Remember book clubs? Ever been a member and getting a new book delivered home once a month, to be read or at least to help fill the empty bookcase in your living room? It was late 1990s and I and my then-wife were members of the Great Finnish Book Club. I don’t remember for how long, most likely only for a year. The monthly selections must have mostly been mediocre: there are not that many books left from that period in my bookshelves. (Or my ex’s.)
There were exceptions. First, Dersu Uzala by Vladimir Arsenyev; it was made into a truly great movie by Akira Kurosawa. A potential reread by yours truly.
Second, Evening Class (translated as ‘Italian illat’, ’Italian nights’) by Maeve Binchy. My #1 romantic book of all times.
Evening Class is full of sweet characters who are thrown together for various reasons to study Italian in an evening class in Dublin in the early 1990s. There is Kathy who works very hard at school and whose much older sister Fran supports her above and beyond her duties, sacrificing her own happiness.
Then there is Bill who is the nicest person there is, working at a bank, loving Lizzie and wanting to get ahead in life. How about a job overseas, in Italy? Lizzie loves nice things (also Barry), but loving nice things means having spending money or new credit cards to be maxed out.
There’s even more: Laddy, Connie, Barry, Lou and Fiona. All of them are fully fleshed-out persons with more or less intertwining stories. With proper care and love, Maeve Binchy reveals us their lives.
But it all starts with Aidan Dunne, a middle-aged teacher in a Catholic school of Mountainview in Dublin. Aidan is wondering where the love between him and his wife, Nell, went. They used to be inseparable and couldn’t get enough of each other. His passion — nowadays more then ever — is teaching.
The current headmaster is retiring and Aidan has aspirations to be his successor. He has plans for the worn out school of his. Alas, he has a nemesis (I am using the word lightly here) named Tony O’Brien, a smoking, drinking, partying and womanizing single man, 48 years old. Aidan and Tony are both of the same age yet so far apart in lifestyle and even professionally. Still, Tony is inexplicably (to Aidan) liked. I don’t view really it as a spoiler to reveal that Tony and not Aidan will be the new headmaster.
One things leads to another. Tony does not want lose Aidan, who can teach and knows the students by name. So, he promises to give Aidan whatever he wants to keep him happy. One of Aidan’s idea to rejuvenate the downtrodden Mountainview school is to start offering evening classes. Aidan starts to see that maybe Tony for all his vices is more suited to be the headmaster like the ability to endure those battles over budgets and win.
What Aidan does not know yet is that Tony has another reason to be nice. See, Tony is very much in love with Grania, who just so happens to be Aidan’s daughter (and who works at same bank as Bill). He is so much in love that he’s quitting smoking and cutting down drinking because he’s found happiness at last wants to enjoy it for as long as possible.
Grania is also in love with Tony but there are wrinkles in love due to Tony getting the coveted headmaster’s position.
The other dramatis personae is Nora O’Donoghue or Signora. She is the backbone of the book acting as the catalyst and the driving force behind all the good things.
Signora’s story is actually both romantic and dramatic. Back in late 1960s she fell in love with a certain Mario and lived with him in London for two years. Obviously, her parents and siblings did not like her living in sin and tried to get her to leave him. Mario, in turn, told Nora that he can never marry her. He will return to his village of Annunziata in Sicily and marry Gabriella instead as is his parents’ will.
Nora, however, did do against her parents’ will and moved to Annunziata to live across the piazza to Mario and Gabrielle, as the eccentric Signora irlandese, to love Mario from close and also afar. Occasionally, on cloudy nights Mario would sneak to her apartment to spend the night but that was the extent of their secret relation.
Eventually Mario dies, the secret was not so secret after all, and Nora has to leave the village and get back to Dublin. She is 50ish, penniless but kind and exuding certain mysterious magnetism that helps her in quick succession to find a place to live and land a job. Thanks goes to a waiter named Suzi who happens to know that her parents have an extra room — hers! — because she just left home because she had a row with them. Signora moves there. She helps their son, Jerry, with the homework. Jerry goes to Mountainview and one day his headmaster comes to visit the boy. Tony O’Brien expects a painful visit to indifferent and uneducated parents, but Signora is there and saves the day. And that, finally, leads to Signora knocking at Aidan Dunne’s door at the school.
“I’ve come to talk to you about Italian, Mr. Dunne.”
“Don’t you know, I knew somebody would knock at the door and say that to me.”
And the rest, as they say in the evening class in the Mountainview school: E un mirocolo.
P.S. Aidan teaches Latin and that fact prompted me to fire up Duolingo. Cotidio linguae Latinae studeo.