Odious Quizzes and Scary Tales

It’s not often that I get really stroppy on this site, or indeed anywhere else for that matter, but today I’m abusing my posting schedule in order to have a rant. When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student I spent a lot of time feeling stupid and crushingly inferior. There was always someone in class who had swallowed the French dictionary whole, and lecturers seemed to have read, retained and could quote from, just about any book in the vast European canon. But you know, the years passed, and I settled into my job and it occurred to me that radical lack of self-confidence is neither a good way to teach nor to live. And I realised that if I couldn’t follow something it was because it was poorly explained; there is no concept that cannot be made comprehensible to any lay person, and if it can’t then it doesn’t deserve the name of concept and should go away and make a new life for itself as a painfully complex enigma. Anyhow, this is a long preamble to mitigate what might otherwise look like a highly immodest statement, which is: I don’t feel stupid very often. And then along comes The Sunday Times/Faber Literary Quiz. Fifty teasing little questions that ask you to identify a novel from an obscure detail, and I can’t answer a single one of them.

I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve been reading all my life. ‘Who misses the soup and fish when dining between two regal ladies?’ ‘Who set an ecclesiastical ghost story in another author’s fictional cathedral?’ ‘Who sits in the stalls during a fire in a Belgian theatre?’ ‘Which bongo-playing pastor drives out demons from a family in Cheadle Hulme?’ ‘Which versifying diplomat loses his memory in the Middle East?’ Is it just me? I haven’t got a clue, and couldn’t even make a wild stab. In their non-googleable oddness, there’s no way of looking up the details included in the questions, and tracking the answers down. But I’m also annoyed by the way that there are no limits set around the potential field of books from which the questions are taken, apart from this thing called ‘litt-rar-chure’ that we’re all supposed to recognise. I mean to say, ‘Which surgeon listens to Bach while operating?’ – now surely that comes from a Judith Krantz novel, one in which our ingénue heroine is savaged by crocodiles in a random outback accident, and returns to New York to have her face recreated (by the Bach-playing surgeon) who falls in love with her and they have one of those faintly sado-masochistic marriages that raises her social profile and destroys her morale until she is rescued by a surgeon’s cowboy stepson…. Surely Krantz wrote a novel like that? Or how about this one: ‘Who hates his former manager for taking over his home, firm and daughter?’ Now that must be a Michael Connolly novel, one in which the home, firm and daughter will all shortly be put in grave peril by the actions of a vengeful Mafia boss against the drug-trafficking manager, and our melancholy hero will prove himself the true alpha male by rescuing them all. Or even: ‘Who acts as gracious host to the man who earlier beheaded him?’ Must be Nearly-Headless Nick at Hogwarts – so, a Harry Potter novel, right? Then there’s the blandness of some of the questions: ‘Who motors down to Cornwall in his employers Ford?’ Well, who doesn’t? ‘Which female mill-worker is buried in someone else’s nightcap? Pick a Dickens, any Dickens. I am equally annoyed by the fact that nowhere does it say that any answers will ever be forthcoming, and the prize is £10,000 of Faber books, which the winner will clearly not need, having read everything there is to read already.

I went and had a moan to my husband about this and he of course thought it all very funny. He suggested that the next time I set an examination paper, I should introduce a section of questions just like these to test the student’s in-depth knowledge of their texts. I could well imagine the combination of outrage and completely blank looks I’d receive if I told them all their next exam contained questions like (without specifying the country, century or author) ‘Which novel contains a character who is both criminal and detective?’ or ‘Who has an epiphany listening to a jazz song in a café?’ My husband came out with a whole string of impressively risible questions you could put like ‘Plot the events in Tristram Shandy on a time line’ or ‘Explain what really happens in Nabokov’s Pale Fire’ or, my personal favourite, ‘In which novel can the words ‘ancient spires’ be created out of an anagram of the first letter on each of the first 13 pages?’ Ok, so it’s all supposed to be a bit of fun, but it’s smug, pretentious point-scoring fun that reinforces the idea that literature lovers are an elite bunch conscious of their own superiority.

Ok, I feel better for having got all that off my chest. All it boils down to is that I’m annoyed I can’t answer the questions. If any of you know the answers, fellow litbloggers, you can impress me immensely by letting me know, although I’ve no way of checking and will believe anything you say with sufficient conviction.

To turn to (slightly) calmer prospects, I’m signing up for Carl’s R.I.P challenge, as reading a host of gothic novels will be a fantastic way of doing background reading for the fantasy and dream book. The novels I’m hoping to read are:

Walpole – The Castle of Otranto

Sheridan Le Fanu – Through a Glass Darkly

Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey (a re-read but I love it so)

Ann Radcliffe – The Italian

Gaston Leroux – The Phantom of the Opera

May I also recommend to anyone wondering what to read for this, Maupassant’s Le Horla or any of his flesh-crawling ghost stories, Theophile Gautier’s short stories and Balzac’s The Wild Asses’ Skin which is all about a dangerous magic talisman. Lesser known works but very good ones. I’ve still got a few books left to go on the American reading challenge that I’ve been enjoying so much. I really must read John Irving, Betty Smith and Flannery O’Connor before I get deeply into this. Ah the joy of lots of lovely posts ahead.