Practice test for ARCO I students of English - word formation exercise (number 2)
WORD FORMATION EXERCISE. TRANSFORM TO UNDERLINED WORD INTO A SUITABLY RELATED WORD TO COMPLETE THE SENTENCE CORRECTLY.
“A brief glimpse of Bruges. A dead relationship is rekindled in Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte” by Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, 5 Jan 2008
There is something very 1) FAMILY about this story: a middle-aged widower, Hugues Viane, moves to Bruges as it is the town most suited to his melancholy. He desperately misses his wife; and in the cloistral, muffled, moribund city of Bruges he finds the perfect analogue for his grief. And then one day he sees a woman in the street who appears to be the exact double of his dead wife. He obsesses about her, pursues her, and 2) EVENTUAL begins a relationship with her. But it turns out that she is not the reincarnation of his wife ...
This 1892 novel has something archetypal about it, in the way that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Gray do. The chief 3) DIFFERENT lie in tone and the absence of the supernatural; there is also a far more ambiguous approach to metaphor. The Stevenson and the Wilde are 4) (-) DISPUTE great works, but no one's going to call them subtle. Bruges-la-Morte, though, edges away from allegory, or maintains a pious silence as to whether it is, or is not, 5) ALLEGORY.
It certainly is symbolist, though, in the sense that Georges Rodenbach's 6) REPUTE is as a symbolist writer. He was an 7) ADMIRE of, and friends with, such Parisian luminaries as Mallarmé, the Goncourts, Villiers de l'Isla-Adam; Rodin offered to carve a 8) SCULPT of him in Bruges after his death. But the city fathers of Bruges, indignant that (a) Rodenbach identified the city with 9) DIE and morbid religiosity, never mind how appreciatively and ecstatically; and (b) that he 10) WRITE in French rather than Flemish (although it would have been most difficult and counter-productive to do so at the time), refused. A note by Will Stone at the end of the book points out that this is still the case, and that you will have to go to Ghent to find a 11) SUBSTANCE memorial to Rodenbach. An admirer has put up a modest bronze plaque in Bruges, and that's it.
But there is so much to admire in this brief novel. Like many symbolist works, it has a modern feel to it, despite all those stylistic mannerisms we associate with the era - the most 12) STRIKE being those fainting-sensibility 12) EXCLAIM marks at the end of descriptive paragraphs.
But it is those 13) DESCRIBE that make Bruges-la-Morte so 14) REMARK. As Rodenbach fully intended, the chief character in the novel is the town itself: and this, remember, was some time before Joyce had the same idea about doing the same with Dublin in Ulysses.
It is fitting that Alan Hollinghurst introduces this novel, for he has used elements from it in his own fiction. His 1994 novel The Folding Star is itself a homage to Bruges-la-Morte, although he doesn't feel the need to declare so in his illuminating and sympathetic 15) INTRODUCE. His narrator says of his lover: "I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room ..." Rodenbach imagines the mirrors in Hugues' house "needed only the merest touch with a sponge or cloth, so as not to erase her face sleeping in their depths."
This is one of the 16) GREAT novels ever written about grief, loneliness and 17) ISOLATE; and such subjects are, alas, always relevant these days. (Those suffering similar personal circumstances will find it remarkably consoling.) It is the kind of book, I kept thinking, that should have been turned into an opera by Debussy, along the lines of what he did with Pelléas et Mélisande, by Rodenbach's contemporary and fellow-townsman Maeterlinck. As it turns out, Erich Korngold did such a thing in 1920, but the Nazis banned it, and I'm not sure that he would have had the right 18) MUSIC attitude. If Debussy hadn't done it, Alban Berg would have been ideal.
I keep thinking about music so much because so much music resides in the words, even in (the very able) 19) TRANSLATE. This is a book which is not only richly, almost oppressively, atmospheric: it is about atmosphere, about how a city can be a state of mind as well as a geographical entity. It has its shocks and its melodrama: but it is a 20) HAUNT, and a haunted work. Congratulations to Dedalus for 21) REVIVE it.
ANSWER KEY:
1) FAMILIAR
2) EVENTUALLY
3) DIFFERENCES
4) UNDISPUTABLY
5) ALLEGORICAL
6) REPUTATION
7) ADMIRER
8) SCULPTURE
9) DEATH
10) WROTE
11) SUBSTANTIAL
12) EXCLAMATION
13) DESCRIPTIONS
14) REMARKABLE
15) DESCRIPTION
16) GREATEST
17) ISOLATION
18) MUSICAL
19) TRANSLATION
20) HAUNTING
21) REVIVING
