WELD / CO Lit 2012: Beauty is Tlooth, Tlooth beauty
Packet 11
1. In this author’s most famous novel, a woman who shelters the protagonist risks jail time by selling a type of beer which has been banned. In middle age, he moved to Jamaica, which is the setting for his novel about a black nationalist party, This Island Now. One of his novels includes the character Tom Lanwood, who is a fictionalized version of George Padmore. That novel, whose title character returns from exile in London to rule an African country, is called A Wreath for Udomo. He also fictionalized the Great Trek in his novel Wild Conquest, and his autobiographical works include Tell Freedom and Return to Goli. In his major work, Paddy O’Shea befriends the protagonist, and they lead a strike together after a fatal mining accident. In that novel, Leah’s niece Eliza rejects the protagonist, Xuma, because he is black. For 10 points, name this South African novelist of Mine Boy.
ANSWER: Peter Abrahams
2. This poem features a vision of a spirit “clothed in no bright robes of shadowy silver or enshrining light,” and it describes how the main character “kept mute conference with his still soul.” The speaker of this poem asks the “mother of this unfathomable world” to “favour [his] solemn song” because of his devotion to her. This poem describes how the main character abandons his body, until “his listless hand hung like dead bone within its withered skin.” The main character of this poem addresses a swan, saying “Thou hast a home, beautiful bird.” The main character of this poem is a poet who leaves home “to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands,” and a vision of a “veiled maid” inspires him to search for the supernatural, culminating in a voyage down a river in an abandoned boat. For 10 points, name this poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley named after a “spirit of solitude.”
ANSWER: “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude”
3. This author recounted seeing a graceful young boy lose his grace because of his inability to exactly replicate a movement he had made with his foot in an essay which ends with the observation that we would have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to return to a state of innocence. In one of his shortest stories, a marquis is driven mad and burns his own castle down because it is haunted by the ghost of a woman who had died after he had asked her to sleep behind the oven. This author of “On the Theater of Marionettes” and “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” wrote a novella whose title character ends up marrying Count F, who replies to a newspaper announcement about her mysterious pregnancy. He also wrote about a man who unrelentingly seeks justice after Junker Tronka mistreats his horses, as well as writing about Jeronimo Rugera, who is preparing to hang himself in prison before the title disaster strikes in one story. For 10 points, name this author of Michael Kohlhaas and “The Earthquake in Chile.”
ANSWER: Heinrich von Kleist
4. One writer from this place wrote a book titled after a native of this place “in New York” and founded a movement which produced such works as Sancocho and Down These Mean Streets. Another writer from this place wrote the amazingly titled novel No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again. This birthplace of Ed Vega was also home to the author of a stream-of-consciousness story about a young ballerina whose sections are titled after Coppélia, Giselle and the title ballet, Sleeping Beauty. This home of Rosario Ferré and the openly gay writer Manuel Ramos Otero also produced the author of a poetic trilogy entitled Empire of Dreams, who also wrote United States of Banana and the first novel written in Spanglish, Yo-Yo Boing! For 10 points, name this birthplace of Giannina Braschi, an unincorporated territory of the United States.
ANSWER: Puerto Rico [prompt on the United States of America, I suppose]
5. The narration of this character’s adventures is interrupted by a story called “The Risky Bet.” This character is shaved by a mute barber at an inn whose motto is “Ubi homines sunt, modi sunt.” He is given a manuscript of a story called “The Wandering Madwoman” by another character. With his son, this character visits the enlightened Pedagogical Province. He sees a scroll with his own life story written on it after he is allowed to join the Society of the Tower. He befriends a mysterious harpist as part of a travelling troupe of actors, which he joins after being betrayed by the actress Mariana, and while with that troupe he directs and stars in a production of Hamlet. This character, whose son is named Felix, adopts Mignon in the first novel in which he appears. For 10 points, name this character whose “journeyman years” and “apprenticeship” are related in two novels by Goethe.
ANSWER: Wilhelm Meister [accept either]
6. This character’s first conversation with her future husband is punctuated by parenthetical comments describing what she is thinking during the pauses. She loses an archery contest to Juliet Fenn. In his preface to one edition of the novel in which she appears, F. R. Leavis suggested that the novel should be named after this character. When her family falls into financial trouble, she considers a career in entertainment, but is discouraged by Herr Klesmer because she is too old to start training. When we first meet this character, she loses 200 pounds at the roulette table, forcing her to pawn her necklace. She marries the wealthy but jealous Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, who already has several children with Lydia Glasher, but seeks solace with the title character, a Zionist who rescues Mirah Lapidoth. For 10 points, name this heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
ANSWER: Gwendolen Harleth [accept either]
7. One of this playwright’s works is a series of four linked plays, including “Greeks,” “Open House,” and “Snails,” each of which is introduced by photographs projected behind the stage. She once wrote a short play every day for a year, resulting in 365 Days/365 Plays. One of her plays includes “The Looking Song” and is about a woman with five sons named Baby, Beauty, Bully, Trouble, and Jabber; that play and a play published a year later are both based on The Scarlet Letter. This author of Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and In the Blood wrote a play about a man who looks like Abraham Lincoln and allows people to pay him to act as John Wilkes Booth and reenact his assassination, which is reminiscent of the names of the two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, in her most famous play. For 10 points, name this playwright of The America Play and Topdog/Underdog.
ANSWER: Suzan-Lori Parks
8. The speaker of one poem in this collection describes a water-based religion whose “litany would employ images of sousing.” In another poem in this collection, a picture of a girl on a poster advertising a beach is defaced by Titch Thomas. Yet another poem in this collection ends with a stanza containing the phrase “Never such innocence” twice. In addition to “Water,” “Sunny Prestatyn,” and “MCMXIV,” it contains a poem ending with the line “Books are a load of crap.” In the title poem, the speaker says that a dozen of the title events took place in the time it takes to say “I nearly died”; the speaker of that poem watches those events from a train. This collection’s final line, which lacks the author’s typical cynicism, is “What will survive of us is love,” from the poem “An Arundel Tomb.” For 10 points, name this collection by the author of High Windows, Philip Larkin.
ANSWER: The Whitsun Weddings
9. Probably the strangest book by this author contains diagrams like “The Decayed Orbit of the Lay Freudian” and lots of multiple-choice quizzes, and is a parody of self-help books which includes a semiotic analysis of the self. This author answers “Bad” when asked “What kind of Catholic are you?” in an interview with himself called “Questions They Never Asked Me,” which is collected in a volume called Conversations with this author. In one of his novels, a descendant of Sir Thomas More invents a device called the ontological lapsometer. He wrote about the nervous tendencies of Will Barrett in a novel whose sequel is called The Second Coming. This author of Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman is best known for a novel about the existentialist search of a New Orleans stockbroker named Binx Bolling. For 10 points, name this Southern author of The Moviegoer.
ANSWER: Walker Percy
10. One character in this novel thinks that the atomic bomb would not have been dropped on Hiroshima had Japan been populated by white people. That character was trained by Lord Suffolk, and meets the main female character of this novel when he hears her playing a piano. A pivotal scene in this novel takes place in the Cave of Swimmers, where the title character leaves his mortally wounded love interest. The title character of this novel falls in love with Katharine Clifton, which explains why he keeps a copy of Herodotus’ Histories with him. One character in this novel is a morphine-addicted spy who had his thumbs cut off during an interrogation, named Caravaggio. The title character of this novel, whose face is unrecognizable because it was burned in a plane crash, is named László de Almásy, and is nursed by Hana. For 10 points, name this novel by Michael Ondaatje.
ANSWER: The English Patient
11. Several characters in this novel joke about cutting a waiter open with a musical saw. The protagonist of this novel receives a telegram from Holmes with the news of his father’s death shortly after he finds out that another character was beaten to death in a speakeasy. In this novel, Baby rescues the protagonist from an Italian jail after he punches a member of the Carabinieri. This novel features a ridiculous duel fought by Tommy and McKisco, which takes place in France, where the main characters are entertaining various people, including Abe North. A black man named Jules Peterson is murdered in this novel, nearly endangering the career of the star of Daddy’s Girl, Rosemary Hoyt. The protagonist is a psychoanalyst who is married to a schizophrenic named Nicole Warren, who was one of his patients. For 10 points, name this novel about Dick Diver by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
ANSWER: Tender Is the Night
12. One character in this novel is mocked for masturbating under his covers at night. Two characters in this novel encounter a main lying in a coffin who dies in front of them, as he has been trying to do for weeks. The main character of this novel kisses an old woman who dies immediately thereafter, and as a girl, that woman had unexpectedly kissed him while he was working at a tile factory. This novel’s blurring of the lines between life and death is exemplified by the line “It’s our coffins that keep us alive,” spoken by Yelisey, who carries off all but two of the hundred coffins unearthed by the workers. It opens when Voshchev is fired from his job for thinking too much and starts walking down the road until he joins the workers who are building the title structure, which will be the site of the House of the Proletariat. For 10 points, name this novel by Andrei Platonov.
ANSWER: The Foundation Pit [or Kotlovan]
13. The main character of this poem has “hands baked like rock” and lives in a “forgotten quiet village where streets have no names.” The speaker of this poem says that he is a “descendant of plow pushers” and that he “struck roots here long before the olive trees and the poplars,” and complains “you’ve left nothing for my children except the rocks, but I’ve heard you’ll take away even the rocks.” The speaker of this poem, who works to feed his eight children, soon to be nine, says “beware of my hunger and anger” because “if I’m made to starve I’ll eat the flesh of my oppressor.” The speaker of this poem repeats the refrain “Write down: I’m an Arab” and tells his interlocutor that the title record is number fifty thousand. For 10 points, name this poem about a Palestian trying to get himself registered, a work of Mahmoud Darwish.
ANSWER: “Identity Card” [or “Bitaqat Huwiyya”]
14. This author wrote a play about a girl who mysteriously disappears for three weeks on a Scottish island, later returning to the same island as an adult only to disappear again, this time for many years. One of his works features a St. Bernard which, like this author’s own dog, is named Porthos. In that work, some fairies cause Maimie Mannering to become trapped inside Kensington Gardens. This author of Mary Rose and The Little White Bird wrote a play in which class distinctions are overturned when a group of aristocrats including Lord Loam’s family are stranded on a deserted island, and their butler, the title character, becomes their leader. In his most famous work, Ed Teynte, Bill Jukes, and Cecco are killed by the title character. Smee is the right-hand man of the antagonist of that work, which popularized the name Wendy. For 10 points, name this author of The Admirable Crichton and creator of Peter Pan.
ANSWER: James Matthew Barrie
15. Near the end of this novel, the narrator quotes the last two lines of the “all the world’s a stage” speech while bemoaning the difficulty of writing endings. One character in this novel is a crippled woman who is estranged from her Italian husband. At the beginning of this novel, the old bishop dies and is replaced by a man who is dominated by his wife, who opposes the High Church. Much of this novel’s plot revolves around the proposal to install a Sunday school in the location which was formerly managed by the protagonist of the novel to which it is a sequel. The main female character of this novel is wooed by three men, including Bertie Stanhope and the disagreeable Mr. Slope. At the end of this novel, the widowed Eleanor Bold marries the new dean Mr. Arabin, and Mr. Quiverful becomes the new warden of Hiram’s Hospital. For 10 points, name this sequel to The Warden, the second novel in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire.