisi, Azar

Reading Lolita in Teheran: a memoir…

June 12th

Atwood, Margaret

Moral disorder

-2-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Summertime: scenes from provincial life

COETZEE, J. M.

BIOGRAPHY John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the elder of two children. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941–45 he served with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy. Though Coetzee's parents were not of British descent, the language spoken at home was English.

Coetzee received his primary schooling in Cape Town and in the nearby town of Worcester. For his secondary education he attended a school in Cape Town run by a Catholic order, the Marist Brothers. He matriculated in 1956.

Coetzee entered the University of Cape Town in 1957, and in 1960 and 1961 graduated successively with honours degrees in English and mathematics. He spent the years 1962–65 in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.

In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939–1991). They had two children, Nicolas (1966–1989) and Gisela (b. 1968).

In 1965 Coetzee entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1968 graduated with a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

For three years (1968–71) Coetzee was assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After an application for permanent residence in the United States was denied, he returned to South Africa. From 1972 until 2000 he held a series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last of them as Distinguished Professor of Literature.

Between 1984 and 2003 he also taught frequently in the United States: at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought.

-3-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969. His first book, Dusklands, was published in South Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa's then principal literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the USA. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which won Britain's Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), which again won the Booker Prize.

Coetzee also wrote two fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002).

The Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello (2003). White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture.

Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later literary essays.

Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.

In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide

SUMMERTIME: SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE Here for the first time in one volume is JM Coetzee's majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime.

Scenes from Provincial Life opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s.

We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother's unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils, especially the rough Afrikaners. As a student of mathematics in Cape Town he readies himself to escape his homeland, travel to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting: he toils as a computer programmer, inhabits a series of damp, dreary flats and is haunted by loneliness and boredom. He is a constitutional outsider. He fails to write.

Decades later, an English biographer researches a book about the late John Coetzee, particularly the period following his return to South Africa from America.

Interviewees describe an awkward man still living with his father, a man who insists on performing dull manual labour. His family regard him with suspicion and he is dogged by rumours: that he crossed the authorities in America, that he writes poetry.

Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.(less) JM Coetzee wraps up his fictionalised memoir trilogy by depicting 'himself' as a misfit

Reviewed by James Urquhart In JM Coetzee's latest work, an Englishman named Vincent is writing a biography of the great South African writer John Coetzee. Summertime is a series of interviews and

-4-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

fragmented, annotated entries from John Coetzee's journal that could pass as an outline draft for what Mr Vincent admits will be an "obscure book", focusing on the years 19721977, when the subject was in his thirties.

Describing Coetzee as a "fictioneer", Vincent largely dismisses any evidence that might be gleaned from the writer's published works (which are variously name-checked) for consideration in his biography. His preference is to track down old acquaintances of Coetzee's, purportedly seeking the anecdotal human angle that seems to be absent from the man's opaque literature. The interviewees generally remain suspicious of this approach, and slightly baffled; since most of Coetzee's peers have by now died, Vincent's collated result is always destined to be highly partial.

What we know of Coetzee's situation leaks out in contextual notes and asides, gradually pooling into a grey reflection of a diminished life. After a mediocre academic career that ended when he was expelled from America, Coetzee returned to part-time, lowlevel teaching in Cape Town, where he lives with his ailing father, a debarred attorney, in a shabby house he is slowly renovating, petulantly claiming that his manual labour is in part to break the South African taboo of whites undertaking "Kaffir" work. His liberal but timid opinions and unkempt physical appearance conspire to amplify his social awkwardness.

Of far more interest than John Coetzee's scratchy existence are the tales told by the interviewees of their relations with him. Julia, a neighbouring bored housewife, falls into an affair with him that she sums up as lacking all sexual thrill. His cousin Margot, a childhood sweetheart, is forced to pass the night with him after his truck breaks down in the veldt; while Adriana, the fiery Brazilian mother of one of John's students, finds herself petitioned with love letters from him after a disastrously misconstrued picnic. "Perhaps this is how these Dutch protestants behave when they fall in love," she exclaims: "prudently, longwindedly, without fire, without grace."

All the testimonies converge on the idea of John Coetzee as a misfit, estranged from love, socially inept, unresponsive and possessed of a sexual autism that might, it is implied, derive from the emotional neutering of a Dutch Calvinist upbringing. In JM Coetzee's deft prose, John's weaknesses and inability to open himself up to people – to confess what is in his heart – is strongly resonant of South Africa's national isolation and staunch denial of history in that restless apartheid period.

Billed as the third instalment of a trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood, these "scenes from provincial life" are evocative rather than literal, the impressionistic testimonies forming a stylised work far removed from the conventional nuts and bolts of a curated life. JM Coetzee flourishes within this ambiguous literary distancing, which he used to great effect in his last novel, Diary of a Bad Year, whose subject was also a crotchety old writer and Coetzee cipher.

How far the reader wants to map the somewhat wintry lament of Summertime back on to JM Coetzee's life depends on how far one is willing to extrapolate plausible fact from nuanced, many-layered fiction. What Summertime offers is a subtle, allusive meditation: an intriguing map of a weak character's constricted heart struggling against the undertow of suspicion within South Africa's claustrophobic, unpoetic, overtly macho society.

-5-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

ENLLAร OS:

Enllaรง: Reading Guide http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee/

-6-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

AUSTER, Paul

Sunset Park BIOGRAPHY Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey on 3 February 1947. He is a contemporary American novelist of Jewish origin. His father, Samuel Auster, was a landlord, who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City. His mother, Queenie Auster, was some 13 years younger than her husband. The family was middleclass, the parents' marriage an unhappy one.

Queenie had realized, even before the end of the honeymoon, that the marriage had been a mistake, but her pregnancy made escape impossible.

Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. When he was 3½ years old, a younger sister was born. By the time she was five, her psychological instability was becoming apparent, and in later years she would be debilitated by mental breakdowns. Auster, meanwhile, began to feel, as he discloses in his memoir Hand to Mouth, like "an internal émigré, an exile in my own house."

In 1959 his parents bought a large Tudor house in their town's most prestigious neighborhood. It was here that Auster's uncle, the skilled translator Allen Mandelbaum, left several boxes of books in storage while he traveled to Europe. The young Auster read the books enthusiastically, and his developing interest in writing and in literature further accentuated his sense of separation from his parents. Auster further benefited from Mandelbaum's proximity when he began writing poems as a teenager: "He was very hard on me, very strict, very good," Auster recounted in a Publishers Weekly interview.

Auster attended high school in Maplewood, some 20 miles southwest of New York City. Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, Paris, and, in homage to James Joyce, Dublin. While he traveled he worked on a novel he had begun in the spring.

He returned to the United States in time to start at Columbia University in the fall.

In 1967 Auster again left the USA to attend Columbia's Junior Year Abroad in Paris.

Disillusioned by the program's routine, undemanding academic requirements, Auster quit college and lived until mid-November in a small hotel on the rue Clément. When he returned to New York, a sympathetic dean reinstated him at Columbia.

A high lottery number saved Auster from having to worry about the Vietnam draft, and instead of pursuing a Ph.D. he took a job with the Census Bureau. During this period

-7-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

he also began work on the novels In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace , which he would not complete until many years later.

On 6 October 1974, Auster married Lydia Davis but this marriage should fail.

Auster and Davis worked on book translations—most of them, with the exception of a Jean-Paul Sartre collection titled Life/Situations, exceedingly pedestrian. Auster worked on two more poetic sequences, Wall Writing and Disappearances, and contributed reviews and essays to the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Harper's, and elsewhere.

On 14 January 1979, the morning after he had completed White Spaces, one of Auster's uncles phoned to say that Auster's father had died during the night. The inheritance that Auster received, though by no means enormous, was instrumental in the continuation of his career. Auster explained to McCaffery and Gregory that "for the first time in my life I had the time to write, to take on long projects without worrying about how I was going to pay the rent."

Auster's final original collection of poetry, Facing the Music, was published in 1980

by Station Hill Press. The same year—as well as the same publisher—saw the publication of Auster's prose work White Spaces. Auster had by now completed Portrait of an Invisible Man—an extended meditation on his father's death that would form the first half of The Invention of Solitude—and during 1980 he would begin work on Invention's second half, The Book of Memory. What Auster would later call the "uni-vocal expression" of his poems was beginning to give way to the self-contradictory expression of prose, and the poet was on the verge of transforming himself into a novelist.

By early 1980 Auster had moved from his dismal lodgings on Varick Street to an apartment in Brooklyn. There he worked on The Book of Memory and on a bilingual anthology titled The Random House Book of Twentieth Century-French Poetry. It was here that a pair of wrong-number phone calls intended for the Pinkerton Agency planted the seed that would become City of Glass.

On 23 February 1981 Auster attended a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. There he met Siri Hustvedt, a tall woman of Norwegian ancestry, born in Minnesota in 1955.

Auster and Hustvedt very quickly fell in love and were married on Bloomsday.

In 1986 Auster had taken on a position as lecturer at Princeton University—a post he would continue to hold until 1990.

Next to the taut structures of his previous novels, Moon Palace, published in 1989, seemed like one of the "large loose baggy monsters" that Henry James referred to in his introduction to The Tragic Muse. Despite its comparative bulk and wandering narrative, Auster's "Bildungsroman" was held together by a complex web of associations linking the personal development of its protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, with the movement of American history. When the critical history of Auster's oeuvre has at last been written, it may be Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" that provides the best explication of Moon Palace.

By this time, Auster and Hustvedt were living in an apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and Auster's writing was done in a studio about a block away.

-8-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

The couple now had a daughter, Sophie, and Hustvedt's name was filtering into the periphery of the literary world's vision with published fragments of the novel that would become The Blindfold and her 1987 translation, in collaboration with David McDuff, of Norwegian scholar Geir Kjetsaa's biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Auster's 1990 novel, The Music of Chance, developed the basic motif of his failed Laurel and Hardy play.

The novel proved an unexpected challenge to write, and underwent major changes while in progress. Auster finished The Music of Chance, his novel about men building a wall, on 9 November 1989—the same day the Berlin Wall fell.

The Music of Chance, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award the year after its publication, attracted the interest of several people in the movie industry.

Auster's involvement with film, though, had not lessened his commitment to his primary craft. By the time Smoke and Blue in the Face were released (in June and October 1995, respectively), Auster had published two more novels. Leviathan, written just before he started work on the Smoke screenplay, and published in 1992, proved to be a complex, involuted novel of ideas—the most sophisticated fiction Auster had constructed in the expansive mode he had adopted with Moon Palace . Mr. Vertigo, published in 1994, was fatally marred by the constant stream of implausibly cartoonish smart-talk issuing from the mouth of its protagonist, but sporadically, and against all odds, rose to magical heights as it described that same character's experience of levitation.

As Auster became increasingly involved with film, an event that could have sprung from the pages of his fiction resurrected a lost piece of his past. In 1976 Auster had translated a book by the deceased French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. The Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians painted the picture of a small Paraguayan tribe at the edge of extinction. Auster held the book in much higher regard than many of the academic works he and Lydia Davis had translated, and duly submitted the manuscript to its intended publishers. The book was never published, the publishing house folded, and the galleys were thought to be lost forever—and, in those days, Auster was much too poor to have allowed himself the luxury of a photocopy. Twenty years later, in late 1996, a young bibliophile attending an Auster lecture in San Francisco laid a set of bound galleys before the astonished Auster; he had picked up this unique find in a secondhand bookstore for five dollars. The translation was at last published by Zone Books in 1998.

SUNSET PARK Reviewed by Arifa Akbar Friday 29 October 2010 I think my old man cycle is over," Paul Auster reflected last year, on the publication of Invisible. Its twentysomething protagonist marked a departure from Auster's recent wave of old, doleful male characters. Sunset Park continues on this youthful trajectory, featuring four middle-class friends stranded in early adulthood in the present, post-credit crunch era, and squatting in a dowdy end of Brooklyn.

-9-

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Their lives do not trace the innocence of youth, as Adam Walker's did in Invisible, but the stinging disappointments and unrealised ambitions of their tender age. Miles Heller is the son of a New York publisher earning his keep as a "trash-out" worker on foreclosed homes in Florida to escape his dark past. Bing Nathan is lonely, overweight and sexually confused. Ellen Brice's vocation as an artist is derailed by having to earn a living as a realestate agent, and Alice Bergstrom is a doctoral student struggling to accept the compromises in her once vigorous relationship.

Yet there is something profoundly jarring in the book's tone. Even as the characters are shown attempting to kick-start their adult lives, their stories – written in the present tense for amplified immediacy - appear to be narrated by someone assuming a youthful ventriloquism, but not quite pulling it off. Miles's illegal love of his girlfriend, Pilar Sanchez, who has not yet reached the age of consent, is the most problematic. While it sees him fleeing Florida for fear of being caught and imprisoned, their love is presented as equal and upstanding. She might only be a high-school student but she is terribly mature for her age, the reader is repeatedly told.

However, when Miles first sees this beautiful young stranger sitting in a park, he describes his stirrings in the leering tone of a modern Humbert Humbert meeting his Lolita: "He guessed that she was even younger than sixteen, just a girl, really, and a little girl at that, a small adolescent girl wearing tight, cut-off shorts, sandals, and a skimpy halter top...No more than a baby, he said to himself." It is courageous of Auster to grapple with the disjuncture between how the world might view their illicit love and how it is felt, between them, to be wholesome.

In some ways, this follows on from his emotional investigations of illicit love in the form of incest in Invisible, when Adam embarks on a sexual relationship with his sister, Gwyn - again described in guilt-free terms.

Sadly, none of the relationships in Sunset Park is investigated in their full psychological complexity. Auster seems satisfied to stop at legitimising Miles and Pilar, and outlining the free-floating and experimental nature of youthful sexuality, rather than delving further.

Just as Auster's 2005 picaresque novel, Brooklyn Follies, captured the intersecting lives of a neighbourhood in the more affluent district of Park Slope, this novel offers another slice of Brooklyn life from the more diverse socio-economic district of Sunset Park.

It stands accused of similar simplifications, particularly in its presentation of ethnic difference. Pilar's Cuban family consists of a brood of siblings with a domineering oldest sister at its helm; a bus ride across America clarifies the country to be a place of the "wheezing black woman, a sniffing Indian or Pakistani man, a bony, throat-clearing white woman of eighty and a coughing German tourist". Yet the multiculturalism is barely fleshed out beyond the briefest of pen-portraits.

Most disappointingly, Auster's writing appears bland, even clumsy, at times: "Baseball is a universe as large as life itself", he writes in one forced metaphor, "and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain." Miles's fate is summed up in over-familiar language: "Just another roll of the dice, then, another lottery pick scooped out of the black metal urn, another fluke in a world of flukes and endless mayhem."

- 10 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Ellen's ruminations on life and art, meanwhile, verge on the facile: "The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait." We end up caring about the lives of the four central characters enough to want to know their outcome, but it is a shame they appear to have been so hastily imagined.

ENLLAÇOS: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/10498346/Paul-Austerinterview-Theres-nothing-I-feel-humiliated-by.html http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/nov/06/paul-auster-sunset-park-review https://www.facebook.com/auster.paul

- 11 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

FITZGERALD, F. S.

The great Gatsby BIOGRAPHY F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first novel's success made him famous and let him marry the woman he loved, but he later descended into drinking and his wife had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.

Early Life F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that had made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble that took his family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York during the first decade of Fitzgerald's life. However, Edward Fitzgerald lost his job with Procter & Gamble in 1908, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, and the family moved back to St. Paul to live off of his mother's inheritance.

Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and ambitious boy, the pride and joy of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine. However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. Though the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, - 12 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met and fell in love with a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince Zelda to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

'The Great Gatsby' and Other Career Breakthoughs The novel's new incarnation, This Side of Paradise, a largely autobiographical story about love and greed, was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families. The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews and, almost overnight, turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. One week after the novel's publication, he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921.

F. Scott Fitzgerald eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer. Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles."

In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and the Damned helped to cement his status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s—what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire."

Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924, Fitzgerald moved to France, and it was there, in Valescure, that Fitzgerald wrote what would be credited as his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves into the town of West Egg on Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. The novel follows Nick and Gatsby's strange friendship and Gatsby's pursuit of a married woman named Daisy, ultimately leading to his exposure as a bootlegger and his death.

With its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream, The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work. Although the book was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

- 13 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Final Years After he completed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. His wife, Zelda, also suffered from mental health issues, and the couple spent the late 1920s moving back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, she was briefly committed to a mental-health clinic in Switzerland, and, after the Fitzgeralds returned to the United States in 1931, she suffered another breakdown and subsequently entered the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great American novels.

After another two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts. He began work on another novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939, and he had completed over half the manuscript when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. None of his works received anything more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime. However, since his death, Fitzgerald has gained a reputation as one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby went on to become required reading for virtually every American high school student, and has had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

THE GREAT GATSBY

"The Great Gatsby" is a 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald set amongst the wealthy elite of Long Island, New York. The novel is one of the most famous and iconic novels of the era, and is one of the best descriptions of the fashions, the morals and the lives of young wealthy people in the 1920s.

"The Great Gatsby" centres on the eponymous Jay Gatsby, a mysterious figure living in West Egg. Gatsby throws elaborate parties, although remains unseen until midway through the novel, at which point he reveals a dramatic truth to the narrator, Nick Carraway. A series of events intrinsically link Nick, Gatsby and Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan. Through Nick's horrified narration, the vanity, selfishness and artificiality of 'Jazz Age' America is exposed, culminating in a tragic and pitiful ending for almost all the

- 14 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

characters. The novel is one of the most damning critiques of the seemingly glamorous aspects of the Roaring Twenties.

Historical Context

‘The Great Gatsby’ is set amongst the opulence and decadence of 1920s America.

Fitzgerald described the period as ‘the Jazz Age’, and was the most famous chronicler in what was one of the most interesting periods in American history. The banning (or ‘prohibition’) of alcohol in 1919 under the Volstead Act had created a situation where bootleggers and illegal alcohol were common, and criminals became celebrities, and extremely wealthy in the process. In addition to this, the economic boom in the United States that followed the First World War brought prosperity to a new generation of Americans. In addition, the horrors of the War meant that young Americans began to throw parties to distract themselves from many of the difficulties in the world.

The American Dream was an important idea in the United States. It was based on the belief that, unlike in Europe, an individual’s background and status was less important than his future. It was felt that with hard work and dedication, wealth was available to anyone. The 1920s saw the rise of consumerism in the United States, as people began to enjoy demonstrating their wealth. For ordinary Americans, this meant buying goods such as radios (often on credit), and for rich Americans, this involved throwing opulent parties, wearing expensive clothes, and driving the newest cars.

Fitzgerald based many of the events and characters in ‘the Great Gatsby’ on his own life, and one of his most damning critiques of the era is that while the parties were exuberant, and the money (and drink) flowed freely, there was little substance behind the style. In the conflict between East and West Egg, the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ money is highlighted. This was a key feature of high society in the 1920s, as the newly wealthy class of entrepreneurs and businessman were buying their entry into the social - 15 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

elites. The contrast between the ‘class’ of the old money and the ‘gaudiness’ of new money is clear to be seen in Gatsby’s life.

Plot Summary

‘The Great Gatsby’ is centred on the life of Nick Carraway, from Minnesota in the American Midwest. Nick is a recent graduate of Yale University, and in the summer of 1922 is sent to New York to learn about bonds. He rents a home in West Egg, part of New York State that is home to a number of the ‘new rich’, a class of people who have newly made their money, and who like to display their wealth by throwing elaborate parties. Nick’s neighbour in West Egg is a mysterious character called Jay Gatsby, who throws the biggest parties in the area, although very few people actually know anything about him.

Because of Nick’s university connections, he has a number of friends in neighbouring East Egg, part of Long Island that is home to the ‘old money’ class, who have been wealthy for generations. Nick travels to East Egg to visit his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, who studied with Nick at Yale. While dining there, he meets Jordan Baker, who has a sharp wit that attracts Nick. They begin a relationship. Jordan gives Nick an insight into the life of Tom and Daisy. She tells Nick that Tom has a mistress called Myrtle in a poor area of New York. Soon after, Tom takes Nick to New York to an apartment he has for his affair. Whilst there, Nick, Tom and Myrtle hold an impromptu party (in direct contrast to the organised, elaborate parties in West Egg). Myrtle drinks too much whisky and begins taunting Tom about Daisy. Tom snaps and breaks Myrtle’s nose.

Halfway through the novel, Nick receives an invite to a party held by Jay Gatsby.

Although it is not clear at the start of the party whether Gatsby is there, Nick and Jordan eventually meet him. Nick is surprised by how young Gatsby is, and says that he talks with a fake English accent (a sign that Gatsby wanted to sound cultured and educated).

- 16 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, and asks tells her that he is in love with Daisy, and that he knew her from Louisville in 1917. He says that he has been throwing his parties as an attempt to impress Daisy, and that he stares at night at the green light that shines at the end of her dock. Gatsby wants Nick to arrange a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy, although asks for secrecy, as he is worried that Daisy will not come. Nick obliges, and invites Daisy for tea (without telling her that Gatsby will also be there). Gatsby and Daisy are initially cold towards one another, although eventually they begin an affair.

Tom slowly realises that Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair, and sets up a confrontation with Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel in New York. He tells Gatsby that Daisy and he have a real history, and that Gatsby could never recreate that. He also tells Daisy that Gatsby has made his money from bootlegging alcohol, and is therefore a criminal. Daisy realises that her future lies with Tom, and drives back to East Egg (although with Gatsby).

While driving through ‘the Valley of the Ashes’ Gatsby’s car hits and kills Myrtle. When Nick asks Gatsby about his, he finds that Daisy was the driver, although that Gatsby will take the blame. Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver. George comes to Gatsby’s mansion, where he finds Gatsby in the pool. He shoots and kills Gatsby, and then commits suicide. Nick holds a small funeral for Gatsby, and then moves back to the Midwest, leaving Jordan behind. Nick is repulsed by the greed and vanity of New York, and the novel ends on his reflection of the ‘Jazz Age’.

ENLLAÇOS: http://www.metopera.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=47 http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/f_scott_fitzgerald.html http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gatsby/

- 17 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

TÓIBÍN, Colm

The master BIOGRAPHY Irish author Colm Tóibín is famous for literary works about Irish society, creativity and homosexuality. His most popular novels include The Blackwater Lightship and The Master.

Irish writer Colm Tóibín, born in 1955, worked as a journalist before achieving fame as a fiction writer. His works often depict Irish society and explore themes of creativity and homosexuality. His most famous novels include The Blackwater Lightship and The Master.

Profile Writer. Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. The second youngest of five children, Colm Tóibín graduated from University College in Dublin in 1975. He then headed to Barcelona, the city that later inspired his first novel, The South, and the nonfiction work Homage to Barcelona, both published in 1990. During the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, first in Ireland and then in Argentina, the Sudan and Egypt.

Colm Tóibín's works often depict Irish society. He is the author of several works of fiction, including The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999), which was on the short list for the Booker Prize. The New York Times named his 2004 novel, The Master, one of the 10 most notable books of the year.

Colm Tóibín published his first collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, in 2006. Non-fiction books include Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He continues to work as a novelist, journalist, literary critic and university lecturer.

THE MASTER The great pretender/ The Guardian, Saturday 20 March 2004 Herminone Lee This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book. I started it in a state of distrust, and ended it absorbed and moved. How dare Colm Tóibín, for all his great gifts as a novelist (I began by thinking) have the chutzpah to pretend to be Henry James, to

- 18 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

know what he thought, to make up his life? My biographical scruples were doing battle with fictional licence. Biographers don't, on the whole (unless they're Peter Ackroyd) invent their subject's conversations, or take their clothes off and put them into bed, or fantasise their secret memories and unacted desires. Biographers (if they have any decency) don't freely paraphrase their subject's writings, or quote from their letters without footnotes. But novelists are allowed to make free. Tóibín has created his own invention, with remarkable boldness and subtlety, out of the life of "The Master", as Henry James was often called: a title which nicely combines James's achievement and reputation, his control over his own life, and Tóibín's veneration for him.

The Master is ruthlessly selective; it recreates only four years of James's life and only a few of his relationships, beginning with the humiliating failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, and ending with his brother's stay, with his wife and daughter, in Rye, in 1899. In these four years, James visits Ireland (an excuse for a lightning sketch of late 19th-century British colonialism, a subject closer to Tóibín's heart than James's), reacts with horror to the trial of Oscar Wilde (its scandal carefully set against his own intense discretion), acquires Lamb House in Rye and has reluctantly to sack a pair of grotesquely incompetent servants (the novel's best-sustained comic episode). He returns to Italy after a five-year absence, falls in love with the handsome and egotistical young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, and makes his peace with his brother. He writes, among other things, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, "The Figure in the Carpet" and The Turn of the Screw, and starts planning The Ambassadors.

But because this is very much a novel about memory and return, the narrative keeps sliding back, as if following James's thought processes, into the crucial events of his past life. In this cunning way we enter into James's extraordinary family life - his father's alarming search for spiritual perfection, his mother's protective care of her writer son, the illness and death of his caustic, brilliant, neurotic invalid sister Alice, his conflict with his overbearing older brother William. Henry's evasion of the American Civil War, dramatically contrasted with his brother Wilkie's injuries; his love for his dazzling and doomed young cousin Minnie Temple; his close, edgy friendship with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, her suicide in Venice and James's clearing-out of her possessions.

But they are mixed with scenes which Tóibín has invented or extrapolated from the fact. There is a suggestive argument with Edmund Gosse, soon to write Father and Son, over whether there can be repressed memories, locked in the unconscious. ("No", Henry said sternly, "nothing is locked within") There is an unspoken attraction to a manservant in Ireland. There is a sexy (but not sexual) night in bed, at Minnie Temple's house, with Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is the amazing scene (based on fact) of James disposing of Constance Fenimore Woolson's dresses, after her death, by going out on the Venetian lagoon with her faithful gondolier and dropping them into the water, where they balloon back like dark, giant, mushrooming ghosts.

At first I thought that the main point of the novel would be to expose the secrets of James's repressed homosexuality; and certainly Tóibín makes the most of James's longago feelings for the homosexual Paul Joukowsky and his mixed attraction and repulsion for Andersen. But the plot that emerges from The Master's crafty structure is more interesting, and less obvious, than the outing of Henry James. It becomes apparent that James, at least in this version, has repeatedly resisted demands, controlled intimacy and avoided commitment in order to do his writing. Tóibín's James is haunted by self-reproaches: did he

- 19 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

abandon Minnie and prefer her "dead rather than alive", so that he could turn her into art?

Did he fake his "wound" at the time of the war? Every human contact he makes must be measured against the imperative of "this quiet and strange treachery" towards the world, so that he can be "not available": "alone in his room with the night coming down... and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed".

How the books grow out of the life is the novel's deepest story. The phrase "I can imagine" crops up several times in the imaginary conversations. It irritated me, as it seemed so anomalous - but it's a clue to what Tóibín is doing. He shows us James's capacity for imagining his way in minute detail into, say, the state of mind of an abandoned child, his superhuman attention to "figures seen from a window or a doorway, a small gesture standing for a much larger relationship, something hidden suddenly revealed".

Tóibín too "can imagine" his way into Henry James with exceptional attention - and, particularly, into the process of turning his own "personal store" of memories and relationships into fiction. Sometimes he allows himself simplistic biographical links, but at its best, the novel deals carefully and subtly with the complicated, mysterious process of how a novelist - above all, this master-novelist - goes about "masking and unmasking himself".

What James mostly makes his books out of, Tóibín thinks, are his ghosts: the lost, the past, the dead. The book is suffused with longing and bereavement and the power of writing to cure and console. This emphasis means that we miss out, to a great extent, on the funny, worldly, satirical Henry James, whose novels can be read as comedies. But what we are left with is a powerful note of sadness, as the great novelist, working alone in Lamb House, hears the sound "like a vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude, and his memory working like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort".

ENLLAÇOS: www.colmtoibin.com

- 20 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

ROY, Arundhati

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

The Good of small things BIOGRAPHY Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Kerala. Her mother, a Kerala native, was Christian; her father was a Hindu from Bengal. The marriage was unsuccessful, and Roy spent her childhood years in Aymanam with her mother. The influence of these early years permeates her writings, both thematically and structurally.

Roy's mother, who herself was a prominent social activist, founded an independent school and taught her daughter informally. This freedom from intellectual constraint allowed Roy to write, as she puts it acccording to Jon Simmons on his "Arundhati Roy Web", "from within"; the ability to follow her inner voice, rather than having a set of restrictive rules ingrained in her, has been an integral part of her accomplishments as an adult writer. She comments that "When I write, I never re-write a sentence because for me my thought and my writing are one thing. It's like breathing, I don't re-breathe a breath... Everything I have - my intellect, my experience, my feelings have been used. If someone doesn't like it, it is like saying they don't like my gall bladder. I can't do anything about it."

In addition to the style of her writing, its subject matter also reflects the cultural texture of her childhood. Of Kerala she says that "it was the only place in the world where religions coincide, there's Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam and they all live together and rub each other down...I was aware of the different cultures when I was growing up and I'm still aware of them now. When you see all the competing beliefs against the same background you realise how they all wear each other down." The deep-seated nature of Roy's activism may also be traced back to her early years, and the rural beauty of the landscape in which she spent them: "I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives in you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much, you may love building but I don't think you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth, it's a different kind of love. I'm not a very well read person but I don't imagine that that kind of gut love for the earth can be replaced by the open landscape. It's a much cleverer person who grows up in the city, savvy and much smarter in many ways. If you spent your very early childhood catching fish and just learning to be quiet, the landscape just seeps into you. Even now I go back to Kerala and it makes me want to cry if something happens to that place."

At age sixteen Roy left home, and eventually enrolled at the Delhi School of Architecture. This training, like her elementary education, proved instrumental in shaping

- 21 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

her as a writer. In The Salon Interview, she likens the creation of a piece of literature to that of plans for a building: "In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space.

And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language." But despite her affinity for the trade, Simmons reports, she left it after a few years to work on projects for the screen, writing first a television serial, which failed due to lack of funding, and then two screenplays, neither of which brought her great success or fulfillment. She then published a criticism of the acclaimed film "Bandit Queen"; the controversy that followed resulted in a lawsuit against her.

In the aftermath, she vacated the public sphere, focusing her energies on The God of Small Things, which was published in April 1997. About six months later it was awarded the Booker Prize; Roy is the first Indian woman ever to achieve this honor. The book has been a stunning success both in India, and internationally. Roy says that her use of the English language was not so much a conscious decision for her, as a choice imposed on her because "There are more people in India that speak English than there are in England.

And the only common language that we have throughout India is English. And it's odd that English is a language that, for somebody like me, is a choice that is made for me before I'm old enough to choose. It is the only language that you can speak if you want to get a good job or you want to go to a university. All the big newspapers are in English. And then every one of us will speak at least two or three - I speak three - languages. And when we communicate - let's say I'm with a group of friends - our conversation is completely anarchic because it's in any language that you choose."

The acclaim that Roy garnered made her an instant celebrity, but the traditional trappings of literary fame were accompanied by a certain amount of notoriety due to the book's controversial treatment of delicate subject matter. Charges of anti-Communism were leveled against Roy because of her portrayal of the Communist characters; the Chief Minister of Kerala claimed that this, and not the book's literary merit, was the reason for its popularity in the West. In addition, Roy faced charges of obscenity and demands that the final chapter of the book be removed because of its sexual content. Roy attributed these hostile reactions not to the "eroticism (which is mild) but rather to the book's explicit treatment of the role of the untouchables in India... The abhorrence was thus as much political as it was moral, and proves that fifty years after Gandhi coined the term Harijan ('children of God') the Hindu caste system is still an important issue."

In the years following the publication of The God of Small Things, Roy has put her talents and status to use as an activist for several of the important issues facing India today. In September 1998 her article "The End of Imagination" appeared in The Nation as a response to the testing of nuclear weapons in India a few months earlier. The article demonstrates both a fervent appreciation for the natural beauty of her country, and a respect for the fragility of life in a world containing bombs that could destroy everything in a matter of seconds. Roy calls for those who agree with her about the evils of nuclear warfare to join her in public denunciation of it.

She has also returned to some of the political territory of The God of Small Things, speaking out against the oppression of the Dalits and appearing at a reception in Kerala to publicly declare herself an advocate of their cause. She also contributed materially, by

- 22 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

donating the royalties from the Malayalam translation of The God of Small Things to advance Dalit literary efforts and "help Dalit writers to tell their stories to the world."

Most recently, Roy has been involved in protesting against the Narmada Dam Project. Her article "The Greater Common Good" in Frontline disparages a project that could force millions to abandon their homes in order to provide limited benefits to a limited number of people. She has demonstrated against construction of the dam both in the Narmada Valley, and globally in an effort to heighten awareness and obtain support for the cause. In January 2000 she was arrested during a protest in the Valley, and released two days later.

Roy's concern for the environment and for the people inhabiting it permeates her life; the social conscience that she exhibits may be read into the literature that she produces as a concrete embodiment of this concern.

THE GOOD OF SMALL THINGS

Family Tree

Summary The God of Small Things is about a family living in India after the Declaration of Independence. Their story isn't told in chronological order but it is revealed bit by bit to the reader.

Rahel and Esthappen (Estha) are seven year old fraternal twins. They are living in Ayemenem with their mother Ammu and her brother Chacko, their grandmother Mammachi and their great-aunt Baby Kochamma. Their father Baba lives in Calcutta. Ammu left him when the twins were two years old.

The family is expecting the arrival of Margaret and Sophie Mol, Chacko's ex-wife and daughter, who are living in England. Since Margaret's second husband Joe had died in a car accident, Chacko invited them to spend Christmas in India in order to get over the loss. When they have arrived, Sophie Mol is taking centre stage. So Rahel and Estha stroll around on the river bank and find an old boat. With Velutha's help they repair it and

- 23 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

frequently cross the river to visit an abandoned house on the other side. Velutha is an Untouchable, whom Ammu and Chacko have known since their childhood. Their family have given him the opportunity to visit a school and employed him as a carpenter and mechanic in the family's pickle factory.

During the guests' stay Ammu is more and more attracted by Velutha. One night they meet at the river where they sleep with each other. As it is not possible for an Untouchable to have a relationship or even an affair with somebody from a superior caste, they have to keep their meetings secret. But one night Velutha's father observes them and, feeling humiliated by his son's overbearing behaviour, reports everything to Mammachi and Baby Kochamma. As a consequence they lock up Ammu in her room. There Rahel and Estha find her and, through the locked door, ask her why she's being locked up. As she is angry and desperate, she blames the two children that without them she would be free and they should go away. Hurt and confused they decide two run away and stay at the abandoned house. But Sophie discovers the twins' plan and demands to be taken along.

While the three are crossing the river, which has risen from heavy rainfall, their boat capsizes. Rahel and Estha are able to reach the other shore but Sophie cannot swim and is carried away by the current. After a long search for Sophie, the twins go to the abandoned house and fall asleep on its veranda. Neither do they see Velutha, who is sleeping on the veranda nor does he notice the twins' arrival. Earlier that night, Velutha had visited the house of Ammu's family, not knowing that their affair had been discovered.

When he arrived Mammachi insulted him and chased him off.

In the morning the children's absence is detected. Then they receive the message that Sophie Mol has been found dead by the river. Baby Kochamma goes to the police and wrongly accuses Velutha of attempting to rape Ammu and kidnapping the children. When the police find Velutha sleeping on the veranda of the abandoned house, they beat him up so heavily that he almost dies. The twins wake up and observe the whole procedure. At the police station they are forced by Baby Kochamma to confirm the wrong statement which she has made. In the following night Velutha dies in prison.

After Sophie Mol's funeral Ammu and the twins have to leave the family's house because Chacko, manipulated by Baby Kochamma, accuses them of being responsible for Sophie Mol's death. Estha is sent to his father in Calcutta where he attends school and later college. Ammu is forced to leave Rahel in Ayemenem in order to look for employment.

But Ammu is not able to earn enough for a living and so she dies of bad health a few years later alone in a hotel room.

Rahel returns to Ayemenem at the age of 31. She hasn't seen Estha since they were separated after Sophie Mol's funeral. She married an American and moved with him to Boston. After their divorce she has been working to make a living. Now Rahel returns to Ayemenem because she wants to see Estha, who has already returned to their family's house. During his stay in Calcutta he someday stopped speaking. After spending a whole day together in Ayemenem, Rahel and Estha, sister and brother, are sleeping with each other.

The fact that Estha has stopped speaking and that Rahel and Estha sleep with each other are only two aspects in which one can see how deeply hurt they still are by the events with Velutha and Sophie Mol that happened long ago.

- 24 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Criticism The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is a novel with autobiographical traits.

There are a lot of similarities between the author and one of her characters, namely Rahel.

Both of them spent their childhood in Ayemenem and later studied architecture in Delhi.

Another parallel exists concerning the parents. Both their mothers lived in Ayemenem and were Christians while their fathers were Hindus and worked on tee plantations. Roy's origin is reflected as well by the free use of Malayalam words as an enrichment to the English language which she plays with in her own way.

In my opinion the story is told in a very interesting way although it may take some time to enter completely into its world and to get accustomed to the author's style. Since the reader is jumping back and forth in time one only gets little bits of information, but the more one gets to know the more one wants to know. During the first reading some questions may occur and are only answered towards the end of the book. One knows for example that something has happened or is going to happen but not how, where and why.

Altogether the story is worth a second reading as one detects tiny details and hints which one misses at first.

Now I am going to introduce a character to you who in my opinion is very interesting for it is mostly hidden in the background and acts as a kind of manipulator: Baby Kochamma When Baby Kochamma is eighteen, she falls in love with the young Irish monk Father Mulligan. Father Mulligan is expected weekly in the village and every time Baby Kochamma is waiting outside and bathing a village child in the well in order to show herself charitable. The two of them then argue about religious matters just to spend time together.

After a year Father Mulligan returns to his seminary in Madras. Baby Kochamma follows him entering a convent there, for she thus hopes to be allowed to see him occasionally. But she never even gets near him and a year after entering the convent she wants to return back home. Her father sends her to America to study since he would not be able to find her a husband due to her "reputation". She returns from America with a certificate in ornamental gardening, but she has not forgotten Father Mulligan. She spends her whole life in solitary occupations, first gardening and later watching television.

When Baby Kochamma is about 68 years old she receives the message that Father Mulligan has become a Vaishnava, a devotee of the Hindi god Vishnu. Through the whole time the two have stayed in contact with each other and Baby Kochamma has never stopped loving him. The message strikes her profoundly as he has given up his vows for a new devotion rather than for her. But neither this nor his death a few years later stop her from loving him.

It is to say that Baby Kochamma had had a very unhappy life always waiting for somebody that was never to come. Therefore she is never satisfied when anyone seems to be content and happy and even delights in other people's misery.

Concerning Velutha she plays a passive and an active part. After the family has found out about the unfortunate relationship, Velutha visits the family's house. Mammachi loses her temper and starts insulting him. But she is not aware that Baby Kochamma is

- 25 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

always stimulating and increasing her anger by clever measures such a patting her shoulder reassuringly.

But as always when it comes to Velutha another aspect of Baby Kochamma's character must be considered. Since she is a very traditionally thinking person she has a dislike for Untouchables, which includes Velutha. For that reason and because she fears to lose her family's reputation in front of the police officer, she wrongly accuses Velutha of attempted rape.

She manipulates Chacko as well, so that after Sophie Mol's accident he believes that it is all Ammu's and the children's fault and he does not allow them to live in the family's home any longer.

Baby Kochamma always interferes with the decisions which have a severe influence on the family's future and that is what makes her a character worth having a closer look at.

The Caste System One topic dealt with in the story is the caste system and particularly the position of the Untouchables. A few decades ago the caste system controlled every aspect in the life of an ordinary Indian, like the profession, the marriage partner and the everyday life. One does not really know about its origin but it is assumed that the castes were introduced by priests to steady their position of power. The myth of Purusha, the divine ancestor, can give an explanation for the emergence of the main castes called varnas in Sanskrit. The Brahmans originated from Purusha's mouth, his arms are represented by the Kshatriyas, his thighs by the Vaishyas and the Shudras are building his feet. The Brahmans traditionally were priests and academics, the Kshatriyas warriors and superior officers, the Vaishyas land owners, farmers and merchants and the Shudras mechanics and day labourers. Below these four castes the Untouchables are found, called Paria, Harijans or Dalits. The four varnas are again split into jatis (subcastes), of which 2000 to 3000 are said to exist.

Untouchability is an important topic in the God of Small Things. When Mammachi is referring to the past, there is a part in which is said that the Untouchables were not allowed to walk on public roads and that they had to wipe out their footprints so that nobody of a higher caste could accidentally step into them. They had to cover their mouths while they were speaking so that nobody had to breathe in their polluted air. They actually were not given permission to exist. This non-existence is referred to several times in the book for example when Velutha does not leave footprints or ripples in the water. This makes him almost inhuman and supernatural.

In Hinduism one believes in rebirth. This is a considerable part of the caste system as it explains some facts which are difficult to understand. Hindus believe that if one lives a moral and religious life and does not commit crimes or injustices one will be reborn in a superior caste. As a conclusion one will be reborn in a lower caste if one does not respect moral and religious instructions and the law. Thus the Untouchables believe that it is justified that they are badly treated and avoided by the community and hence bear their nearly unbearable life. This aspect the author refers to in the person of Velya Paapen, Velutha's father. He feels that it is not right for his son to work in the pickle factory, for this

- 26 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

is not a position an Untouchable may hold. When Velya Paapen finds out about his son's relationship to Ammu he is so ashamed that he offers to kill Velutha with his own hands.

In the Indian constitution of 1950 the Untouchability is legally abolished. Today any discrimination due to the caste system is forbidden by law. Nevertheless the caste system has not disappeared from everyday life. Notably in villages the Untouchables are still excluded from the society and live in separate colonies. However, contingents in the education system and in public administration are granted to Untouchables in order to integrate them into the society and increase their standard of living.

ENLLAÇOS: http://www.gradesaver.com/the-god-of-small-things/

- 27 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

HEMINGWAY, Ernest

The old man and the sea BIOGRAPHY Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA The Old Man and the Sea was published 1952 after the bleakest ten years in Hemingway's literary career. His last major work, Across the River and into the Trees, was condemned as unintentional self-parody, and people began to think that Hemingway had exhausted his store of ideas.

- 28 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Santiago's story was originally conceived as part of a larger work, including material that later appeared in Islands in the Stream. This larger work, which Hemingway referred to as "The Sea Book," was proving difficult, and when Hemingway received positive reviews of the Santiago story, known then as "The Sea in Being," he decided to allow it to be published independently. He wrote to publisher Charles Scribner in October 1951, "This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of man's spirit. It is as good prose as I can write as of now."

The Old Man and the Sea, published in its entirety in one edition of Life magazine, was an instant success. In two days the September 1st edition of Life sold 5,300,000 copies and the book version sold 153,000. The novella soared to the top of the best-seller list and remained there for six months. At first, critical reception was warm. Many hailed it as Hemingway's best work, and no less than William Faulkner said, "Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries." Others, however, complained of artificiality in the characterization and excess sentimentality. Despite these detractors, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the 1953 Pulitizer Prize and American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award of Merit Medal for the Novel and played a significant role in Hemingway's selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

For the first fifteen or so years after its publication, critical response remained largely positive. Since the mid-60's, however, the work has received sustained attacks from realist critics who decry the novella's unrealistic or simply incorrect elements, e.g. the alleged eight rows of teeth in the mako's mouth or the position of the star Riegel. Through the 1970's the book became less and less the subject of serious literary criticism, and the view of the book as embarrassingly narcissistic, psychologically simplistic, and overly sentimental became more and more entrenched. While The Old Man and the Sea is popularly beloved and assigned reading for students in the US and around the world, critical opinion places it among Hemingway's less significant works.

ENLLAÇOS: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/69741-the-old-man-and-the-sea http://www.egs.edu/library/ernest-hemingway/biography/

- 29 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

NAFISI, Azar

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Reading Lolita in Tehran BIOGRAPHY Professor and writer Azar Nafisi was born in 1955 in Tehran, Iran. Her father Ahmed Nafisi was the mayor of Tehran and her mother Nezhat Nafisi was one of the first women to serve on Iranian parliament. The Nafisi family had a passion for literature and exposed young Nafisi to stories of Persian classics during family walks and before bedtime. At an early age, Nafisi developed an appreciation for literature that would ultimately be the focus of her literary career

Nafisi was educated in Switzerland but returned to Iran when her father was imprisoned. She later attended the University of Oklahoma, earning a PhD in English and American Literature. At the University of Oklahoma, Nafisi joined the Iranian student movement, but was more interested in the opportunity to examine revolutionary writings such as Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Nafisi felt conflicted as a member of the Iranian student movement because she appreciated Western literature despite protesting against Western imperialism.

After obtaining her PhD and her fellowship at Oxford University, Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979 and taught American literature at the University of Tehran. 1979 was a crucial time in Iranian history; it marked the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, an influential figure of the Islamic Revolution. His vision was for Iran to be ruled as an Islamic state. The veil was enforced for Iranian women and strict regulations were implemented in order for women to have conservative roles. Nafisi was enraged by the restrictions placed on women. She felt that the rules stripped women of their individuality. Being educated in the West, Nafisi was exposed to the political and personal freedoms of Western women, and growing up in preRevolutionary Iran, she had known women to have more freedom.

In Tehran, Nafisi taught Western classics such as The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice, books that were banned by the Iranian government because they contradicted the values of Islam. Some revolutionary students reacted negatively to the books she taught, believing that the characters acted immorally and justified the selfish views of Western civilization. In 1981, Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil. She taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University until she quit her teaching positions in 1995. She then formed a reading book group with several of her best female students where she secretly taught Western novels, such as Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Madame Bovary. Nafisi challenged her students to establish a connection between the novels and contemporary Iran. Nafisi's

- 30 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

secret reading group was the inspiration for her critically acclaimed novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

Nafisi left Iran for the US in 1997. She wrote op-ed articles for publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Republic about the political relevance of literature and culture as well as human rights for Iranian women. Also, some of her articles focused on the relations between the United States and the Middle East and how people can avoid misconceptions of the Middle East portrayed by the West. In her article, “The Veiled Threat,” the cover story for the February 22nd 1999 issue of the New Republic, she criticizes the Iranian government for the harsh restrictions placed on women.

She also talked about the importance of Iranian women historical figures and how the restrictions prevent Iranian women from having a history. Nafisi asserts that making the veil mandatory for women conflicts with their Islamic faith. “For some traditional women, the imposition of the veil was an affront to their religiosity—changing what had been a freely chosen expression of religious faith into a rote act imposed on them by the state. My grandmother was one such a woman. An intensely religious woman who never parted with her chador, she was nonetheless outraged at those who had defiled her religion by using violence to impose their interpretation of it on her grandchildren. ‘This is not Islam!' she would insist.” Nafisi presented her grandmother's testimonial as a rebuttal to those who believed that imposing the veil on women was an affirmation of Islam. She used this argument to point out that the extreme actions under Khomeini's rule were against the values of Islam.

READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN Nafisi wrote many of her articles before she published Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books in 2003; therefore, many of the ideas in these writings are reinforced in Reading Lolita in Tehran. The novel follows Nafisi's struggles as an English professor in post revolutionary Iran. She uses reading and writing as resistance against the stringent rules imposed on women in Iran. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi references many Western classic novels, but she focused the majority of her analysis on four novels: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James' Daisy Miller, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Nafisi divides Reading Lolita in Tehran into four parts, each focusing on the particular author and his or her novels. Each section intertwines the novel Nafisi covers with specific phases in her life in Iran as well as the events that take place during the Revolution. She emphasizes the importance of literature despite moral views of the characters.

Generally Reading Lolita in Tehran has received positive criticism. Most critics agree that the book offers a fresh perspective on literature. Throughout the novel, the reader is able to see just how much Nafisi is in love with books. The use of literary analysis is essential because it establishes a connection between the characters in these books and the lives of her students. Reading Lolita in Tehran emphasizes how books can be relatable to a particular audience and how it opens doors to the freedom of a person's imagination.

Critic Katie Flint concurs that Reading Lolita in Tehran shows an appreciation for Western literature that many people take for granted. She respects the fact that Nafisi uses reading as an escape from gender oppression.

- 31 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

While many critics commend Nafisi for the use of literary analysis, she is also criticized for the selection of books she discussed in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Critics from the Complete Review feel that Nafisi concentrates too much on Western literature and fails to include Persian writing. Perhaps it is because she writes for an American audience and readers would be unfamiliar with prominent Iranian writers. Nonetheless, by excluding Iranian literature, the reader is only exposed to Western ideas of literature. “Nafisi taught foreign literature, nevertheless, it's astonishing how completely any and all Iranian fiction is ignored in this book….Her refusal to do so also seems again to demonstrate her unwillingness to consider that literature might be relevant in other ways than she allows for” (Complete Review). Reading Lolita in Tehran promotes the ideas of freedom and imagination, but restricting works to Western literature offers a limited perspective of life in Iran during the Iranian Revolution.

Perhaps it is this idea that makes Nafisi's memoir controversial. Some critics believe that Nafisi favors Western ideologies, therefore making the novel biased and inaccurate.

Throughout the novel, it is clear that Nafisi disagrees with the Iranian laws placed to restrict women of their rights. Her observations stem from living in Iran before the Revolution where women had more personal freedoms. In her memoir Nafisi makes historical references to the Revolution to support her arguments. Critic Walter Corbella believes that her historical assessments portray the Iranian government negatively and inadequately. He states, “Nafisi does not look beyond its [Islam fundamentalism] outward manifestations—its terrorist practices, its slogans, and its posters—so she fails to see it'd inherent flaws and how these could cause its structure of domination to unravel.”

One of the more extensive critiques of Reading Lolita in Tehran comes from Hamid Dasbashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia Univeristy. In his essay, “Native informers and the making of the American empire,” Dasbashi suggests that the novel is partly responsible for the current relations between the US and Iran and also that the novel is a propaganda tool for imperialism. He also accuses Nafisi for her relationships with neoconservatives. Although his attacks seem extreme, his rhetoric is valid. He expands on his claims by saying that Nafisi slanders Iranian “revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism, doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire.”

Many of Nafisi's colleagues, who are familiar with Iranian studies and with Reading Lolita in Tehran, say that Dabashi's arguments are too radical. Janet Afary, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Purdue University says that the novel holds the virtue of recalling the real events that happened during the Iranian Revolution. “I have a lot of respect for Hamid Dabashi's work. But Azar Nafisi's work is a literary work. These were the harshest years. They were executing girls of 12 and 13. The stories are true. These things really have happened.”

Despite the controversy, Reading Lolita in Tehran is considered a strong literary work. It is not a simple task to intertwine literary analysis within a memoir while holding the interest of the reader. Nafisi has provided her account of her life in Iran during the Revolution. Her ability to use literature as means of resistance is what makes Reading Lolita in Tehran successful. Her love for literature has won the hearts of many readers and through other writings, she continues to incorporate the use of literature to address political issues in the Middle East. Currently, Nafisi is a Visiting Fellow and professorial lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of the John Hopkins University's School of Advanced

- 32 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

International Studies and is the director of the Dialogue Project, an imitative to educate non Muslims of the Muslim world.

ENLLAÇOS: http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Behind-the-veil-a-desire-to-read-2650604.php http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/13/featuresreviews.guardianreview1

- 33 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

ATWOOD, Margaret

Moral disorder BIOGRAPHY Poet, Author, Literary Critic, Journalist Margaret Atwood is a Canadian award-winning writer best known for her poetry, short-stories and novels such as The Circle Game, The Handmaid’s Tale, Snowbird and The Tent.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Canada. The internationally-known author has written award-winning poetry, shortstories and novels, including The Circle Game (1966), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Snowbird (1981), The Blind Assassin (2000), The Tent (2006) and more. Her works have

been translated into 30 different languages.

Career Highlights Novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic. Born on in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Margaret Atwood is one of today's leading fiction writers. She studied at the University of Toronto and Radcliffe College, becoming a lecturer in English literature. Her first published work was a collection of poems entitled The Circle Game (1966), which won the GovernorGeneral's Award.

Since then Margaret Atwood has published many volumes of poetry and short stories, but is best known as a novelist. Her controversial The Edible Woman (1969) is one of several novels focusing on women's issues. Her futuristic novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) — which was later turned into a film by Harold Pinter—was short-listed for the Booker Prize, as was Cat's Eye in 1989. She finally won the award for The Blind Assassin (2000). Other critically acclaimed works by Margaret Atwood include The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and Oryx and Crake (2003). Her Survival (1972) is widely considered to be the best book on Canadian literature.

In 2006, Margaret Atwood had several new publications: The Tent, a volume of tales and poems; Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, a children's book; and Moral Disorder, a collection of short stories. She continues to be a popular author worldwide; her works have been translated into more than 30 different languages.

- 34 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

MORAL DISORDER

Most collections of short stories by a single author are grab-bags, but some approach or achieve real unity; this is a different unity from that of the novel, and deserves some attention. The gaps between stories preclude the supporting structures of conventional plot. If the stories tell a story, it must be read in glimpses, and through the gaps - a risky gambit, but one that offers singular freedom of movement and ironic opportunity. In such episodic narratives, character, place or theme replace plot as unifying elements. Many collections that pretend to unity merely fake it, but we need a name for a book that is truly a story told in stories. Could we call it a story suite?

Moral Disorder is such a suite, consisting of 11 short stories. Place, perhaps the commonest cement of the story suite, is not very important, but the stories have a single protagonist, a central character- or I think they do. She is variable, elusive, even a bit slippery. This is, after all, a book by Margaret Atwood.

Seven of the stories are told by an "I" who remains nameless, four from the thirdperson point of view of "Nell". It's easy to project Nell into all the stories, because they run in chronological order from childhood to age, the central figure is always female, and there are definite clues that Nell is the protagonist even when not named. Such clues are needed, for there isn't very much in the first-person stories of childhood and adolescence to connect the girl to the woman Nell. The last two stories concern a woman's experience with her father entering dementia, her mother in extreme old age. The daughter may well be Nell, the parents may be the parents of the child in the earlier stories, but I had no feeling of recognition, of rejoining the same people at a later stage of life. The book did not quite form a whole for me, an architecture, a life story however episodic. The glimpses are brilliant, but the gaps are wide. What the stories do have in common, though, is a clear eye, a fine wit, and a command of language so complete it's invisible except when it's dazzling.

One piece is dramatically and effectively out of place. Starting with the second story, we follow Nell through the years from her childhood with sister and parents, through the vicissitudes of semi-marriage, the trials of amateur farming and late parenthood, and at last to her middle age, the daughter of parents at the edge of death. But the first story in the book is chronologically the last, a portrait of Nell and her partner Tig in their own old age, when they are the parents on the edge of death. Why this reversal works so well I don't know; perhaps because "The Bad News" is a stunning opener, electric with wit, energy, Atwood's achingly keen sense of fear and pain. She has never been sharper, dryer, funnier, sadder. And there was wisdom in not putting this story last, because the last two are about dying, the end, and this one isn't, quite - not yet. "Not yet is aspirated, like the h in honour. It's the silent not yet. We don't say it out loud.

"These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we've only recently come to think of as still, and really it's no smaller than anyone else's window."

The uncomplaining, absolute accuracy of this is most admirable. "The Bad News" really has some news for its readers.

- 35 -

English Book Club, 2014 -2015

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

None of the other stories entirely escapes conventionality, not a word I'd expect to use about Atwood. The subjects are familiar tropes of the current short story: miseries and confusions of childhood, city people learning life on a subsistence farm, dysfunctional family members, Alzheimer's. They are not quite predictable, but near it, though there is a patience, a kindness in the tone which is not common. Apart from in that first story, Atwood doesn't pull any of the surprises, the narrative flights and dodges she's so good at. There the old Canadian couple morph quietly into an old Roman couple in a small Gallic town called Glanum, which Nell and Tig once visited as tourists. Breakfast is good whether in Toronto or Glanum, but the world is not in good shape. Terrorism, barbarians threaten the empire. The news is all bad - the news is always the same and always bad, and what are two old people supposed to do about it? This gentle, plausible slide into a fantasy that deepens reality is Atwood at her slyest and sweetest. There really is nobody like her.

ENLLAÇOS: http://margaretatwood.ca/

- 36 -