Description Of Menial Tasks In Fiction

bending light

In movies you often see a character go through some everyday ritual:

• washing face, then squinting at self in bathroom mirror
• fixing hair or lipstick in rearview mirror
• waking up to an alarm clock and getting slowly out of bed
• vacuuming carpet and dusting

These scenes happen in novels too.

He wiped out the corner cupboard (three separate dust rags, that took) and placed the albums in the envelopes on the lowest shelf. He put the tax returns in the desk drawer where the sickroom supplies had been kept. From the basement he brought up a boxset of miniature tools, his compartmented chest of screws and nails and his repair nails and his tin of adhesives, and he arranged them on the upper shelves of the cupboard along with the crochet hooks and Connie’s sewing basket. He lugged the trash out to the alley, the Goodwill bags to his car trunk. He dusted the desk and the lamp tables. He stuffed his cleaning rags into the hamper. He vacuumed the floor and the sofa, which was littered with specks of paper.

- Anne Tyler, from Digging to America

Well, so what about that. These mundane activities happen in life as in fiction, so they have a place in fiction. Scenes about menial tasks have several functions. They serve to:

• ground a character in ‘the reality’ of the story, even when all sorts of unlikely things are happening around him
• give the reader/viewer a chance to zone out a little, as a break between scenes of greater emotional intensity
• tell the reader something about the character, in which we are expected to judge a character’s personality and outlook according to the way in which she approaches day-to-day activities
• foster reader identification, by having the character do the same things we all do, and this includes housework, ablutions and suchlike.

But Anne Tyler’s scene above is rather a lengthy paragraph, and if it happened on the first page of a novel I’d not be the slightest bit engaged. The thing is, we have already gotten to know Dave, and so we know that he is cleaning out his house months after his wife has died, and so the paragraph bears far more weight than the words, in isolation, might suggest.

Notice, too, the sentence length, which gets shorter and shorter until he finishes the task of clearing clutter. The sentences, like Dave’s life, have become tidier and less complicated.

A lot can be done with menial tasks.

The tasks themselves can set a tone, mainly because we’ve been primed for them. Vacuuming carpet or dusting (with a feather duster, in particular) sets a domestic (almost 1950s) tone, whereas clearing out a blocked drain conjures up images of something more sinister.

THIS IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS.

Joanna Trollope can write about a sponge floating in a dirty bucket of water (Second Honeymoon) but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Because unless menial description is placed at the right point in the story, and is of the right length, and is used for one of the reasons above, it’s no more than plodding old space filler.

The Riders by Tim Winton

WHAT HAPPENS

Fred Scully has just moved to Shannon, Ireland and is renovating a rundown eighteenth century cottage which stands beneath the ruins of an ancient Celtic castle. This was purchased on a whim. While doing the place up, Scully waits for his wife and daughter to join him. There, they will start a new life. Scully is presented as a simple, content man.

The wind ploughed about outside as he drank off his Guiness. The yeasty, warm porter expanded in his gut and he moaned with pleasure. Geez, Scully, he thought, you’re not hard to please. Just look at you. (p8)

We know something must happen to him to shake his world view. He will undergo a transformation from content to not content.

The wife (Jennifer) is back in Australia with their 7 year old daughter (Billie) tying up loose ends in their former home of Fremantle. The family has spent the last few years travelling. Scully worked as a laborer so that Jennifer could pursue her dream of being an artist. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the talent to be sufficiently good at any one thing.

Scully works long hours, painting, plumbing, re-wiring, and installing a new outside dunny. Nesting, in other words, and counting down the days until his partner joins him. In the meantime he receives scant news of what’s happening back home. Tension builds. The reader knows something bad is about to happen.

At about page 100, Scully finally goes to meet his wife and child at the airport. But the wife is not there. The child is silent and will not explain what has happened to her mother.

The mood of the novel shifts at this point as Scully reevaluates his future. He goes on a trip across Europe in search of his wife: Greek Isles, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam.

Friends he thought he knew when he was with his wife are now almost strangers who give every indication that they know far more than they are letting on. They pity him and want him gone, or else they show anger and contempt for him that he never knew existed.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

This is the title of a short story, and also the title of an anthology of eleven Alice Munro stories published 2001.

The title story is exquisite. I’m going to trawl through it, as usual, looking for specific wonderfulness.

PLOT

Two mischievous girls in smalltown Ontario decide to play a trick on a housekeeper. They write fake love letters from Sabitha’s father with little thought of consequences. They don’t expect the housekeeper to take leave of her position, move in with the father, get married and have a baby. The girls are never found out, but even after Sabitha has grown out of playing dirty tricks, she feels her own trick backfired somewhat. She never meant a bit of fun to result in the existence of a half-brother.

STRUCTURE

The viewpoint character changes with the scenes, not easy to achieve in a short story, though it can be argued that Munro’s short stories are something more akin to novellas.

1. The station agent has a terse exchange with a plain looking woman with bunched up teeth that look ready for an argument.

2. The woman is Johanna. We follow her now, as she goes, reluctantly, to buy an expensive dress suit. ‘”It’s likely what I’ll be married in,” said Johanna.’

3. We continue to follow Johanna as she leaves the dress shop and sees Mr McCauley across the street. At this point we are told how Johanna is the housekeeper for the McCauleys, and chief caregiver of his grand-daughter, Sabitha. Sabitha’s mother died a few years back.

4. Mr McCauley finds the note left by Johanna, informing him of her resignation and reasons for taking some of his furniture with her on the train. He visits the shoe shop, where he gets talking to the shoemaker and the daughter, Edith.

5. Turns out Edith is a friend of Sabitha. Now we’re at Edith’s house where we learn a little more about Edith.

6. Backstory turns to Sabitha now, and the mischief she and Edith have been up to: The pair have written fake letters to Johanna from Sabitha’s father. Johanna is led to believe that this is the beginning of a love affair. The reader knows that Johanna has given up her job, is poorly-educated, plain, and will soon be in great trouble when she gets to her destination and all is revealed.

7. A series of letters – some made up by the girls, some genuine, from Johanna. Just enough of the letters are included in the story to set up the unfortunate situation – or perhaps this was all of them. The reader doesn’t know. These letters are interspersed with details about Edith and Sabitha – two smalltown girls who are heading for trouble and who have not learnt to care about other people’s feelings.

8. ‘When Johanna got off the train there was nobody there to meet her.’ But she goes to Sabitha’s father’s anyhow. The father has by now been portrayed as an unreliable sort, reliant upon his father-in-law for money. Johanna finds the man very sick in bed, so she tends to him. She is a useful person, well-adjusted to this sort of care.

7. Eventually, POV switches to the sick father (Ken Boudreau) as he regains consciousness. He wonders what this woman is doing in his house, but doesn’t question the matter. He is glad to have the help.

8. Back story about Ken, about how he may be useless with money, but he is a generous sort. He lends money to friends, which is how he often finds himself short. By this point, both Johanna and Ken have been redeemed somewhat in the reader’s eyes.

9. Viewpoint shifts between Ken and Johanna and we see that they are a very good match. Johanna likes to sort people out, and Ken likes a good woman to sort him out. We also see why neither of them mentions the non-existent letters crafted by Ken’s daughter and friend.

10. ‘Mr McCauley died about two years after Johanna’s departure.’ With this sentence, we’ve been catapulted forward two years. This event provides a very good event around which to base a kind of epilogue: Johanna and Ken are married now, and have had a baby called Omar. At the funeral, we see that Sabitha and Edith have grown apart, have changed in appearance as well as in attitude, and neither of them can work out how their mischievous ways went undiscovered. ‘For where, in the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person called Omar?’

*

DIALOGUE

Indirect Dialogue

Munro makes use of direct dialogue interspersed with indirect dialogue in order to keep the pace of the story moving along.

The station master often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.

“Furniture?” he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. “Well now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?”

A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.

And again:

“What nationality would that be?”

She said she didn’t know.

It would have been more economical for the woman’s response to be direct dialogue: “I don’t know.” So why does Munro choose indirect dialogue for much of Johanna Parry’s speech in the first scene? Because it’s not yet time to get too close to the woman. Our empathy is supposed to lie with the station master, a kind, familiar character, trying his best to accommodate quite unreasonable demands from this bossy, unpleasant woman. Later, the reader will learn of Johanna Parry’s good points: she is a very good and loyal carer. But for now, it is best to stick to indirect dialogue, as if the station master is recounting this encounter to someone else, which indeed he does, later, when Mr McCauley wonders what’s happened to all the furniture that’s disappeared from his house.

Dialogue Tags

Munro’s dialogue tags focus less on tone of voice and facial expression, more on the impression created. In other words, she does not rely heavily upon cinematic dialogue tags. She interprets for us. This is economical writing, and Munro’s observations are wryly observed. We know exactly what Munro means, because we’ve encountered similar people ourselves.

She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words.

She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket.

The woman monkeyed around til she found the label, then read off a description of the material that Johanna wasn’t really listening to because she had caught at the hem to examine the workmanship.

The phrase ‘monkeyed around’ is particularly apt, because this is Johanna’s observation. She has little time for monkeying around, and is shrewd enough to see straight through a sales pitch. The phrase ostensibly belongs to a narrator, but here Munro achieves ‘deep penetration’ (Orson Scott Card’s words, not mine).

Accent

When a word is pronounced in a specific way and Munro needs us to know about it, this is how she sometimes does it:

Johanna said, “No.”

“Don’t you find it clique-y?”

Cleeky.

“Hard for an outsider to break in, is what I mean.”

*

Characterisation

The apt and economical characterisation lies in well-chosen details.

Johanna: (organised, prepared, practical)

“I might as well go ahead and try it on.”

This was what she’d come prepared for, after all. Clean underwear and fresh talcum powder under her arms.

Mr McCauley: (absent-minded)

She saw Mr McCauley walking in the opposite direction up the other side of the street. That was all right – even if he had met her head-on he would never have noticed the box she carried.

Edith: (sarcastic, old-beyond-her-years)

Mr McCauley said, “Honor thy mother and father, that thy days may be long in the -”

Edith said something not for him to hear. She said, “Shoe Repair Shop.”

See also: The Last Book I Loved (hint: It’s this one) by Emma Borges-Scott at The Rumpus.

Writing a Compare and Contrast Essay

BASIC TEMPLATE FOR THE COMPARE AND CONTRAST ESSAY (doc)

TWO SHORT STORIES ABOUT FATHER AND SON (doc)

I think these two short stories would be most appropriate for study by high school aged boys:

1. The Reunion by John Cheever

This story was published in The New Yorker and is available as an audio download for free, here.

2. The Hoaxer by Walter Kirn

This story is published in 12 Short Stories and Their Making, edited by Paul Mandelbaum. This book includes an interview with Walter Kirn about why he wrote this story.

*

Focus Questions (for discussion in small groups)

What are the stories you used to believe as a child which you no longer believe because you’re grown?

Santa, Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are the obvious ones. Did your caregivers or grandparents ever try to convince you of anything you later understood to be false?

• If you don’t eat meat you won’t grow hairs on your chest.
• If you eat your crusts your hair will turn curly.
• If you play outside after your bath you’ll catch a cold.
• If you eat your carrots you’ll see in the dark.

Which stories are you told now that you are older? How much of this do you really believe?

• If you work hard you’ll get what you want in life.
• Everyone needs a good education. Stay in school for as long as you can.
• If you listen to your music too loud you’ll go deaf.
• If you play too many computer games your eyes will go bad.
• If you get drunk at the weekends you’ll die young.
• If you drink and drive you’ll kill yourself and others.

What will you tell your own children? Will you let them believe in Santa? Where do you draw the line?

Are you more of a Believer, or more of a Skeptic? What do you think about:

• UFOs
• crop circles
• The Lochness Monster
• Ghosts

Are you more or less skeptical than your parents and grandparents?

What have you learnt about the adults in your life since you were a child?

Did you used to believe things about your adults that you no longer think are true?

Are there members of your family and extended family who embarrass you? Why? Do you agree with the way your adults treat other people?

Who are you most similar to in your family? Whose does your public behaviour most resemble? What about your behaviour in private, within the family?

What, if anything, would you change about the important man in your life?

Just After Sunset – short stories by Stephen King

Michael Chabon, editor of McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales, calls Stephen King ‘the Last Master of the Plotted Short Story’.

Here’s what King himself says on that same issue:

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

He says plots are artificial but short stories are organisms which grow out of characters and situations. He says a short story can be stripped down to three basic elements:

1. Narration – moving the story from A to B

2. Description – creating a sensory reality

3. Dialogue – bringing characters to life

This is what he has to say about the short-story as an art-form:

‘It never occurred to me that writing short stories is a fragile craft, one that can be forgotten if it isn’t used almost constantly.’ – Stephen King, in the Introduction to his short story collection: ‘Just After Sunset’.

I agree with him on that. With short stories, a writer has to keep their hand in. Even a writing break of a few months can send you stale.

2. THE GINGERBREAD GIRL

I would call this a novella rather than a short story. The scenes are divided into chapters in much the same way as a novel would be. Each chapter has its own title: a creepy quotation from somewhere inside that chapter. I like the technique.

I like the idea of turning a popular children’s fairy tale into the horror genre, and I think most all of them can be rewritten King-style!

What happens:

Emmy’s baby has died of cot death so she takes up running marathon distances to cope with the pain of loss. Her marriage breaks down. She decides to move to Vermillion Key, where her father lives nearby and where she continues to run along the beach for miles each day.

Then Deke Hollis turns up. Deke is an old fellow who runs the drawbridge between Vermillion and the mainland. He is friends with her Dad and warns Emmy to steer clear of Jim Pickering. Pickering lives at number 366 and always has a different ‘niece’ with him (young, attractive women). He made his money in computers.

Right after that, Emmy finds a dead body in the open trunk of Pickering’s Mercedes. The body has been stabbed. There’s blood and shit everywhere. She blacks out.

Next, Emmy finds herself bound up in Pickering’s house. He’s torturing her, threatening to cut out her eye-ball. For some reason he decides not to kill her then and there. He leaves the room. The pace slows right down as King describes Emmy’s attempt to escape in fine detail. Her strong legs push against the duct tape securing her to the chair and she can hear a sucking noise as it lifts. Tension is created because the serial killer is about to come back into the room.

In the next chapter, the escape attempt continues. She’s almost broken free when Pickering arrives home. There is a scuffle. The crazy guy gets mad because he falls against the fridge and hurts his head. Emmy thumps him good with the arm of her chair. Finally, she stabs him.

Emmy explores his house, finds photographs in his bedroom and so on. But Pickering’s not quite dead. He’s coming to get her. With him on the other side of a door, Emmy throws a piece of furniture through the window and escapes through the jagged hole.

In Chapter 9 there’s a bit of back story about what a tom-boy Em had been as a girl. This comes in handy as she jumps ten feet to the patio from the window. Pickering appears above her but quickly disappears – he’s coming after her. She runs away.

At the beginning of Chapter 10 she is still running. We’re not sure if this is continuous action or if there has been a time-jump to a more serene time. But after a few sentences we realise he is still chasing her. He chases her along the beach; she is fitter than he is. Eventually she meets a Latino who only speaks Spanish – each of them try to explain in broken Spanish that the other is crazy. The Latino gets stabbed in the mouth.

This part is reminiscent of The Gingerbread Man:

She tried as hard as she could and knew it wasn’t going to be enough. She could outrun an old lady, she could outrun an old man, she could outrun her poor sad husband, but she couldn’t outrun the mad bastard behind her.

She goes into the water. Pickering almost dies chasing her into the surf but resurfaces just as she hopes he has drowned. Finally he sinks with a ‘glub’. She is happy and applauds. She walks home.

*

This story was one of King’s earliest, and there are places where the prose feels clunky:

Thunder rumbled. Almost directly overhead now. The courtyard was empty except for

the car (and the blond in the trunk, there was her).

This doesn’t work for me:

‘Even as her rational mind was telling her that was bullshit, the part of her that specialized in rationalization was nodding frantically.’

‘To Em, he looked like he was trying to play creep-mouse with her. He also looked crazy.’

(I had to look up creep-mouse: “Here, comes, the, creep, mouse, from, the, barn, into, the, house”.) What stands out to me here is that King decided to tell rather than show how the man looked crazy. My instinct would have been to give a few specific details which show the reader he looks crazy. Maybe King just wanted to get on with the story.

I don’t feel this story works very well. The reader must avoid certain questions to enjoy it:

• Why is Pickering crazy?
• Why did he leave the stabbed woman in the trunk of his car for Emmy to find?
• Why didn’t the police find him first, if people around the neighbourhood don’t trust him? Surely he’s under surveillance in a small town.
• Why didn’t Emmy just run into someone’s house instead of all along the beach? Where was everyone… etc.

But it pays not to look for inconsistencies when reading because stories can often be picked to bits. I envy those readers who can suspend disbelief better than I can.

At the end, King writes:

In a horror movie, Pickering would make one last stand: either come roaring out of the surf or be waiting for her, dripping but still his old lively self, in the bedroom closet when she got back. But this wasn’t a horror movie, it was her life.

I wonder if King thought of ending his story like that before changing his mind. That would be too clichéd, after all. Instead, he points out that his ending is not clichéd. It is almost Chekhovian, with Emmy walking home. We are left to wonder what happened (Did the police contact her? Did she get back with her husband?). I prefer endings like this, especially when preceded by drama bordering on melodrama.

*

GRADUATION AFTERNOON

From Postscripts Magazine, issue #10 (2007)

Anthologised in Just After Sunset (2008)

Characters

Stephen King likes to set up the characters with a little backstory before embarking upon the rest of the story. He manages this where other writers might fail:

1. Because he has a large, loyal following who expect this of him

2. His characterisations are interesting in their own right

3. All the while he’s foreshadowing what’s to come.

Janice Gandolewski

Will graduate from Fairhaven High in two weeks’ time. She has a well-off boyfriend called Buddy. She is good-looking and smart enough to pull-off a relationship with a boy socially out of her own league, because she is ‘a townie’.

Bruce ‘Buddy’ Hope

Buddy goes to ‘The Academy’ rather than Fairhaven High. He lives in a place ‘too big to be a house, too small to be an estate’. There is a tennis court, swimming pool These details alone tell us that Buddy comes from a rich family – though not super rich – there is a nouveau riche whiff about a large house going by the name of ‘Harborlights’. The Hope family lives in Connecticut. Crucially, they have a good view over New York.

Gran Hope

Doesn’t like Janice because she’s worried Buddy will get her pregnant, and then the family will be stuck with a woman of lower class than themselves. She says what she thinks with little self-editing: ‘If it enters her head, it exits her mouth.’

Mrs Hope

A minor character who serves only to slap Janice near the end.

Story

The viewpoint character is Janice and we see the story unfold from her eyes. She and her boyfriend, from each from a different social milieu are about to go their separate ways. The story takes place at Buddy’s graduation party – hers will be much smaller, two weeks later. She will then go to ‘educational halls far less grand or traditional’ to become a journalist.

Through Janice’s imaginings of the future, this story covers a much longer timespan than the gradution party itself; she lets us see into their imagined future:

Short term:

‘Tonight the kids will go out and party down in a more righteous mode. Alcohol and not a few tabs of X will be ingested…’

Long term:

‘By the age of thirty-five or so, she guesses he will have lost most or all of his enthusiasm for eating pussy and will be more interested in collecting coins. Or refinishing Colonial rockers, like his father does out in the—ahem—carriage-house.’

Time is flexible in this short-story, flitting from the past (via flashbacks), the present (what’s happening at the party) and the imagined future. Nothing much is happening, and this helps flesh out the story, to make it an interesting one, and then:

‘Bruce’s mother comes out on the patio and stands next to [Janice], shading her eyes. She is wearing a new blue dress. A tea-dress. Her shoulder brushes Janice’s and they look south at the crimson mushroom climbing, eating up the blue. Smoke is rising from around the edges—dark purple in the sunshine—and then being pulled back in. The red of the fireball is too intense to look at, it will blind her, but Janice cannot look away. Water is gushing down her cheeks in broad warm streams, but she cannot look away.’

From here they can see that New York City has been bombed.

The story quickly draws to a close, after Janice is slapped by Buddy’s mother for ‘joking’ about a nuke. In slow-motion, we see Gran walking down the path like a ‘dispossessed warhag’.

Theme

The epiphanic moment takes place over the final paragraph, as Janice realises the impact of the bomb:

‘She thinks about the hike Bruce and his friends won’t be taking. She thinks about the party at Holy Now! they won’t be attending tonight. She thinks about the records by Jay-Z and Beyoncé and The Fray they won’t be listening to—no loss there. And she thinks of the country music her dad listens to in his pickup truck on his way to and from work. That’s better, somehow. She will think of Patsy Cline or Skeeter Davis and in a little while she may be able to teach what is left of her eyes not to look.’

The final sentence is ambiguous. We don’t know exactly why Janice thinks this way – why she mulls over trivial things like pop music rather than the (unmentioned) fact that the Janice’s home and school has been destroyed in an instant.

This story is like the modern, horror equivalent of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. It is about class differences and how little these things really matter in the end, when we’re all facing death. In both of these stories, the viewpoint character responds to death in the final paragraph, and is to be interpreted by the reader.

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

Do you have to like the viewpoint character of a story in order to like the story? This is something that depends a lot on the reader. Some of us can like a story even if we dislike every single character within. Sometimes, disliking a character is, in its own way, one form of LIKING a character. In fiction as in real life there are people we love to hate.

I find Karim Amir, the viewpoint character of The Buddha of Suburbia, entirely unlikeable:

• He’s arrogant.
• He’s morally flexible.
• He’s passive – things happen to him.
• He’s a name-dropper.
• He’s dishonest – a thieving little bastard, given the chance.

His father’s even worse.

So why do I like Karim so much? How did Hanif Kureishi manage to craft an award winning novel, in first person point-of-view, no less, about this slimy little creature?

Humour, I think. As a first-person narrator, Karim Amir has the ability to laugh at himself. The novel is set in the 1970s (and was published in 1990), so we are to imagine an older man looking back with some scorn at his younger self. We, as readers, are allowed to join in. The older narrator (Hanif Kureishi’s unique voice) is extremely observant and funny, which makes up for Karim’s numerous other short-comings.

Not everyone would find this novel funny, but I found it remarkably clever. How did Kureishi do it? What exactly makes him so funny? Here’s my own analysis of it:

1. Keen observations of characters, focusing on their unusual and contradictory behaviour.

Take our introduction to Mr Haroon Amir, Karim’s repugnant but loveable father:

‘…He quickly stripped to his vest and underpants.

“Fetch the pink towel,” he said to me.

I did so. Dad spread it on the bedroom floor and fell on to his knees. I wondered if he’d suddenly taken up religion. But no, he placed his arms beside his head and kicked himself into the air.

“I must practise,” he said in a stifled voice.

“Practise for what?” I said reasonably, watching him with interest and suspicion.

“They’ve called me for the damn yoga Olympics,” he said. He easily became sarcastic, Dad.’

At the most basic level, Kureishi has painted a comical, slap-stick sort of scene. The towel could have been any colour, but it is pink – a feminine symbol. Karim wonders if his father has ‘taken up religion’ – phrased in such a way that he might take up religion as easily as he takes up a sport or hobby. This is even more funny when you consider the title: Karim’s father IS the ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ – an ironic title given that we know, indirectly, from this little aside, that he is not in the least religious. Not really.

We know from Haroon’s sarcasm that we are in for a treat with such an eccentric character and we are; throughout the novel, the father never fails to surprise. Karim, our narrator, sees straight through the irony, and starts to call his father ‘God’.

And Eva, Haroon’s subsequent lover, is introduced like this:

‘…I thought we’d turned up at the wrong place. The only thing she wore was a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan, and her hair was down, and out, and up. She’d darkened her eyes with kohl so she looked like a panda. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted alternately green and red.’

And right away we get the feel for this eccentric woman – a perfect match for Haroon. Of course he can’t help falling in love with her. Notice Kureishi’s attention to detail, right down to the colour of her toenails. Her hair is both ‘up’ and ‘down’ at once; we know it’s all over the place.

2. Slight exaggerations which nevertheless ring true

Karim’s mother is in direct contrast to his father and it’s little wonder they’re about to separate. The father is liberated, free, unconcerned with appearances, impulsive and unreliable. His mother wears ‘an apron with flowers on it’ and is mostly ‘a timid and compliant person’, overly concerned about the neighbours. When she comes into the bedroom and sees her husband practising yoga, she says:

‘”Oh God, Haroon, all the front of you’s sticking out like that and everyone can see!” She turned to me. “You encourage him to be like this. At least pull the curtains!”

“It’s not necessary, Mum. There isn’t another house that can see us for a hundred yards – unless they’re watching through binoculars.”

“That’s exactly what they are doing,” she said.’

In a wonderfully understated way, Mrs Amir shows us that she is paranoid – just a little more paranoid than most real-life examples, but not so wacko that we don’t recognise the mother’s foibles in ourselves, or in people we know.

3. Witty observations, philosophical in nature, that we haven’t heard before. We may have heard similar in others, but these characters twist them somehow.

For example:

‘I’d discovered in life that if you’re too eager others tend to get less eager. And if you’re less eager it tends to make others more eager. So the more eager I was the less eager I seemed.’

Most people’s common-sense says that the more eager you are the more you will encourage eagerness in others, but Karim thinks the direct opposite. This is so amusing because he might well be right. Perhaps we are the overenthusiastic fools.

Other characters surprise us too, with their unusual views:

‘“Don’t show us up, Karim,” (Mum) said, continuing to watch TV. “You look like Danny La Rue.”

“What about Auntie Jean, then?” I said. “She’s got blue hair.”

“It’s dignified for older women to have blue hair,” Mum said.’

4. Simple hyperbole.

‘It took me several months to get ready: I changed my entire outfit three times.’

Understatement is used to similar effect, like when Karim meets Charlie, his future step-brother and lover:

‘… he lowered his head one thirty-secondth of an inch in acknowledgement of me.’

In an instant, we know that Charlie considers himself holier than thou. Also, there’s no such word as ‘secondth’; the word itself has comic value because it’s impossible to pronounce.

5. Original ways of seeing the familiar.

‘I’d washed my face in Old Spice’.

(Karim is not old enough to know how these things are really used.)

6. Comic dialogue

One source of wonderfully colourful dialogue is Changez, straight off the boat from India, brought to London to marry one of Karim’s lovers and make a botch-up job of working in a shop.

‘As Anwar was talking Changez turned to him and said, “I thought it would be much more freezing in England than this.”

Anwar was bewildered and irritated by this non sequitur.

“But I was speaking about the price of vegetables,” said Anwar.

“What for?” asked Changez in bewilderment. “I am mainly a meat-eater.”’

We can tell Changez is speaking in non-native, Indian inflected English. We can tell this simply by the arrangement of his sentences. He also gets his idioms a bit wrong:

‘”You’ve hit the nail exactly on the nose!”’

Changez has an idiosyncrasy in his speech where he often puts ‘yaar’ at the end of a sentence. This all gives him colour and makes him distinct from the other characters.  Note that each of the characters has some object or idiosyncrasy associated with them: Karim is obsessed with tea, Haroon with Chinese paraphenalia, Auntie Jean with gin and so on.

7. Unusual repetition

‘She just eyed me steadily, as if I were some kind of criminal rapist. What was her fucking problem, that’s what I wanted to know.

“What’s your problem?”

“You weren’t there,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. You just didn’t show up.”

Where wasn’t I?

“Where?” I said.

“Do I have to remind you? At the demonstration, Karim.”’

Here, the narrator treats us to some internal dialogue, pre-empting his dialogue which follows immediately after. This lets us right into his mind – we can see how confused he is.

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These are some of Kureishi’s techniques at the most detailed level. But what mainly makes this novel so funny is the sum total of completely bizarre characters thrown in with each other. We see them interact and react and we see ourselves in them.

That’s why I admire this novel so much.

Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield

Leila has turned 18, so must now attend balls in order to find a husband. Her city cousins, The Sheridans, introduce Leila to this exciting, dream-like world.

HER FIRST BALL TEXT (pdf, with line numbering)

HER FIRST BALL ANNOTATED (pdf)

HER FIRST BALL ANNOTATED (doc)

Her First Ball Close Reading Test (doc)

photo by itspaulkelly (flickr, creative commons)

The Fly by Katherine Mansfield

THE FLY TEXT (PDF, with line numbers)

THE FLY TEXT (doc)

THE FLY ANNOTATED (PDF)

THE FLY ANNOTATED (doc, feel free to modify)

The Story

The reader is introduced to a man called only ‘The Boss’, watches him entertain a former employee (Old Woodifield), hears Old Woodifield mention the Boss’ dead son, then watches the boss torture and kill a fly.

Narration

This story is typical of Mansfield’s story-telling technique: The reader is moved through a series of incidents, carried along with the action. It is no more than action until the reader discovers causal relationships.  Honeymoon, The Voyage and Prelude make use of the same narrative technique. Before long, the reader begins to notice certain positionings that form repetitive patterns that  suggest  possible relationships:

Character

• Mr Woodifield is consistently described as a baby even though he is aged and sick.
• Mr Woodifield is consistently contrasted with the Boss, five years older, but still rosy and strong.
• The Boss is immensely proud of all his possessions, most of them recently obtained. His geniality is an expression of his feelings of superiority.
• Mr Woodifield’s perfectly normal response to his own dead son is set next to the Boss’ strange detachment.
• After Mr Woodifield leaves, readers are brought inside the mind of the Boss as he reflects on his son and relationship with him. What the boss says is in strange contrast to what he appears to be. He says that life had no other meaning except for his son and that when he heard of his son’s death 6 years ago, he had left his office ‘a broken man, with his life in ruins’. But the reader sees he does not look like a broken man and his life does not appear to be in ruins at all.

Imagery

The Fly

When the Boss begins to play with the fly, birth imagery appears and readers remembers that Woodifield was described as a baby. As the fly struggles to recover from the persistent blobs of ink the boss drops on him, readers understand that the fly is a symbol for man and struggle is man’s struggle.

Flys also ‘fly’. They can soar through the heavens, escaping earth-bound reality. But eventually flies die too. There is the ordinary lifecycle: birth, youth, old age, death. There is struggle. But along with the struggle there are moments of flight, desires, hopes, aspirations.

The Boss

What role does the Boss play? He appears to be god, giving life and taking it away. This is typical behaviour for him. The Boss is given no name – he is known simply as ‘Boss’ – authority, father figure to both Woodifield and Macey. He gives a little drop of whiskey to Woodifield, insisting it wouldn’t hurt a child, even though alcohol is forbidden to the old man. Did the Boss drop similar metaphorical blobs of ink on his son? Perhaps. The Boss had insisted that the son follow in his footsteps, thereby providing meaning for his own life.

The Boss has hoped to accomplish immortality by living through his son but a greater power than him has dropped a blob of ink on the son and on the Boss. Realising the son’s death for the first time, the Boss acts out a symbolic drama, assuming the role of God.

The Final Sentence

The story comes together with the revelation in the last sentence:

‘For the life of him [the Boss], he could not remember.’

The words ‘for the life of him’ are chosen carefully. At this moment he has an intimate though subconscious knowledge of his own mortality. For the reader, things are set back in balance.

photo by jpctalbot (flickr, creative commons)

For more extended analysis see enotes.

The Wind Blows by Katherine Mansfield

THE WIND BLOWS TEXT (pdf, with line numbering)

THE WIND BLOWS TEXT (doc, to add your own notes)

THE WIND BLOWS ANNOTATED (pdf)

THE WIND BLOWS ANNOTATED (doc, feel free to modify)

THE STORY

On the surface level this story is about an adolescent girl (Matilda) who wakes up one morning, nervous and tense. While the wind blows outside, she gets ready for her music lesson. Before she leaves she has a tiff with her mother. She has her music lesson, goes home, meets her brother walks with him to the sea. They stand together and watch a ship in the water. Then she imagines a time in the future when she and her brother will be leaving their home on a ship like this one.

On the metaphorical level the wind is an extended metaphor for the confused feelings of adolescence.

photo by miss mass (flickr)

In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield

book cover by Penguin

Some critics of Mansfield have said that the narrator in these stories is too childish and immature, and assume that Manasfield herself, at this point in her life, was synonymous with the narrator.

But it would be a mistake to think that NARRATOR = AUTHOR. The two are quite separate. The narrator in the Pension stories is a complex character, interacting with the other characters. If interpreted this way, the stories in this anthology are far more subtle than sometimes considered to be.

Seven of the stories in this anthology are related to one another. Taken together, they present a gallery of people presented as typically German. The narrator is a young Englishwoman, whose involvement in ‘the German colony’ undergoes a ‘developmental pattern’. This first person narrator is also the protagonist. In each story she is pitted against the Germans. Although there are sub-plots, the major struggle is between this narrator and the other people.

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A Birthday

A BIRTHDAY TEXT (doc)

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A Blaze

A BLAZE TEXT (doc)

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At Lehmann’s

AT LEHMANN’S TEXT (doc)

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Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding

FRAU BRECHENMACHER ATTENDS A WEDDING TEXT (doc)

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Frau Fischer

FRAU FISCHER TEXT (doc)

FRAU FISCHER ANNOTATED (doc)

FRAU FISCHER TEXT (PDF)

FRAU FISCHER ANNOTATED (PDF)

In the first three stories of In a German Pension, the narrator has either been over-powered, wanting to become part of the larger group, or intimately drawn into it. In this story she rejects the group of German women and what they consider the proper way for a woman to live her life. Frau Fischer represents German women in general.

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Germans At Meat

GERMANS AT MEAT TEXT (doc)

GERMANS AT MEAT ANNOTATED (doc)

GERMANS AT MEAT TEXT (PDF)

GERMANS AT MEAT ANNOTATED (PDF)

This is the first story in this anthology. The Germans are characterised by their behaviour at table. Note that the word is ‘meat’, not ‘meal’, suggesting a certain brutality: butchery, blood-lust.

A comparison is immediately set up. The narrator is vegetarian.

The entire story takes place at the dinner table. The English narrator, along with the other characters, is on some sort of health jaunt.

The central symbol is the food, made clear from the first sentence:

‘Bread soup was placed upon the table.’

Bread soup is heavy and filling, unlike clear broth. Whereas the Germans are very interested in food, the narrator is not. She is married but has not noticed what sort of meat her husband enjoys most.

Herr Rat is not married.

“I have had all I wanted from women without marriage.”

His egocentricity and selfishness are revealed.

During the meal, the narrator’s fusiness is contrasted with the vulgarity of the Germans.

• Herr Rat blows on his soup before eating it.
• The traveller from North Germany says he can’t keep sauerkraut down.
• The widow picks her teeth with her hairpin and talks about childbirth.
• The traveller speaks his potato with a knife.
• Herr Hoffman talks about sweating and wipes himself with the dinner napkin.

The narrator tries her best to steer the conversation in a more genteel direction. The Germans find her too prissy. She doesn’t hold her own when her entire country is accused of eating too much, and they ridicule her secret regarding how to make a good cup of tea.

The conversation descends into a political discussion.

The story ends when the narrator retreats, closing the door behind her.

Standing alone, there are few subtle strokes in this story.

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The Advanced Lady

THE ADVANCED LADY TEXT (doc)

THE LUFT BAD ANNOTATED (doc)

THE LUFT BAD TEXT (PDF)

THE LUFT BAD ANNOTATED (PDF)

This is the last of the stories about the characters at the Pension, told in the first person narration. The guests go for an excursion to an inn in the countryside. The Advanced Lady is writing a book, which impresses everyone but the narrator.

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The Baron

THE BARON TEXT (doc)

THE BARON ANNOTATED (doc)

THE BARON TEXT (pdf)

THE BARON ANNOTATED (pdf)

This is the second story in the anthology. Food is an important part but the focus is on sickness. The German guests are in awe of a member of Royalty who stays at the pension because of his nerves. The English narrator, too, finds the contrast between his appearance and his status fascinating.

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The Child Who Was Tired

THE CHILD WHO WAS TIRED TEXT (doc)

This was the first story Mansfield had published in Europe.

Mansfield is often said to be heavily influenced by Chekhov. In 1951, E.M. Almedingen said that this story, published 1910, was a copy of Chekhov’s Spat Khochestsia, translated as Sleepyhead. Chekhov’s story was available in 1903, though there was no evidence Mansfield had read it then. Parallels do exist.

In both stories, a servant smothers a baby to death. His is set in Moscow, hers is set in Germany. Mansfield adds more children to the family. She names one of them Anton (Anton Chekhov?).

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The Luft Bad

THE LUFT BAD TEXT (doc)

THE LUFT BAD ANNOTATED (doc)

THE LUFT BAD TEXT (PDF)

THE LUFT BAD ANNOTATED (PDF)

The narrator self-consciously bathes with her German companions at the spa. The sickness metaphor continues.

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The Modern Soul

THE MODERN SOUL TEXT (doc)

THE MODERN SOUL ANNOTATED (doc)

THE MODERN SOUL TEXT (PDF)

THE MODERN SOUL ANNOTATED (PDF)

The story opens with a man squeezing the narrator’s hands. She not only squeezes back metaphorically speaking, but eventually gets very angry and takes vengeful action before she withdraws. This one is different in plot movement, with a tripartite structure.

1. The narrator sits with a German professor in the garden.

2. A musicale is given by some guests for the benefit of afflicted Catholic infants.

3. The narrator and Fraulein Sonia have a conversation on a walk together.

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The Sister of the Baroness

THE SISTER OF THE BARONESS TEXT (doc)

THE SISTER OF THE BARONESS ANNOTATED (doc)

THE SISTER OF THE BARONESS TEXT (PDF)

THE SISTER OF THE BARONESS ANNOTATED (PDF)

This is the third story in the anthology. The characters are the same as in the first two stories but now the English narrator is beginning to fit in. In this, another member of royalty arrives. Themes of The Baron are continued.

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The Swing of the Pendulum

THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM TEXT (doc)