Anonymous

Great Classic title, outstanding narrator

Reviewed: 01-21-20

I have been waiting a long time for this in audio. It lives up to its classic status, portraying complex characters throughout their intertwined lives. It is a fascinating experience that involves living for a few weeks in a culture that is at once totally ‘other’ and very believable. Fascinating to see what could be created while living imprisoned behind screens your whole life.

Brian Nishii is almost unique in audiobooks in both pronouncing the Japanese in what sounds like a very authentic way and maintaining the character voices through 50 plus hours. (I have listened to many excruciating hours of bad/phony French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Swedish, etc etc names and accents.) The women have womanish, but not annoying, voices. The most important thing is, however, that he communicates the author’s clearly ambiguous, perhaps conflicted, attitudes toward her characters actions and thoughts.

Highly recommended. (Note, I preordered the original, one volume format. It’s worth using two credits for the two volume format.)

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15 people found this helpful

Outstanding narration

Reviewed: 02-05-15

This is arguably the finest American novel, by the perfect narrator. Heald's voice is American, amazingly expressive, diverse for the different characters, and easy to listen to for hours. He brings out the humor, illuminates the anguish and tragedy, and even keeps you interested in the descriptive passages about whales and whaling. I can’t say enough about Heald as a conductor to this great book.

As for Moby Dick itself, I came back to it decades after I had first read it as a teenager. Now I have a much deeper appreciation of the nuances in the many thematic threads that Melville weaves through his tale, and I am blown away by his writing. I really encourage you to read it for the first time, or to return to it. It is truly a great novel. And a funny one.

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2 people found this helpful

Excellent exploration of this subject

Reviewed: 01-13-15

Stewart has written an excellent exploration of the philosophical groundwork that informed the religious and political thinking of the men who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution. He takes the unusual approach of weaving his story around the lives and deeds of Ethan Allen and Thomas Young (a fomenter of the Boston Tea Party and a mobile gadfly during the years leading up to the war).

The work is challenging but rewarding, as Stewart explicates the elements of texts by Lucretius, Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke. He then shows how these ideas permeated the thinking, writing and activities of Allen and Young in particular, but also many other leading figures of the Revolution. This is a refutation of the idea that the founding fathers intended the country to be a Christian land, a refutation that is grounded in fact, not assertion.

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9 people found this helpful

Excellent narration and rollicking story

Reviewed: 11-21-14

George Backman is a terrific narrator for this. He can handle the Chinese names effortlessly and he catches the spirit of the soap opera characters, bed scenes, insults and general conniving.

Yes, it is in one sense a seemingly endless portrayal of a superficial, wealthy, randy young Chinese businessman and his wives/concubines, drinking parties, etc in 1100s China. But it is also a discerning portrayal of human psychology and a picture of Chinese life across most classes during the 1600s, when it was actually written. If you think of it as like a multi-year television program, well written and weaving together the threads of several plot lines while beguling you with descriptions of suculent feasts and beautiful clothes, you’ll get into the spirit of the thing and commit to multiple volumes. Again, Backman is flawless and makes the book.

Do note that it is frankly written in occasional bed scenes, so you wouldn’t want to listen in a car with children.

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9 people found this helpful

Excellent narration

Reviewed: 08-06-14

Davidson is a terrific reader. He creates dozens of characters with his voice, each one quite suitable, and maintains them over 1300 pages. He also manages to read Tolstoy’s repetitive essays on the myth of the great man and the force of a people without going nuts, which is more than you would do if you were reading it yourself.

While Tolstoy is annoying at times, there is no denying the power of the work. You gain a sense of Russian isolation and are forced to consider what does drive human history, even if you don’t agree with Tolstoy’s explanation.

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Terrible narration; I don’t know about the story

Reviewed: 01-01-14

I had to give the story a rating or else I couldn’t write a review, so I am giving it an average 3 stars. I have no idea of whether the story will be any good. I simply can’t go on listening, about 30 minutes in. The narrator is terrible. She swallows the words and doesn’t articulate clearly; it is just too much hard work to understand what she’s saying as I drive or walk. Her voice is very off-putting. I don’t have the return option on this one, or I certainly would do so.

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2 people found this helpful

Fun and interesting

Reviewed: 12-27-13

This is a very clever and insightful story that is really about the hypocrisy of life in the early Soviet Union, and the inability of man to create a communist utopia. The surface story is about a cultured surgeon who transplants the pituitary gland of a good-for-nothing human who dies (presumably of alchoholism) into a mongrel dog. The dog starts to take on human characteristics--but not those the doctor expects. (This echos another book I just read which involves early Soviet fascination with hair-brained scientific/medical research into things like eternal life.)

The book is very funny, and the narrator is pitch perfect for all of the voices, especially the dog.

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12 people found this helpful

stopped before halfway done

Reviewed: 12-27-13

This is one of those prize winners where you go ‘huh?’ Boring, writing isn’t insightful or artful. I read a lot of serious international fiction, and this doesn’t measure up. I made myself keep going to about one third through, to see if was going to kick in, but it never did.

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Failed coup in another country can be fascinating

Reviewed: 12-27-13

Warning: stick with this for at least an hour. It is slow at the beginning. But once Cercas gets rolling you are enthralled with his character studies and his explorations of heroism, statesmanship, politics, and democracy.

The framework for this analysis is the failed coup of February 23, 1981 in Spain. The country is just settling, uneasily, into democracy after forty years of Franco. The economy is failing, ETA (Basque terrorists) are bombing regularly, and those with power: the military, the church, the wealthy and priveleged under Franco, are unhappy with Adolfo Suarez, who they put in place to retain the core of Francoism while putting on the trappings of a democracy for public consumption. Surprise. Suarez took his assignment seriously and rapidly drove through a full democratic architecture; he even legalized the Communist party.

So several generals decide, ‘for the good of the country’, to overthrow Suarez. The military bursts into the Cortes (the legislative chambers) and starts shooting. As everyone else drops to the ground, Suarez and two of his unlikely collaborators in creating a democracy stay upright. Cercas asks why they stayed standing and what it meant. The book is a wonderful set of character studies of these men and the plotters, set against Spain’s recent history.

The writing is very skilled. Cercas uses rhetorical devices such as repetition of phrases (ironic or otherwise), symmetry, etc. to bring art to history. The rhetoric brings a rhythm and sense of music to the story, carrying the reader along.

Very highly recommended. Also, the narrator speaks both English and Spanish so all the names and places are pronounced correctly (I presume--sounds right to me).

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3 people found this helpful

Wonderful multi-narrator technique

Reviewed: 11-30-13

This is beautifully written and narrated. Friends, advisors, daughter, enemies buld up layers of history and character as you wonder what Augustus himself thinks. Highly recommended.

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