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issue 30: May-June 2002 

Cormac McCarthy Quizthe tbr
Cormac McCarthy Quiz

Twenty-two questions on one of the U.S.'s most singular and outstanding authors. If you think you have them - or close - e-mail your answers by July 10th and win a free book by Cormac McCarthy; the winner may request a copy of McCarthy’s upcoming novel, although it is not due out until 2003. In case of a tie, a name will be drawn.

                 Good luck! 

1. What was McCarthy’s given name?
a. Andrew McCarthy
b. Charles McCarthy
c. Cormac McCardy
d. Edward Sholkovitz

2. In 1974 and 1975 McCarthy worked on which PBS screenplay?
a. The Gardener's Son
b. Upstairs, Downstairs
c. The End of an Old Song

3. McCarthy once commented that his favorite book was
a. As I Lay Dying
b. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
c. Moby Dick
d. The Call of the Wild
All the Pretty Horses
4. In All the Pretty Horses the character named "Abuela" has what relation to John Grady Cole?
a. grandmother
b. housekeeper
c. neighbor

5. McCarthy keeps his personal library of 7,000 books in
a. a shed outside his El Paso home
b. a self-built barn in Knoxville, Tennessee
c. various storage lockers
d. the basement of the Juárez, Mexico public library

6. Esquire magazine once printed a rumor about the living conditions of McCarthy, saying that he lived
a. under an oil derrick
b. at the University of Texas El Paso grounds office
c. in a sod-lined hut on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas
d. under the I5 underpass in Worland, Wyoming

7. Albert Erksine, McCarthy’s editor at Random House, was also the long-time editor of
a. John Steinbeck
b. F. Scott Fitzgerald
c. Ernest Hemingway
d. William Faulkner

8. Where in Spain has McCarthy lived?
a. Calle Marina, Barcelona
b. Plaça d´oli, Vilafranca del Penedès
c. Calle Becas, Valencia
d. Calle Piedras, Ibiza

9. Which two characters in the Border Trilogy are bilingual?
a. John Grady and Alejandra
b. Mac and Rawlins
c. John Grady and Blevins
d. Magdalena and Billy
Suttree
10. The novel Suttree is set in
a. London, Kentucky
b. Tupelo, Mississippi
c. Wheeling, West Virginia
d. Knoxville, Tennessee

11. In Child of God Lester Ballard is a solitary
a. bootlegger who communes with animals
b. backwoodsman who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee
c. preacher who roams the Appalachian Mountains of Western Kentucky
d. horseman who terrorizes the Texas-Mexican border

12. What is the alternate title of Blood Meridian?
a. Evening Redness in the West
b. Western Bloodlines
c. Red Tempest
d. Red Sun Rising

13. What was the first university McCarthy attended?
a. Brown University
Child of Godb. University of Texas, Austin
c. University of Tennessee
d. Providence College

14. Which actor does not appear in the movie All the Pretty Horses?
a. Bruce Dern
b. Penelope Cruz
c. Matt Damon
d. Billy Bob Thornton
e. Ruben Blades
f. Lucas Black
g. Henry Thomas

15. To which novel is the Tatler referring in this cover blurb: "It does for the lupine what All the Pretty Horses does for the equine."?

The Orchard Keeper16. In the novel The Orchard Keeper, who killed Captain Kenneth Rattner?
a. Marion Sylder
b. John Wesley
c. Ather Ownby
d. Jefferson Gifford

17. In McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark, where does the tinker find the abandoned child?
a. on a beach
b. at a country fairground
c. in a forest
d. on the doorstep of the town hall

18. The death of which character in Cities of the Plain is foreshadowed during Alejandra´s dream in All the Pretty Horses?
a. John Grady Cole
b. Amarillas Mello
c. Billy Parham
d. Magdalena

19. Name the five-act play in which McCarthy, via a series of monologues, portrays the tribulations of the Telfair family.

20. The name of the character who lives alone in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River is
a. Reese
b. Harrogate
c. Cornelius
d. J-Bone

21. It features the Kid and the Judge and is like no other Western in all of American literature. What is the novel?

22. Name the eight novels from which the following quotes are taken:
a. He told her about Blevins and about the prisión Castelar and he told her about what happened to Rawlins and finally he told her about the cuchillero who had fallen dead in his arms with his knife broken off in his heart.
____________________

b. When he got home with the dead girl it was midmorning. _____________________

c. He asked the blind man had he heard of others who had suffered the same calamity as he at that man’s hands but the blind man only said that he had heard, yes, but had not seen nor met.
___________________

d. The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.
The Crossing____________________

e. The boy had already gone when they came from Knoxville, seven years now after the burial and seven months after the cremation, and sifted the ashes, since whipped to a broth by the rains of that spring and now dried again, caked and crusted, sifted them and there found the chalked sticks and shards of bone gray-white and brittle as ash themselves, and the skull, worm-riddled, vermiculate with the tracery of them and hollowed and fired to the weight and tensile cohesiveness of parched cardboard, the caried teeth rattling in their sockets.
______________________

f. I’d give ten dollars for a glass of icewater, said the city mouse. Cash money.
______________________

g. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. ______________________

h. Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said. I don’t know, the man said. Where are we now?
__________________________

An excellent site to visit is The Cormac McCarthy Home Pages at www.cormacmccarthy.com
 
Quiz composed by Jeffrey Herlihy -- jeffherlihy@go.com
 

© 2002 The Barcelona Review
© Author photo: Marion Ettlinger

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