Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, Nadine Gordimer was one of the noteworthiest chroniclers of oppressive life in South African apartheid, a system that crippled humanity. But in her novels and short stories there was much more than writing about the injustices of racial segregation; her concern was also on relationships and this worldwide confusion of human values. 

Rereading The Late Bourgeois World this week, I´ve rediscovered Liz´s story in a novella overtly political - but also of moral dilemmas and search of the self - which makes use of imprisonment as a metaphor of the human condition.

Reading and enjoying The Canterville Ghost

Some of my 2nd year ESO students (Compulsory Secondary Education) have read and enjoyed Oscar Wilde´s The Canterville Ghost.  They have drawn some comics, an amusing tool to foster their written expression and communicative skills, and searched about the great Irish writer´s work. Good excuse today, Saint Patrick´s Day, to show it to you.

"Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin. After that he wrote lots of plays like The Duchess of Padua, poems like Ravenna and tales like The Canterville Ghost." (Irene Cagigas)

"Nobody wanted to live in that house because they said that it was haunted. But Americans are very practical and the Otis family didn´t believe in ghosts" (Selena Martín)

"The tale teaches you many lessons but it is disappointing too." (Sara Cecín)

"Strange things happen and it´s exciting." (Nahia Martínez)

"It´s fantastic to practice my reading in English." (Paula Arce)

"When you read you feel in another place. With books you can travel around the world. When we read we can´t see the words, we see pictures, we see the story in our head. Books make you think about the world, the humans, the animals and our future. Books are our world, our culture, our past, our present and our future... Don´t stop reading, please!" (Cristina Pérez de las Cuevas)

The act of reading according to Doris Lessing

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”     (The Golden Notebook, 1962) 

 Doris Lessing, another Nobel Prize for Literature who has just passed away...  The image of her, sitting on her doorstep in London, surrounded by the journalists who had just communicated her the news when coming back from grocery shopping is now a legend. The Swedish Academy had phoned her home a few hours earlier, but she wasn´t in ("Oh! Christ! ... I couldn´t care less", she said to them).  Something which also said a lot of her character was the fact of having turned down the offer of becoming Dame of the British Empire because "a British Empire no longer exists". However, there was no problem in accepting the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature.

In her novels and short stories, she explored a great variety of topics ranging from the mystery of being female in a male-dominated world or the degradation of the educative systems nowadays to racism in British colonial Africa or her disillusionment with communism.

Doris Lessing was one of the most vividly representative literary figures of our times, and she will be best remembered for her semiautobiographical Children of Violence and the experimental The Golden Notebook. Many readers will sorrow the loss of her courageous outspokenness, her intellectual restlessness and fierce curiosity about the changing world around us.