Villages
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Narrated by:
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Edward Herrmann
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By:
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John Updike
About this listen
Owen's education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, "How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!" His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: "A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall."
This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early 21st century.
©2004 John Updike (P)2004 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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"Updike still writes lovely sentences and creates a believable portrait of the American village." (Publishers Weekly)
"As is usual for Updike, this novel is elegantly styled." (Booklist)
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Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.
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Grows Within You
- By Chris Reich on 08-06-11
By: Saul Bellow
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
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Mislaid
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
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Misbegotten, mishandled, misfired novel
- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Family Secrets
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Though Diane Randall’s jewelry business is a great success, her marriage is not, and she finds herself growing lonely as her children near adulthood. Meanwhile, her eighteen-year-old daughter Julia is falling dangerously in love, and Diane’s mother, Jean, is relishing her newfound freedom as a single woman in Europe. Distracted by their individual concerns, the three women are ill-prepared for the crisis that suddenly appears on Diane’s doorstep in the form of a handsome FBI agent asking about an explosive secret that’s laid buried for decades.
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Nancy! Is there a sequel? What?
- By PattieLynn on 12-02-22
By: Nancy Thayer
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The Portable Veblen
- By: Elizabeth Mckenzie
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor. The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that's as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its words, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now.
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Not what it was cracked up to be
- By Linda on 02-03-16
What listeners say about Villages
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Susie Bright
- 06-04-10
Updike's Last Major Book, Outstanding
By the time Villages came out, Updike was not trendy anymore, just a giant that young people barely knew about. But you take one look at this book, just listen to one chapter, and you're blown away. His powers were as great, greater than ever. What a loss. I miss his books so much.
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- Mike Williams
- 04-19-15
One of John Updike's best
One of my favorite books from John Updike.
I read this book years ago and just recently rediscovered it on Audible. Although the book takes place a few decades ago. Its characters could easily exist today. This book follows the changes that many men go through as they advance in age. I am sure that most will be able to relate to some of the situations that the lead character finds himself in.
Great book for middle-aged men. (Highly Recommended)
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- Ted
- 05-23-24
Of mainly autobiographical interest
I count John Updike as one of my favorite writers and genuinely revere him, but it occurred to me, listening to Edward Herrmann’s superb narration, that this book is only interesting because it is Updike telling the story, a fictionalized account that parallels his own life. If someone else were reminiscing at such length and in such detail — some ordinary man in his seventies — these childhood memories, sexual discoveries, domestic conversations, and accounts of dreams would, alas, be rather boring.
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Overall
- M. Consol
- 07-09-05
Updike at the height of his powers
This novel is a true masterpiece, full gorgeous phrasings and extraordinarily keen observations. No writer is a greater virtuoso of the English language than Updike, but many of his books are plagued by scenes and storylines that dawdle and beat around the bush. Not this one. This book has a strong and well paced storyline, so you not only get Updike's immaculate writing skills but also the kind of forward momentum that keeps readers feeling a genuine sense of destination.
It's also has a flamboyant cast of characters, lead by Owen Mackenzie, who Updike takes from boyhood to the grave in a whirlwind expedition through childhood hi-jinx, courtship, marriage, fatherhood, numerous extra-marital affairs, business relationships and a career as a computer engineer and entrepreneur. You get a surprisingly well-informed and entertaining history of the computer industry?s evolution. Updike makes extraordinary observations about digital devices and their analogies to the humanity.
It?s also a very sexy book, built around male/female relationships, some sanctioned, some illicit. Nobody writes sex and love scenes like Updike, and this book is loaded with them. They?re not so much descriptions of the act as they are beautifully and incisively crafted explorations of human geography and emotion. Some of these scenes are so literary even Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would have difficulty quibbling with them.
Lastly, the book is marvelously read and extremely well recorded, making the separation of characters very distinct.
What a treat that John Updike, though advanced in years, is still turning out such powerhouse novels.
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18 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Alison
- 02-22-05
Good for Updike fans
I'm not a hardcore Updike fan, but I've enjoyed some of his other books. This one is good and is well-adapted to the audio format. Real Updike fans will probably enjoy it even more because it sheds some light on the situations and characters developed in his other books.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Terry
- 11-24-04
Titillating
If you like to listen to language, this is about as good as it gets. Villages is soap opera elevated to high art. (Did America invent the Soap, along with Jazz?) In Villages Updike uses all his skills to create a really interesting listening experience. As a narrator, Edward Herman is truly superb. I wish he would have done the Rabbit novels.
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2 people found this helpful
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- CJS
- 11-01-18
Updike Can Be Infuriating but He’s Still My Favorite
Updike seems to write the same book over and over again and the especially promiscuous behavior of the protagonist in this one made me burst out loud (in my car or on the walking path) several times with cries of exasperation. But Updike is my favorite. He’s always been the best, for me, at capturing the experience of being alive, describing the world and consciousness and memory. There are many gorgeous passages here that I wish I had written down. The narrator read too fast to my liking and I actually slowed this down to .75 speed and that seemed more appropriate.
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Overall
- Everett Leiter
- 04-22-09
Pardon me for yawning...
I have listened to the first 45 minutes of Villages, and as of yet, I haven't come across anything in the way of interesting plot -- or *any* plot for that matter. So far, it seems to be just tedious exposition. I can see why people speak of Updike's keen observations and his poetic use of language, etc. However, this book is not my cup of tea. My interest in the characters, places, periods described simply has not been piqued, not after nearly an hour of listening. This will be one of the rare pieces of literature that I shall leave unfinished.
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2 people found this helpful