Os profesores da Escola Oficial de Idiomas recomendan estes libros.
The Swimmer (1964)
by
John Cheever (1912-1982)
Click herefor source
John Cheever, known as "The Chekhov of the Suburbs for his ability to capture the drama and sadness of the lives of his characters by revealing the undercurrents of apparently insignificant events” (source here) braids, in his well-known short story, “The Swimmer,” first published in “The New Yorker” in 1964, the quintessential epic of self-quest with harsh criticism of the American bourgeois way of living.
Neddy is heading back home, after a party, at the Westerhazy’s, through swimming all the swimming pools of his neighbourhood.
Neddy Merrill feels himself to be an explorer, a pilgrim, a legendary figure, as research scholar Nasrullah Mambrol explains in “Analysis of John Cheever’s The Swimmer,” and he will embark in a “diurnal, seasonal and biographical journey.” Neddy will call the new streak of water “Lucinda,” like his wife, a territory to be conquered in the fashion of explorers, yet the battle is lost from the very beginning. Rather than swimming home, he flees from the embodiment of his home, his wife and family. He abandons Lucinda / Penelope at the Wasterhazy’s and only swims to a material idea of home. Neddy transitions from a blissful, energetic, full- of -vim state in day time, bracing and immersing himself in clear-water swimming pools, to aging, decline, social descent as midsummer touches an end, swimming through darker and murkier waters.
The short story opens up with one of those “midsummer Sundays,” in which parishioners, tennis players, wildlife watchers, even the priest are all pervaded by the haziness of a hangover. Alcohol will be indeed omnipresent: Neddy stops at each of the swimming pools to have a drink. The word “stupefaction” appears frequently in the short story. This haziness or stupefaction that alcohol brings about runs paralell with Neddy´s inability to remember. Indeed, Neddy departs from the Westerhazy’s swimming-pool, whose name is illustrative of omens to be fulfilled, “West,” associated with “death” as the sun dies in the “West” and “hazy” (blurriness), cloudiness of thoughts, not being able to remember.
The narrative voice deflates Ned’s prospects of heroic deeds. “He was far from young,” the narrator’s voice points, and “he might have been compared to a summer’s day,” but “particularly the last hours of one.” Shakespeare’s sonnet, echoed in these words, constitutes a reverse of what Neddy represents. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (click on the number if you want to listen to it), where the beloved competes, transcends, and overcomes the beauty of a summer day, Neddy does not outdo the summer day with his infatuated airs of being young, but, contrary to that, the passage of time and the passing of the season will leave furrows in his body’s field, echoing another sonnet by Shakespeare (Click here if you want to listen to it: Sonnet 2): “When forty winters shall beseige thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.” He will be driven into physical deterioration through exhaustion and disillusionment.
Mambrol describes the first swimming pool which Neddy traverses as a simil of his being born, of his early stages of life, those green waters in which he “crawls” echo the maternal womb and the amniotic liquid. Everything is blissful and eden-like at this stage “embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much as pleasure as the resumption of his natural condition.” Later, there is also an allusion to an apple-tree blossoming (reminiscent of Eden).
As he traverses hedges, even a highway, and immerses himself in his neighbours pools, strewn pieces of his life come afloat: bankruptcy, marital issues, a mistress, debts, abandoned friends ... His pilgrimage equally showcases the flaws and superfluousness of American bourgeoise society. He starts to feel feeble and tired with the swimming, yet he struggles till the end. Dried pools interrupt his chain of swimming, abandoned houses, houses for sale… At the public swimming-pool, there are rules and regulations, but he still fights his sense of belonging to a certain status by being deprecatory of a crowd that jostles him (comment indebted to Marián). He has no identification disc, and the guardians of the public pool chase him off. This literal lack of identity dovetails with his efforts to remember. When he finally reaches his home, he seems to be an old man, who can barely walk on his legs, and he finds his house empty and dark with nobody inside, yet, he is still resistant to come to terms with his social descent and loneliness by calling out the cook or the maid (comment indebted to Cándido).
Don’t miss a revisiting of this story in:
The Swimmer / TV ad (1992): “Mad about the Boy” by Dinah Washington https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpUUxDo0skQ. (Cándido’s finding)
The Swimmer (1968) by Frank Perry (main cast: Burt Lancaster and Janet Landgard) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HuleRy4oh8&t=3s
This review is from the reading club at the EOI of Vigo. Click here to read more entries: https://theworddepotlookingfortreasures.blogspot.com
American Gods
American Gods: Gaiman’s Overpopulated World
American Gods is undoubtedly ’s masterpiece, and it has been acclaimed by the public as a flagship of the fantasy genre. However, some may find that the book features an excessively large cast for a rather simple plot.
Shadow has been released a day early from prison following the shocking death of his wife Laura. Soon after stepping in the free world, he is engaged by Wednesday to become his bodyguard and errand boy. The protagonist quickly discovers that Wednesday and his colleagues are old gods preparing a war against the new gods of technology and the internet.
A multitude of gods from diverse cultures is introduced to the protagonist as he embarks on a road trip across the US. Readers will hopefully find themselves in awe of Gaiman’s vast knowledge of mythology, religion, and US geography and climate. Impressive knowledge notwithstanding, the pace of the book is tedious –precisely to allow readers to soak in the diversity of US landscapes and beliefs–, so the ending may feel rushed and shallow in contrast.
All in all, this is a sensational work for fantasy lovers. Lay readers may just need a little patience to move through this volume, which acts as a masterclass in Gods and Nature.
Blu Palinuro
Blu Palinuro es un libro insólito, en cuanto a estructura y contenido, en el panorama literario actual, que sumerge al lector en un fascinante viaje literario a través de Italia.
El libro está narrado en primera persona por la autora, Isabel Parreño, y se articula en breves capítulos dedicados a diferentes lugares de Italia. La narración del viaje se entrelaza a la narración de episodios de las vidas de escritores y escritoras que vivieron en esos lugares o cuyas existencias están vinculadas, de diferentes formas, a ellos. A estas narraciones se suman, además, anécdotas relacionadas con películas, actores o historias de personajes históricos. Así, al mismo tiempo que vagabundeamos por los callejones empinados de la isla de Capri, nos adentraremos también en la tormentosa historia de amor entre el filósofo y escritor Walter Benjamin y la directora y actriz de teatro Asja Lacis. O, callejeando por una inquietante y contradictoria Nápoles, descubriremos la triste historia del poeta Giacomo Leopardi o la valiente aventura de una desconocida Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel.
Blu Palinuro es un libro obligado para todos los amantes de Italia y para todos aquellos que poseen la pasión de leer y viajar. En palabras de la propia autora:
Para saciar el vicio promiscuo y omnívoro de leer y viajar
Dandelion wine
“A must” to remember our own trips down memory lane,
because we are ,“all of us,” the “children hidden” in the adults we have become
Ray Bradbury, described as Midwest surrealist,is author of well-known science fiction novels such asFahrenheit 451(1953). Yet, he did not accomodate to the label himself as he believed that science-fiction was a possibility of the real in the future and not a fantasy. Fantasy is deemed unreal.
A childhood encounter with Mr. Electrico on a Carnival (funfair) inveigled him with the power of eternity. See anecdote here. Anointed with this power, he truly believed the prophecy and decided that his destiny had been written when he was twelve. He, indeed, became eternal through the immanence of his writing.
Dandelion Wine Ray Bradbury’s semiautobiographical novel,set in the summer of 1928 in the fictional Green Town, based on his home town Waukegan, Illinois, “packs all the joys of summer in a bottle.”
The locale nostalgia of childhood dreams and fantasies, of endless counting of ritual actions, freeze the destructive power of things to pass. Revisiting Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” where old age is a “paltry thing” and the poetic voice veers from mortal affairs by hankering to be turned into an artifice of eternity in the unending and repetitive circles of history, gyres,Bradbury hoists sails to a simpler world of childhood joy and fears
“old gods’ marmalade;” “the porch calm and bold;” “my grandfather, a myth indeed” who supersedes Plato; “Grandmma sewing the raveled sleeve of care;” “uncles gathered with their smokes;” “Yets still we knew ourselves. The sum? Byzantium, Byzantium”
On a first summer ritual, Douglas Spaulding and Tom Spaulding venture into the forest to pick fox grapes and wild strawberries with their father. Douglas is exhilarated with the first grand revelation of being alive, something he says “he mustn’t forget.” A parade of characters and town affairs interlude as short stories that conform the thread of that summer. Thus, the landscape of the novel is contoured by rituals and revelations: rickety machines that have lost their purpose, the tour-de-force of the new versus the old, untimely encounters of unrequited love, the understanding of the world through the eyes of the children...
“Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood” (Ray Bradbury intro ix)
La mujer de la falda violeta
L A
MUJER DE
Esta novela está contada por una de las protagonistas, alguien que hace
todo por conocer a la mujer de la falda violeta, con un fin oculto que no
sabremos hasta el final de la historia. Lo curioso de esta historia es que nosotros
vamos creando nuestra imagen del personaje según las pistas sobre su manera de
ser y reacciones.
Curiosidad es lo que más nos producirá esta novela y también encontraremos
pequeños giros inesperados que
descolocarán todo lo que pensábamos de la mujer violeta.
Una novela diferente y curiosa donde conoceremos costumbres japonesas y que no dejará a nadie indiferente, porque es una novela que cada uno siente de una manera. Para mí, una novela recomendable que nos hace parar y pensar.
O xogo das cadeiras
As protagonistas de O xogo das cadeiras son Teresa, Martiña e Eulali, tres amigas, diferentes entre si, que viven nunha pequena vila costeira de Euskadi. A novela preséntanos ás tres mulleres xa anciás que se reunen todas as tardes na pastelaría de Ixabel e reconstrúe, de maneira fragmentaria e con continuos saltos temporais, a vida das protagonistas: a infancia, a atrocidade da guerra civil, a vellez e ao final, sempre ao axexo, a morte.
Novela de forte carácter intimista, O xogo das cadeiras alude simbolicamente, dende o proprio título, ao xogo da vida no que, cando se quita unha cadeira, alguén ten que abandonar a partida.
Uxue Alberdi escribiu o O xogo das cadeiras en éuscaro e a novela foi traducida ao galego por Isaac Xubín e publicada pola editorial Hugin e Munin.
Collected Short Stories
Roald Dahl es un autor británico de ascendencia noruega (Llandaff, 1916 - Oxford, 1990) más conocido quizá por sus relatos o historias infantiles adaptadas al cine (Las Brujas, Matilda). Nada tienen de infantiles, todo sea dicho; pueden ser perfectamente leídas por adultos y están disponibles en nuestra biblioteca en su idioma original (The Witches, Matilda), sin embargo, en esta ocasión quiero recomendar cualquiera de sus recopilaciones de relatos cortos.
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