quiz

QUIZDon DeLillo

 

DON DELILLO

Twenty-one questions (including some quotes) on one of the giants of American literary fiction:  Don DeLillo. If you think you know them - or close - e-mail your answers by May 1, 2009, and win a 30-euro gift certificate from Amazon.  In case of a tie, a name will be drawn.

Good luck! 

This Quiz is now over. To check the answers go to here

1. DeLillo first took an interest in writing when as a teenager he worked as a . . .

a. golf caddie
b. swimming pool cleaner
c. bookstore clerk
d. parking attendant

2. DeLillo has said:  More than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz and  . . .
Libra cover

a. sports 
b. Abstract Expressionism
c. historical documents
d. the media

3. In DeLillo’s world, the homerun hit by Bobby Thomson to cinch the 1951 World Series for the Giants was captured that day by . . .

a. a local tavern keeper
b. a young black boy
c. a hot dog vendor
d. a stripper

4. Dialogue of Lenny Bruce’s running stage stints shoots through which novel?


5. The professor of Hitler studies in White Noise has a secret.  He . . .

a. cannot speak German
b. does not have a university degree
c. was a Nazi sympathizer
d. knows hardly anything about Hitler

6. The Falling Man performance artist is . . .

a. Rumsey
b. Bill Lawton
c. David Janiak
d. Don DeLillo

7. The protagonist in Falling Man, a survivor of 9/11, abstractly picks up what object as he winds his way down the stairs of the North Tower after the attack?

a. a hand-written note
b. a baseball card
c. a shoe
d. a briefcase

8. After the death of her husband, this woman finds a metaphor for her loneliness on the internet, specifically from . . .

a. a chat room on Alexander Pope
b. a web cam on a Finnish street
c. a Japanese porno site
d. trainspotting via a fixed camera on a Dorset railway

9. This DeLillo novel was the inspiration for James Ellroy’s American Tabloid . . . 

a. Cosmopolis
b. Running Dog
c. Libra
d. The Names

10. Who is the writer-protagonist who formulates a plan to travel to Beirut in order to speak on behalf of a Swiss writer held hostage there?

a. Bill Gray
b. Bucky Wunderlick
c. Nicholas Shay
d. Gary Harkness

11.  Which book derives its title from a fictional "underground" magazine modeled on Rolling Stone?


12. This novel focuses on the one-day odyssey of an obscenely wealthy man being chauffeured across Manhattan for the purpose of . . .

a. shopping at CostcoWhitenoise
b. buying a bulldog
c. getting a haircut
d. separating from his mistress     

13. One of DeLillo’s four stage plays, written before the Terri Shiavo case, involving the question of when life ends, places the mercy-killing decision in the hands of two women and . . .

a. Sean Macklin
b. Alex Macklin
c. the attending physician
d. the government

14. DeLillo’s one screenplay features Nicky Rogan who has an obsession with the failures of . . .

a. the New York Mets
b. the Boston Red Sox
c. the Brooklyn Dodgers
d. the New York Yankees

15. Ratner’s Star seems to be located in a  . . .

a. twilligon
b. zorg
c. surd
d. mohole

16. This television executive, working for a network of madmen, sets off on a cross-country journey during which he attempts to . . .

a. film a serial killer
b. find and cast people for an intergalactic sitcom
c. put his own life on film
d. film a nomadic terrorist cell

17. New Yorker Pammy Wynant has sex with a homosexual friend, Jack, who later, for more complicated reasons . . .

a. becomes a suicide bomber
b. assassinates the governor
c. blows up the stock exchange
d. pours gasoline on himself and lights it

18. Babette is very fond of her . . .

a. DylarUnderworld
b. Xanax
c. Mystic mints 
d. vibrator

19. Journalist Moll Robbins gets caught up in a chase for . . .

a. a secret erotic diary rumored to be written by JFK
b. an erotic film rumored to star Adolph Hitler
c. a sleazy sex video rumored to include J. Edgar Hoover
d. a porno film of the Manson Family rumored to include a famous celebrity

20. In 2007, pre-production was begun on a feature film adaptation, to star Josh Hartnett, of which of DeLillo’s novels?


Name the eight novels from which the following quotes are taken:

21. Fear of Death? Volunteers wanted for secret research.


 22. Wally Pippich sat behind his desk, facing up into the sun lamp, a strip of Reynolds Wrap covering his eyes.


 23.There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists.  In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.  Do you ask your writers how they feel about this?  Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture.  Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. 


 24.There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.


 25.Fame requires every kind of excess . . . .  Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.


 26. Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business.


 27. When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn’t supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I’d shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent . . .


 28. I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams . . . I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. . . . How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed.



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