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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. To what Rolling Stones' song were some of Harun's photographs used as illustrations?

2. Where was Sem working when Harun's student film aired?

3. In 1999, who does Sem remember standing in front of a hotel smoking a cigar?

4. What day of the week did Sanja have her stroke?

5. For writers from what country was Villa Aurora an exile refugee during World War II?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is Sanja's situation by the time she has been in the hospital for four nights?

2. How did Harun acquire the habit of going into the mountains when he was quite young, and what did he do there?

3. What does Sem tell Sanja is in the hospital when she asks what happened to her?

4. After Sanja has been in the hospital two days, what does Sem go back to their apartment to get?

5. What ritual did Sem and Harun develop when Harun was a child?

6. What difficulties has Sanja had with allergies?

7. How does Sem compare photographs and drawings?

8. What type of tennis shoes does Sanja have, and why are those typical of who she is and what she is like?

9. In what language does Sem write?

10. What do they learn about Sanja's condition after doing scans at the hospital?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Genre is a means of classifying literature. What is the genre of the novel? Why is it fiction?

Essay Topic 2

Sem still writes in Bosnian, not English. What is Sem’s relationship to language? Why does he consider himself to be a "prisoner of [his] language" (97)? Why does he still write in Bosnian?

Essay Topic 3

After her stroke, Sanja experiences memory loss. How do Sanja and Sem cope with her memory loss? Why does Sem wish there was a machine "that discovers forgotten events and returns them to memory" (221)?

(see the answer keys)

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