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2014 Madrid Exam Text Analysis

The passage discusses different ways of treating books based on whether one views them as objects to be preserved or vessels containing knowledge to be consumed. It contrasts the "courtly love" approach of a Danish chambermaid who believes books should be kept pristine with the author's family's "carnal love" view that sees books as meant to be read and used heavily. The passage gives various examples of individuals who read books in ways that prioritize understanding over physical condition, such as by marking, underlining, tearing out pages, or allowing insects inside.

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176 views3 pages

2014 Madrid Exam Text Analysis

The passage discusses different ways of treating books based on whether one views them as objects to be preserved or vessels containing knowledge to be consumed. It contrasts the "courtly love" approach of a Danish chambermaid who believes books should be kept pristine with the author's family's "carnal love" view that sees books as meant to be read and used heavily. The passage gives various examples of individuals who read books in ways that prioritize understanding over physical condition, such as by marking, underlining, tearing out pages, or allowing insects inside.

Uploaded by

Laura Laurita
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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2014 Exam Text Analysis

NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK


When I was eleven and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe.
At the Htel d'Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of
his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next
afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark
the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its
cover:
SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK.
My brother was stunned. How could it have come to pass that hea reader so
devoted that he'd sneaked a book and a flashlight under the covers at his
boarding school every night after lights-out, a crime punishable by a swat with a
wooden paddlehad been branded as someone who didnt love books? I
shared his mortification. I could not imagine a more bibliolatrous family
than the Fadimans. Yet, with the exception of my mother, in the eyes of the
young Danish maid we would all have been found guilty of rampant book abuse.
During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one
way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The
chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to
her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic
adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of
perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed
in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard,
glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no
sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard
use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.
Hilaire Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:
Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight
of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed
and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who
reads in the sauna, where heat fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm?
What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade
my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless
1572 first edition of Plutarch's works in Greek in order to interleave its pages
with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he
was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading

six volumes of Boswell's journals and, as he puts it, "sucked them like a giant
mongoose"? Byron told me, "I didn't give a damn about the condition of those
volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them,
shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that
we can't discuss in public."
Byron loves books. Really, he does. So does my husband, an incorrigible booksplayer whose roommate once informed him, "George, if you ever break the
spine of one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking my
own spine." So does Kim, who reports that despite his experience in
Copenhagen, his bedside table currently supports three spreadeagled volumes.
"They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up," he explains. "To use an
electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop
button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed
Pause." I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying,
sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dogearing the page. (Here
I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the
upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want
to xerox for my commonplace book.)
All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carolwho will probably claim she's no
relation once she finds out how I treat my booksplaces reproductions of
Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If
the colored side is up, she was reading the lefthand page; if it's down, the righthand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards,
spurning his wife's silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too
thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian,
favors Paris Mtro tickets or "those Inkjet-printed credit card receiptsbut only
in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with
something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry,
which really are sacred."
Courtly lovers always remove their bookmarks when the assignation is over;
carnal lovers are likely to leave romantic mementos, often three-dimensional
and messy. Birds of Yosemite and the East Slope, a volume belonging to a
science writer friend, harbors an owl feather and the tip of a squirrel's tail,
evidence of a crime scene near Tioga Pass. A book critic I know took
The Collected Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe on a backpacking trip
through the Yucatan, and whenever an interesting bug landed in it, she clapped
the covers shut. She amassed such a bulging insectarium that she feared Poe
might not make it through customs. (He did.)
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader

QUESTIONS
Time assigned, 1h15
1. Analyse genre, text type and communicative functions in 100 words. (1
point)

2. Explain and find examples in the text of compound words, derivational


affixes, irregular plurals and borrowings. (1 point)
3. Find anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric references in the text. (0.5
point)
4. Analyse the following sentence from the text. [...] a reader so devoted
that he'd sneaked a book and a flashlight under the covers at his board
school every night after lightsout [...] (0.5 point)
5. Discuss on the British spelling words and variants in the text. (0.5 point)
6. Find inversion in the text and explain why the writer uses it. (0.5 point)
7. Explain the final sentence "He did". (0.5 point)
8. Explain the meaning of the following words according to the text:
rampant, wantonly, shredded, dog-earing the page. (0.5 point)

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