A Siesta quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary movement best describes "A Siesta"?

   • Correct answer: Realism
   • Gothic Horror
   • Romanticism
   • Naturalism
   • Modernism

   Realism is the fit. Kielland belongs to the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian letters: contemporary settings, recognisable social types, and fiction used to argue about how society actually works. Nothing supernatural happens here — a man plays a piano at a dinner party, and the story is about what that exposes.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What is unusual about the dinner party in the Rue Castiglione?

   • The guests are old friends who meet in these same rooms every week
   • Correct answer: Almost none of the guests actually knows the person seated beside them
   • The guests have all been invited because they are celebrated musicians
   • The host has assembled the party to raise money for the flood victims

   The host is a rich Portuguese out of Brazil who invites people he has met once: "When he met anyone, he immediately asked for the address, and sent next day an invitation to a little dinner." Because "he could not reach up to the level of the Jockey Club, he gathered the best company he could find" — with the result that "In that little company scarcely anybody, except those who had come in pairs, knew his neighbour." That detail matters at the end: it is why the party dissolves so completely once the music frightens it.

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3. 3

   Question 3. Mademoiselle Adèle boasts that she can place any foreigner after ten words. How does she do with the silent stranger?

   • Correct answer: She calls him a Pole, then an Englishman, then an American, and misses each time
   • She identifies him as an Irishman before he has finished his first glass of wine
   • She refuses to guess at all and sends Anatole across the table to find out for her
   • She decides that he must be Portuguese, like the host who has invited them all here

   Adèle "used to declare that she could guess a man's nationality as soon as she had spoken ten words with him," and this guest defeats her completely: she tries a Pole, hears English in his speech, offers American when he denies England, and only then does he supply it himself — "I am an Irishman, madame." Kielland never gives him a name. He gets a look ("a thick black moustache, and a nice little figure," fingers "remarkably long") and a nationality, and nothing else — even the host cannot produce his name when thanking him.

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4. 4

   Question 4. On which Paris street are De Silvis's elegant chambers?

   • Rue de la Paix
   • Correct answer: Rue Castiglione
   • Rue Richelieu
   • Rue de Rivoli

   The first line places them exactly: "In an elegant suite of chambers in the Rue Castiglione sat a merry party at dessert." The story names two other streets on the way home — the Rue de la Paix, where Anatole stops at the English dispensary, and the Rue Richelieu, where the German doctor goes for beer.

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5. 5

   Question 5. Adèle asks what an Irishman is, and Anatole whispers back, "The poor of England." What does that exchange expose?

   • That Anatole is the only guest at the table who has ever travelled to Ireland
   • That the party regards the English as the poorest people in the whole of Europe
   • Correct answer: That for these Parisians Ireland is not a country but a category of poverty
   • That the guests have followed Irish politics and the Land War very closely

   Four words file a whole nation under a single word — and the story was written in 1880, in the long aftermath of the Great Famine, amid mass emigration and the Land War. Watch what the label does to Adèle's interest: "Adèle elevated her eyebrows, and cast a shrinking, timid glance at the stranger. She had suddenly lost much of her interest in him." This is the same table that will spend the rest of the evening praising its own generosity toward the poor, and it cannot manage ten more minutes of conversation with a man it has just placed in that category.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Mademoiselle Louison drops a grape into her champagne. What does she see in it, and why does the table admire it so much?

   • A pearl necklace forming in the glass — an image of wealth made out of nothing at all
   • A balloon rising above the rooftops — a hopeful emblem of the century's inventions
   • A drowning man pulled under by the wine — a warning against too much rich living
   • Correct answer: White angels bearing a sinner to heaven — a flattering picture of easy salvation

   "Tiny bright air-bubbles gathered all round the coating of the fruit, and when it was quite covered with these shining white pearls, they lifted the heavy grape up through the wine to the surface." Louison's reading — "look, white angels are bearing a sinner to heaven!" — is exactly the room's taste in morality, and it is passed round the table and much admired. The journalist converts it straight into fundraising doctrine: "He explained how small forces, when united, can lift great burdens." That is how these people prefer to picture the poor: as a weight that other people's small kindnesses raise without effort.

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7. 7

   Question 7. The journalist boasts of "the magnificent collections made by the press for the sufferers by the floods in Spain." What real campaign is Kielland pointing at?

   • A cholera outbreak in Naples, and the collections taken up in French parish churches
   • The siege of Paris in 1870, and the charity balls held to feed the city afterwards
   • Correct answer: The Murcia flood of October 1879, and the huge Paris press subscription that followed
   • The Great Famine in Ireland, and the relief committees formed for it across Europe

   On 15 October 1879 the Segura river flooded Murcia in south-eastern Spain and killed more than a thousand people. The French press answered with an enormous, heavily publicised subscription: a one-off charity newspaper, Paris-Murcie, printed in December 1879 with a Gustave Doré engraving and contributions from Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, followed on 18 December by a celebrated benefit gala at the Paris Hippodrome. That gala is the same "fête in the hippodrome" Louison's three seamstresses sat up all night sewing for. Notice how the journalist takes it personally: he says "we" at every turn about "these millions, that we, with such great self-sacrifice, have raised."

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8. 8

   Question 8. What does Monsieur Anatole complain about all evening?

   • The oysters
   • Correct answer: The truffles
   • The champagne
   • The cigars

   Adèle's new lover "had surfeited himself on truffles" and never stops mentioning it — even while the room is being terrified: "Oh, these truffles!" groaned Anatole, holding his stomach. The running joke carries the story's irony: the only suffering this room can name out loud is its own indigestion.

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9. 9

   Question 9. Why does Kielland light the drawing-room scene with the grate rather than with lamps?

   • The stranger has asked for darkness so that nobody can watch him while he plays
   • Correct answer: The half-dark lets the guests drop their guard, so the music can reach them
   • The host is economising after spending so much money on the dinner itself
   • The firelight is there to show that the house is old-fashioned and shabby

   "There was no other light than the fire in the grate," and "Nothing else was visible except the red ends of cigars and cigarettes." In that gloom the guests stop performing for one another — "each following his most secret thoughts — thoughts born of the mysterious, muffled music." Light and dark track the story exactly: the spell holds while the room is dark, and it breaks in the same sentence that the servants appear with lamps and the stranger crashes down his final chord.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What does "Taciturn" mean in this story?

    • Foreign in manner; visibly out of place in company
    • Correct answer: Saying very little; habitually silent and reserved
    • Sullen and hostile; openly resentful of the company
    • Absent-minded; unable to follow a conversation closely

    "But this taciturn stranger caused her much perplexed cogitation." He is not rude — he answers Adèle "courteously, but briefly, and in an undertone." His silence is what makes her want to place him, and it is why the piano lands so hard: the man who has said almost nothing all evening finally says everything at once, and without words.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What does "philanthropy" mean, and how is Kielland using the word?

    • Correct answer: Generous giving to help people in need — used here with quiet irony
    • Love of learning and the arts — used here to praise the company
    • A special tax paid by the wealthy — used here to explain the collections
    • Sympathy for the suffering of animals — used here as a passing joke

    Philanthropy is generous giving to relieve need. Kielland's sentence does the satire quietly: "The many pretty instances of philanthropy, and Louison's swimming eyes, put the whole company into a quiet, tranquil, benevolent frame of mind, eminently in keeping with the weariness induced by the exertions of the feast." Good works and heavy digestion produce exactly the same comfortable drowsiness — which is the state the title names.

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12. 12

    Question 12. How does the stranger begin playing, and why does it suit the room so well?

    • With scales and exercises, as though he were warming up for a real concert
    • With an Irish folk air that none of the guests present has ever heard before
    • With a slow funeral march that quiets the whole party almost immediately
    • Correct answer: With the tunes of the day, played "lightly, sportively, frivolously"

    He opens exactly "as befitted the situation": "The melodies of the day were intermingled with fragments of waltzes and ballads; all the ephemeral trifles that Paris hums over for eight days." The ladies keep time with their feet. Only the German doctor is unmoved — "the pieces were too easy for him." The stranger flatters the party first, which is precisely how he gets to lead it somewhere it would never have followed.

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13. 13

    Question 13. How does the stranger win over "der liebe Doctor," the German who has condescended all evening?

    • By stopping between two pieces to argue politics with him across the room
    • By playing a set of Norwegian dances that the doctor recognises from home
    • Correct answer: By working in the loved notes of "unser Schumann" and "unser Beethoven"
    • By inviting the doctor to choose whatever should be played for the room next

    "From time to time he turned and signed to De Silvis, as he heard the loved notes of 'unser Schumann,' 'unser Beethoven,' or even of 'unser famoser Richard'" — that last is Richard Wagner. The stranger feeds every guest his own taste in turn. The joke is what the doctor says later, when the music has become genuinely frightening: his entire verdict is technical — "Er führt eine famose linke Hand," he has a splendid left hand — while that hand is doing the real work of the evening.

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14. 14

    Question 14. Which two works does Kielland name outright as the music turns dark?

    • Correct answer: The Baptists from "The Prophet" and a rider from "Damnation de Faust"
    • The storm from "William Tell" and the ball scene from "Don Giovanni"
    • The triumphal march from "Aida" and the wedding chorus from "Lohengrin"
    • The overture to "Tannhäuser" and the mad scene from "Lucia di Lammermoor"

    "The Baptists from 'The Prophet' came with heavy step; a rider from 'Damnation de Faust' dashed up from far below, in a desperate, hobbling hell-gallop." Those are the only two works the story names. As a gloss for modern readers: the first is Meyerbeer's 1849 grand opera Le Prophète, with its tramping chorus of Anabaptists, and the second is Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust and its Ride to the Abyss — both about mobs, damnation and descent. After this point the stranger stops quoting anybody, and the music becomes his own.

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15. 15

    Question 15. In which year did Kielland first publish this story, in his Norwegian collection Nye Novelletter?

    • 1874
    • Correct answer: 1880
    • 1888
    • 1896

    Kielland wrote it in Norwegian as "Siesta" for Nye Novelletter (New Novelettes), his second collection of short fiction, in 1880 — months after the Murcia flood campaign its dinner guests are boasting about. English readers met it sixteen years later, as the opening story of Norse Tales and Sketches, translated by R. L. Cassie and published in London in 1896, which is the date this page carries.

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16. 16

    Question 16. Adèle whispers, "he is playing Poverty." What is the music actually doing at that moment?

    • A crowd of dancers whirls faster and faster until the tune finally collapses
    • A single slow melody in the treble mourns quietly over a motionless bass
    • Correct answer: Small dark figures scramble upward in the bass and never get anywhere
    • The angels of Louison's grape are heard lifting a sinner up toward heaven

    The bass fills with "a multitude of small, dark figures scratching and tearing; a mad eagerness, a feverish haste; a scrambling, a seizing with hands and teeth; kicks, curses, shrieks, prayers" — all of it straining "upward, always upward, but without making any way." It is Louison's picture with the lifting taken out: many small forces, and no rising. Meanwhile "The artist's left hand seemed to be tying a knot that would never be loosened, while his right made light little runs, like flames, up and down in the treble," so that the keyboard maps the social order — "It sounded as if there was something uncanny brewing down in the cellar, whilst those above burnt torches and made merry."

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17. 17

    Question 17. Why is the story called "A Siesta"?

    • It refers to the afternoon nap the Portuguese host takes before his dinners
    • Correct answer: It names the drowsy after-dinner comfort that the stranger's playing destroys
    • It marks the long pause the stranger leaves before he begins to play at all
    • It describes the two weeks of rest that Louison promises herself afterwards

    Once the guests are settled in easy-chairs, "The conversation died away," and "each seemed disposed to enjoy, undisturbed, his genial mood and the quiet gladness of digestion." Full, warm, morally satisfied, half asleep — that is the siesta, and it is what the music destroys. The title is ironic twice over: literally it names a doze that is not allowed to finish, and figuratively it names a comfortable class asleep on top of a poverty it will discuss fondly over dessert and cannot endure for ten minutes when the subject is played back at it. Kielland's Norwegian title is simply "Siesta"; the 1896 English version added the article.

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18. 18

    Question 18. How do the guests respond once the music stops?

    • They demand that the host tell them the stranger's name and his address
    • They argue about the meaning of the music until long after midnight
    • They agree to take up a collection for the poor before leaving the house
    • Correct answer: They scatter to a mass, a dispensary and a beer-hall, and go quietly home

    The reaction is retreat, not repentance. De Silvis laughs it off — "I think it was the devil himself. Come, let us go to the opera" — and "no one noticed the stranger slip out behind the servants." Louison refuses the opera ("I will hear no music for a fortnight.") and goes to a midnight low mass at La Trinité with the journalist; Anatole stops at the English dispensary in the Rue de la Paix for something for his truffles; the German doctor walks to Müller's brasserie in the Rue Richelieu for beer and bacon. "They had all suddenly realized that they were strangers in a strange place, and each one wished to slip quietly home." Only one person is honestly changed, and only in private: alone in her carriage, "this light, frivolous creature cried as if she had been whipped whilst she drove homeward."

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19. 19

    Question 19. What is Kielland's central point about the charity these guests are so proud of?

    • Correct answer: It is performed for an audience, and cannot survive the thing it describes
    • It is well meant but simply too small to relieve so much genuine suffering
    • It works, and Kielland offers the press campaign as a model to be copied
    • It fails only because the guests are foreigners with no real ties to Paris

    Every act of goodness at this table has a spectator. The journalist claims the press's millions as a personal virtue; Louison's reputation for saintliness rests on a night when she "had taken three poor seamstresses up to her own rooms, and had them sew the whole of the night before the fête in the hippodrome" — she fed them and paid them, and the room hears only the kindness. The narrator files the whole performance dryly: "Numberless little touches of nobility — all savouring of self-denial — came to light from amidst these days of luxury and pleasure." Poverty as an idea makes these people feel generous and sleepy. Poverty as a sound makes them ill, and they flee it within minutes.

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20. 20

    Question 20. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • The host knows most of his guests only from casual meetings.

      Happened

      "And the host himself knew his guests only through casual meetings at balls, tables d' hôte, or in the street." De Silvis asks for an address the moment he meets anyone and posts an invitation the next day.

    • Mademoiselle Adèle guesses the stranger's nationality on her first try.

      Didn't happen

      She misses three times — Pole, Englishman, American — despite claiming she can place any man after ten words. He finally tells her himself: "I am an Irishman, madame."

    • Anatole defines an Irishman for Adèle as "The poor of England."

      Happened

      He whispers it back when she asks what an Irishman even is, and her interest in the stranger collapses at once — she casts "a shrinking, timid glance" at him.

    • Louison sees white angels lifting a sinner in the bubbles on her grape.

      Happened

      "look, white angels are bearing a sinner to heaven!" The thought is passed round the table and much admired, and the journalist turns it immediately into a lesson about how small forces united can lift great burdens.

    • The journalist admits that the collections made by the press had failed.

      Didn't happen

      The opposite: he takes credit for them, saying "we" at every turn and talking himself warm about "these millions, that we, with such great self-sacrifice, have raised."

    • Louison had three poor seamstresses sew in her rooms all night.

      Happened

      Her best friend tells it as proof of goodness: Louison "had taken three poor seamstresses up to her own rooms, and had them sew the whole of the night before the fête in the hippodrome." She gave them coffee, food and payment.

    • The stranger announces his name before he sits down at the piano.

      Didn't happen

      He is never named at all. When De Silvis tries to thank him, the sentence breaks off — "Senhor de Silvis had forgotten the name — a thing that often happened to him with his guests."

    • The drawing-room is brightly lit by lamps while the stranger plays.

      Didn't happen

      "There was no other light than the fire in the grate." The lamps arrive only at the very end, at the same moment the music breaks off in a dissonance.

    • The guests applaud and call for an encore when the playing ends.

      Didn't happen

      They spring up in fright and crowd round the host, one lady has already felt ill, and Adèle shrieks that she dare not be in the dark. Nobody even notices the stranger leaving.

    • Adèle cries alone in her carriage on the way home.

      Happened

      After Anatole gets out at the dispensary she leans back, relieved to be alone, and "this light, frivolous creature cried as if she had been whipped whilst she drove homeward." It is the only unwitnessed feeling in the story.

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