From Dance While You Can by Susan Lewis

Read the passage bellow and answer the following questions:

1. Why does the passage sound retrospective? What is it about?

2. How did the two sweethearts use to spend their free time together?

3. What is implied by “the fairground and Violet May”? what is it suggestive of?

4. What metaphors describe the man’s pleasure of such a pastime? Is it typical of people in love to exchange their dreams and fantasie? Why so?

5. What kind of epithet is the epithet “ear-shattering”? What is its role in the passage? How and why did the man’s mood change at the end of the given passage?

Looking back now, I think we both knew how selfish we wer being, but at the time we were so much in love that nothing else seemed to matter. I listened for hours while she told me about the fairground and Violet May. Then I basked in her admiration as I told her about the cases I had been involved in, shamelessly exaggerating my successes. I’m sure she knew what I was doing, but nevertheless allowed me to wander on in my own fantasy world – until, once with an ear-shattering snore, she brought me back to earth again.

From Dance While You Can by Susan Lewis

Read the extract bellow and answer the following questions:

1. How is the extract opened? What does the advantage of the first sentence lie in?

2. What did the newcomer look like? What stylistic devices make the man’s description vivid? Give your commetary for every case.

3. Which sentences prove that the narrator had a very rich imagination? Whom did the narrator associate the newcomer with? How is the association achieved?

4. Enlarge upon the role of similes in the given extract.

5. What compositional device rounds up the second paragraph? Specify the synonyms which intensify the effect.

6. Why did the narrator try to sound humorous in the third paragraph of the extract?

7. How are further events likely to develop? Support your viewpoint.

8. Is bigamy a crime? What’s your attitude to it?

Rachel and I teurned to find a tall blond man standing on the pavement outside, shuffling uncomfortably from one foot to the other as if he were more than ready to move on. The collar of a purplish check shirt appeared above the neck of his fur-lined leather jacket, and his jeans, which had seen better days, were stuffed inside the legs of what looked like size fourteen cowboy boots. All he needed to complete his appearance was a corck-dangled hat and a can of lager.

“I think I’ll be on my way,” Rache said. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. And she ran off down the steps. The man smiled pleasantly as she passed him, and doffed the invisible hat. I followed her down the steps and asked what he might want with Lizzie. He hooked his thumbs through his jeans loops, as if trying to give himself a confidence he was clearly far from feeling, and leaned against the pillar of the proch. I listened in stupefied silence as this stranger, who had appeared out of the darkness on a cold and windy March night, told me who he was, and why he was looking for my sister-in-law. I was dumbfounded. I was astonished. In the end I asked him to wait, and went inside to fetch Henry, Lizzie’s husband.

I let him take a good look at the man standing at the door before I made the introduction. “Henry Clive, meet John Roseman. Or should I put it another way. Henry, meet Lizzie’s husband.”