Goodbye, Mr. Chips

a film by Sam Wood
based on a novella by James Hilton

A heartwarming drama starring Robert Donat, in his well-deserved Oscar-winning performance (he beat Clark Gable and Laurence Olivier to it), and Greer Garson in her first movie role.

As I just have learned, Hilton’s 1934 novella, of which I’ve been ignorant until now, had a tremendous success. I guess school teacher was a respected profession back then. The book spawned two feature films (this one was the first) and a number of theatre, radio and television adaptations.

This was the opening film of the cycle James Hilton. Escritor y guionista by Asociación de Cine Vértigo.

Gush

by Yo Hemmi
translated by Giles Murray

Many years ago I watched a film by Shōhei Imamura called Warm Water Under a Red Bridge and enjoyed it a lot. It turns out that the movie was based on the title novella, which was the reason I took this book from the library in the first place. I have to say that there are many differences between the film and the original story. That’s only natural but, imprinting and stuff, I prefer the film. Also, the first-person protagonist of Gush (all three novellas are narrated in the first person) is quite annoying.

Night Caravan is the shortest story of the three which would greatly benefit from being even shorter.

My favourite novella is the final one. Piano Wire portrays a family of slobs falling under the influence of a mysterious compulsive declutterrer^*. I always suspected there was a sinister side to tidying up; still, the ending comes as a shock.

*	All three novellas were first published in 1992. Imagine that by then Marie Kondo had been decluttering for three years already. 22 years later, she has “kind of given up” on it. Good for her.

Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

Ten delightfully complex, dark and/or disturbing gems from arguably the greatest living short story master.

Inevitably, the “our Chekhov” cliché (attributed to Cynthia Ozick) has found its way onto the book’s dustjacket. Have those who repeat it ever read Chekhov? Or Alice Munro? Well, Munro is nothing like Chekhov. She’s in a class of her own.

The first nine stories all take place in Canada. Now, as a note aside: I don’t know much about Canada. It’s a huge and sparsely populated country. Apart from ice hockey, it gave us, off the top of my head, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Maynard Ferguson, Oscar Peterson, Kenny Wheeler, Diana Krall, Lhasa de Sela, Tanya Tagaq, Peaches, Lido Pimienta, Leslie Nielsen, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Keanu Reeves, Donald Sutherland, Rush, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cirque du Soleil... And, of course, Alice Munro. The Klondike Gold Rush inspired many a work by Jack London that I enjoyed reading as a kid. Yet the first thing that springs to my mind is The Lumberjack Song. Oh, the power of a stereotype.

To be fair, a wood cutter by the name of Roy actually is a protagonist of the short story called Wood. As Canadian as possible under the circumstances? Maybe. To me, Roy is a stereotypical Finn.

This curious diagram from Wikipedia shows the evolution of sections in Wood, first published in 1980 and then in its revised form in this collection (2009):

“The 2009 version comprises eight sections to the 1980 version’s three, and has a new ending.”

The title story — at 50+ pages, shouldn’t it be called a novella? — is quite different from the rest. It is based on the life of the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya (Sophia Kovalevsky in the story) and, as far as I can see, pretty faithful to historical events.

As another note aside: yes I heard about Kovalevskaya when I was in school, and later at the university. Not much though. The fact that she was not able to attend a university, let alone get any teaching job, either in Russia or abroad, was somehow glossed over^*. Her mentor, Karl Weierstrass — that Weierstrass, the author of an endless list of theorems — also appears in the story.

The amazing thing is, even here, even knowing how it’s gonna end, Munro’s stories and characters are not predictable.

If I were to choose three stories, it would be those that are narrated in the first person: Child’s Play, Some Women and Wenlock Edge.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would have called smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.
These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.
Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?
Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?
The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.
And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.
“Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

Some Women

*

Or so I thought until I came across the 1948 essay by Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina [1]. The author does not make any secret that Kovalevskaya was not employable in pre-revolutionary Russia — and adds that Currently in the Soviet Union, all conditions have been created for a woman to engage in science equally with a man, if this corresponds to her natural inclinations. Polubarinova-Kochina, a distinguished mathematician herself, lived through the birth and death of the USSR and died at the young age of 100.

1. Полубаринова-Кочина, П.Я. Софья Васильевна Ковалевская (очерк научной деятельности). В сборнике С.В. Ковалевская. Научные работы. Редакция и комментарии члена-корреспондента АН СССР П.Я. Полубариновой-Кочиной. Издательство Академии Наук СССР, Москва, 1948, стр. 313—342.

La mujer rota

by Simone de Beauvoir
translated by Dolores Sierra and Neus Sánchez
illustrated by Sara Herranz

I’ve never read anything by Simone de Beauvoir, and I guess La Femme rompue (The Woman Destroyed) is not exactly the work one should start with. Still, I duly read the text, written in a form of a diary of a middle-aged lady named Monique. The protagonist couldn’t irritate me more. I’m pretty sure it’s done on purpose. So she has been married to her college sweetheart for twenty years; abandoned her career for marriage and children; now her two grown-up daughters live independently while her husband is involved with a younger and ambitious woman. Kind of “normal”. Even so, Monique is having a breakdown. You’d think the author could have been a bit more sympathetic to her creation. But no. Ms de Beauvoir singularly fails to give her — admiteddly flawed, and who isn’t? — heroine what this latter needs most: love. It’s a shame really, because the novella is well-written and masterfully translated.

The real (if not the only) reason I took this book from the library was the illustrations by Sara Herranz. (This time, just black and white, without her signature red.) They tell the story beautifully, without idealising or judging, and make us care about Monique like Simone de Beauvoir never managed to do. In fact, forget the text. It doesn’t add anything to what Sara’s drawings say.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada

by Gabriel García Márquez

In early 1990s, I watched the Cuban film Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes. If it sounds like another blog post that I wrote about ten years ago, this is because it was the same mini-festival of films based on works by Gabriel García Márquez.

Back to the present: I finally finished reading this book that has stuck in our house for a few months now (that could happen in the time of pandemic). Incidentally, this is the first collection of stories by García Márquez that I read in Spanish from the beginning to the end. It contains six short stories, including Un señor muy viejo, and the title novella.

Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1955) El mar del tiempo perdido (1961) El ahogado más hermoso del mundo (1968) Muerte constante más allá del amor (1970) El último viaje del buque fantasma (1968) Blacamán el bueno, vendedor de milagros (1968) La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972)

Recurring characters include Blacamán the Good, senator Onésimo Sánchez, and spider woman, while (unnamed) Eréndira and her grandmother, Catarino’s shop, and even the smiling gringo Mr. Herbert all appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of all stories, I liked El último viaje del buque fantasma the least: it is just one very long sentence, and I kept losing the thread. Otherwise, it is a great book.

Márquez’ fine, understated sense of humour is omnipresent, even in the saddest stories of this collection. Take, once again, Un señor muy viejo: first, the presumed angel talks “in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice”; second, the Holy See expresses their doubts suggesting that the creature could be “just a Norwegian with wings”; third, the matter seems to be settled as we hear “the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian”. And Muerte constante más allá del amor (whose title, as I just learned, is an inverted “loan” of Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet, Amor constante más allá de la muerte), has the best opening sentence of any story I’ve ever read, or perhaps only second to that of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Al senador Onésimo Sánchez le faltaba seis meses y once días para morirse cuando encontró a la mujer de su vida.

Muerte constante más allá del amor

Vinieron en busca de salud los enfermos más desdichados del Caribe: una pobre mujer que desde niña estaba contando los latidos de su corazón y ya no le alcanzaban los números, un jamaicano que no podía dormir porque lo atormentaba el ruido de las estrellas, un sonámbulo que se levantaba de noche a deshacer dormido las cosas que había hecho despierto, y muchos otros de menor gravedad.

Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes

Y al fondo del salón, una mujer solitaria que se abanicaba muy despacio con un cartón de propaganda.
— Y tú — le gritó el señor Herbert —, ¿cuál es tu problema?
La mujer dejó de abanicarse.
— A mí no me meta en su fiesta, míster — gritó a través del salón —. Yo no tengo problemas de ninguna clase, y soy puta porque me sale de los cojones.

El mar del tiempo perdido

— Tiene cara de llamarse Esteban.
Era verdad. A la mayoría le bastó con mirarlo otra vez para comprender que no podía tener otro nombre. Las más porfiadas, que eran las más jóvenes, se mantuvieron con la ilusión de que al ponerle la ropa, tendido entre flores y con unos zapatos de charol, pudiera llamarse Lautaro. Pero fue una ilusión vana.

El ahogado más hermoso del mundo

El músico no recibió el dinero.
— Son ciento ochenta y dos con cuarenta — dijo —. Los valses son más caros.
— ¿Y eso por qué?
— Porque son más tristes — dijo el músico.
La abuela lo obligó a que cogiera el dinero.
— Pues esta semana nos tocas dos piezas alegres por cada vals que te debo, y quedamos en paz.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada

Carmen

by Prosper Mérimée
translated by Mauro Fernández Alonso de Armiño
illustrated by Benjamin Lacombe

The last time I read Carmen was more than thirty years ago, in Russian, in a paperback collection of Mérimée’s selected works. Right now, I don’t remember what else was in there. In any case, I was not planning to reread it until I saw this gorgeous edition in our library among the new books, right next to graphic novels. So I took it and embarked on reading, this time in Spanish.

I loved it. I don’t speak (or read) French, so the chances of me reading it in original are slim. And what is “original” anyway? After all, the narrator is in Spain and talks to his heroes in Spanish. Moreover, it is speculated that Carmen was inspired by Pushkin’s poem Цыганы (The Gypsies), which Mérimée read in Russian and translated it into French in 1852. In the meantime, I want to say that the translation by Mauro Armiño is masterful, although it would be so much easier to read if the whole text of the novella were not printed in white on a black background.

Here’s something that I completely forgot since 1980s: the story of Carmen is told to the narrator by don José who is condemned to death. Throughout, we hear not only misogynist and racist notes but the whole (all too familiar) song of an abuser and murderer blaming his victims for their fate. Striking illustrations by Benjamin Lacombe reflect this: handsome José is presented as a victim of a spider-like femme fatale. I think this Carmen in 3-D would make an excellent Falla.

♦ ♦ ♦  Frankly, José is pathetic. He appears to lack any sense of humour. Carmen, on the contrary, has a lot of it.  ♦ ♦ ♦ — Escucha, Joseíto — dijo —, ¿te he pagado? Según nuestra ley no te debía nada, porque eres un payo; pero eres un mozo guapo y me has gustado. Estamos en paz. Adiós. Le pregunté cuando volvería a verla. — Cuando seas menos idiota — respondió riendo. Luego, en tono más serio: — ¿Sabes, mi niño, que creo que te quiero un poco? Pero esto no puede durar. Perro y lobo no hacen buena pareja mucho tiempo. Quizá si abrazases la ley de Egipto gustaría convertirme en tu romí. Pero son tonterías: eso es imposible. ¡Bah!, créeme, muchacho, has salido bien librado. Has topado con el diablo, sí, con el diablo; no siempre es negro, y no te ha retorcido el cuello. Aunque visto de lana, no soy cordero. Vete a poner una vela delante de tu majarí; bien se la ha ganado. Bueno, adiós otra vez. No pienses más en Carmencita, o hará que te cases con una viuda con pata de palo.

The Annex contains one of Letters from Spain. Published some 13 years before Carmen, not only does it provide insight into the evolution of Mérimée’s (anti)hero (from José María el Tempranillo, a real-life noble bandit à la Robin Hood, to don José) but also is a jolly good read in its own right.