I Should Live so Long: One Hundred Years of Solitude

I learn foreign languages with the aim of reading the literature. The drawback is it takes years. In fact,  the only language with which I feel confident with is French, which I  learned at school. I remember a  holiday in France with  no access to English books when I read 'Madam Bovary'. There must have been lots of words I didn't know, but it helped that I'd already read an English version.

 

I was pleased when I saw an entry  in the U3A handbook earlier this year : Argentinian Francisco  offered  to lead weekly two-hour sessions of advanced Spanish in his home. It took months to get together enough people of the right level and  agree a class  time but after a launch at the Royal Standard pub in  Blackheath it was settled. Now we get together  at 3pm to 5pm on Wednesdays at Francisco's house in Charlton - six members, including Francisco, but usually only about four or five people at each meeting.

The first half hour  is taken up with translating into Spanish a piece from the freebie Metro Then we do it the other way round with a Spanish freebie, called El Iberico. 

 

After a ten minute chat-in-English break we read and translate,  A Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien anos de Soledad) by Columbian  author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

The extraordinary tale tells the story of human development through the history of a small town and its leading family. Jose Arcadio Bendia has two sons of quite different temperament and abilities -one is serious and interested like his father in new discoveries and inventions, the other is a more sensual individual of great sexual appetite. It's a pattern that's repeated over the generations. The women are subordinate but  strong individuals who  deride the hair-brained schemes of their men,   and who sometimes go AWOL.  

 

The style is 'magic realism', which means bizarre things happen, sometimes the result of exaggerated reactions and confusing timeshifts. Gypsies pay an annual visit to the isolated town of Macondo, appear each year with some new invention from the outide world, such as a block of ice or a flying carpet. Some events are starting and some are funny but all are recounted in a style that piles on details in  hypnotic sentences. When you read you become fully immersed and convinced by the author's vision of his world .

 

 We don't go very fast - on average four pages each week, because of the method of taking it in turns to read and translate a passage. It's the sort of thing that was tedious in a school classroom but which works very well with a small group of adults, especially when one is a native Latin American speaker.

 

Some of the group use dictionaries, and I initially downloaded the text to my Kindle, so I could use the built-in dictionary. It's easier just to position a cursor and click than to search a print dictionary, but the drawback is that the Kindle version doesn't have page numbers. I use a 'parallel text' method instead - I read a page in Spanish, putting pencil crosses over words I don't know, then I read the English version, writing the translation over the crosses.  

 

So far so good, excpet for a minor setback - Francisco's three sons have clubbed together to buy their father a ticket to Argentina . He'll be away for three weeks. As we 've only reached page 60  of this 500 page novel, I only hope I live long enough to finish it.

 

Almost Promethean: U3A London Region Creative Writing Study Day at Canada Water Library 19/4/2012

 Had Lewis Carroll and  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn been partners in building design  they might well have come up with  Canada Water Library. In fact it was designed by Piers Gough, and opened in November 2011. It's said to have solved the problem of how to build a library  on too small a site, as if the fact of a new library were not miracle enough in a time of widespread closures.  Inside,  it was warm and cosy; not at all like the set for a Murnau film.  

The U3A ‘Day for Aspiring, Self-published and Published Writers’ attracted some 40 enthusiasts, from London and other regions. I know because I was i/c of ticking off names.

National Adviser for Creative Writing, Maggie Smith, whose creative writing classes I was once lucky enough to attend,  facilitated. Gwen Wright, U3A London Regional Chair, welcomed guest speakers Ian Skillicorn, Director of  National Short Story Week, and   Catherine King, author of popular fiction novels. There was an opportunity over a buffet lunch for members to buy books and CDs as well as chat informally with speakers and fellow writers.

Ian Skillicorn's past was in non-fiction writing and translating. He returned from Italy to found Short Story Radio.com in 2006, a project that attracted Arts Council funding and content development in 2009. In 2010 he conceived  the idea for National Short Story Week.  The third annual events will take place in on November 12^th-18^th 2012 and will be celebrated in about 25% of UK libraries. In addition to adult entries, this year 250 schools will be invited to submit entries. More about this, plus downloadable podcasts, can be found at http://thewritelines.co.uk/blog/

Ian had brought along a CD  of short stories,  Women Aloud, to be sold in aid of the Helena Kennedy Foundation (Further details at www.hkf.org.uk) Contents  include stories by  Katie Fforde, Sue Moorcroft and our next guest speaker, Catherine King, in a two-disk compendium. 

A new Short Story Network will be launched on May 1^st with links to organisations such as the National Association of Writers, the Amateur Theatre Network and Writing Magazine.

Ian’s  talk  was titled: What Makes a Good Story?  with an emphasis on writing for radio. Fascinating, but as Ian uses his material for teaching I can't say anymore.

 Catherine King's talk stressed  the need for market awareness. From a scientific background ('I was no good at English in school'), she began writing her popular sagas after retirement. They are set in Industrial Revolution Yorkshire, and feature strong heroines who survive the hardships that were the common lot of working class women in the nineteenth century. From her first novel, Women of  Iron (2006)  Catherine went on to develop the theme through six further works, the latest a story set in the fashionable Edwardian era with a heroine who is in domestic service.

 Catherine was enthusiastic about the income libraries generate for  authors in payments for lending rights especially with  adaptation to audio and  large-print versions.

The development of eBooks was  was a marvellous marketing outlet for writers at a time when publishers are economising on  paper publications.

Her inspirational attitude, as someone remarked, could be summed up as’ If I can do it, anybody can’. There are two things publishers want, she was told: a good page-turning story, and a voice, which could be summed up as the writers ‘take’ on life.  

Catherine  said writers  should network , especially on occasions when agents might be present. Find your own tribe, she said, and join events and associations that would relate to your chosen genre. She talked of ‘rubbing shoulders’ and ‘the elevator pitch’ or imaginary thirty-second slot in which to summarise your novel.

The afternoon session continued with practical writing exercises conducted by Maggie Smith. The results were first read aloud in small groups, and  the best were shared with the appreciative audience. All agreed the programme had the right balance of learning, writing and socialising –the current buzzword, ‘networking’ seeming inadequate to describe the sense  of camaraderie that characterised the day.