Archive | Reviews

WATT

By Samuel Beckett • Read by Dermot Crowley

“Astonishing performance”

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

The right friend, absolutely. The performance is a work of art in its own right, and the text is so difficult, it’s almost a sport to see what the narrator’s going to do with it. What he does is offer this much under-represented text arguably (by me) its best medium.

What did you like best about this story?

Watt has some of Beckett’s funniest writing, and there’s a great sense of him working towards the inimitable trilogy. The performance here makes sense of the oceans of patterned text when you read it in hard copy, and Crowley brings fantastic light and shade to aid comprehension of the incomprehensible.

Have you listened to any of Dermot Crowley’s other performances? How does this one compare?

I listened to Dermot Crowley on Molloy, so I bought this one with confidence. His performance in Watt is comparable in excellence, but much more of a tour de force, because the text is even more difficult. He utterly brings it to life.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, I wanted to take it all in in ‘movements’ — it evolves and develops in the manner of classical music.

Any additional comments?

I’m so pleased to hear Crowley unleashed on Beckett again — I’ll certainly listen out for more from him.

Nettlewine – 04/03/2017 – Audible Review

“Astonishing performance”
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why? 
The right friend, absolutely. The performance is a work of art in its own right, and the text is so difficult, it’s almost a sport to see what the narrator’s going to do with it. What he does is offer this much under-represented text arguably (by me) its best medium.
What did you like best about this story?
Watt has some of Beckett’s funniest writing, and there’s a great sense of him working towards the inimitable trilogy. The performance here makes sense of the oceans of patterned text when you read it in hard copy, and Crowley brings fantastic light and shade to aid comprehension of the incomprehensible.
Have you listened to any of Dermot Crowley’s other performances? How does this one compare? 
I listened to Dermot Crowley on Molloy, so I bought this one with confidence. His performance in Watt is comparable in excellence, but much more of a tour de force, because the text is even more difficult. He utterly brings it to life.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No, I wanted to take it all in in ‘movements’ — it evolves and develops in the manner of classical music.
Any additional comments?
I’m so pleased to hear Crowley unleashed on Beckett again — I’ll certainly listen out for more from him.

– Nettlewine UK 3/4/17  Audible 

“Perfect Narration”
If you could sum up Watt in three words, what would they be?
A difficult novel to read made easy by listening to it.
What other book might you compare Watt to, and why?
Murphy and How It Is. They are all challenging books to read and these audio recordings really open out the text.
Any additional comments?
I would like to hear some of Beckett’s later novels and short prose on Audible. For instance Ill Seen Ill Said, Company, Worstward Ho! and The Lost Ones.

– mike dee Llanelli 5/5/17  – Audible

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS

By C. G. Jung • Read by James Cameron Stewart

“‘Two souls in his breast'”

Jung’s autobiography is no ordinary memoir, but then you wouldn’t expect anything ordinary from a man with such an extraordinary mind. From a very young child he was aware of a splitting of himself and lived in a world of shadows and visions, some of them deeply troubling.

BUDDENBROOKS

By Thomas Mann • Read by David Rintoul

BUDDENBROOKS The Decline of a Family

 

Mann’s saga of a nineteenth-century German merchant family is the kind of audiobook that envelops listeners in its long story. David Rintoul serves this end by imbuing his skillful narration with understanding, emotional warmth, and occasional passion. His delivery of narrative is deep, resonant, and engaging, his reading supple, well paced, and clear. He differentiates the many characters with a light touch, saving extremes for characters who call for them. He usually manages the difficult job of conveying English versions of German dialects, odd accents, and vocal peculiarities adeptly. But his key talent, and most subtle, is his ability to engage the listener mentally and emotionally with the characters and story, which becomes absorbing and easy to listen to over its great length.

W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

“The German Middlemarch”

Very enjoyable reading of a clever translation, which catches the nuances of pre-unification German society. The decline of a mercantile family, often humorously drawn, played out against the seismic changes of the 19th century. Highly recommended.

Elvis Patterson – Penrith, United Kingdom – 12/01/2017 – Audible Review

“Five Star”

One of the best readings I have yet heard. David Rintoul’s performance was perfect throughout. The intensity and the gentle humour of the novel were beautifully delivered. I hope we can have a recording of Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” with the same reader.

Hugh M. Clarke

LE GRAND MEAULNES

By Alain-Fournier • Read by John Hollingworth

Coming to man’s estate”

My long-ago first reading of Le Grand Meaulnes left me with a powerful mystical swathe of impressions, and it has been fascinating to listen so many decades later to find that my perspective has altered. This time around I found I was seeing with the 15 year-old growing-up-boy narrator, Seurel, who narrates the complex story (rather as Nick Carraway narrates The Great Gatsby), observing as if watching an opera, rather than feeling bound up with the youthful passions of Meaulnes and Franz. Experience tells you that once Meaulnes has consummated his innocent fantasy-passion for Yvonne, it will disintegrate, and that the search of Franz for his runaway fiancée Valentine will bring him pain and destruction. What gives an extra layer of poignancy to Le Grand Meaulnes is the death of its author Alain Fournier just weeks into the Great War which keys into his novel’s theme of loss. Whatever dreams Fournier had nurtured were extinguished and the rural France of his novel was gone for ever.

Whatever your age, the visual and emotional intensity of the story is overwhelming. It’s all a great theatre in the head as you listen: the purity of Meaulnes’ and Franz’s romantic love made up of dream, enchantment and longing; the fantastical masquerade in the grounds of the hidden chateau where Meaulnes first sees Yvonne; the tangled mesh of impossible love; appearances and disappearances; insatiable wanderlust; disguise and carnival; searches with mysterious maps; the pain of terrible loss, yearning and desire…. So it goes on.

And to balance all this, there is the level-headed Seurel, the son of the teachers at the country school where 17 year-old Meaulnes suddenly appears, alluring and intriguing only to disappear and reappear three days later with a fine silk waistcoat beneath his school jacket. Seurel matures over the years and through him we feel the rather melancholy ordinary rural life in Sologne at the end of the nineteenth century with the schoolroom, the horses, carriages and domestic drudgery.

The narration is exactly right. John Hollingworth with his short a’s and unobtrusive gentle northern phrasing is just right for keeping us in Seurel’s sombre real world from which we view the unfolding of Meaulnes’ bright wanderings.

Rachel Redford – Audible

“The enchantment of a world forever lost”

There are readers and there are re-readers. I admire those who read only once and move onto something new; surely they have an exciting literary life. But I am a re-reader, and I like to re-read in several languages at times. That is the case here. This is my first reading of Alain-Fournier in English, and I enjoyed every single word.

What an enchanting book this is. It is hard not to evoke Proust when thinking of the first part of the book, the author’s close observation of character and detail, and his deep self-knowledge and vulnerability. But our author is no imitator of Proust, but an original and imaginative writer in his own right.

I love the protagonist who is somewhat shy and ostracized from his fellows due to a hip problem that causes him to hop and leads his family toward an overly protective attitude. But when Meaulnes comes to board at the school, the young man opens the door to new worlds of friendship, magic, imagination, dreams, and beauty.

As is well-known, the story centers upon a single event which takes place during the Christmas season. Meaulnes disappears and has an unusual experience when he finds “he had dropped into the most peaceful happiness on earth.” As our protagonist says, “It remained for a long time the great secret of our youth. But today when all is ended, and there remains only dust of so much good and so much evil, I can relate his strange adventure.”

The narrator was perfectly suited to the story. I couldn’t have asked for better.

The experience was all the more bittersweet and nostalgic because the book left me wanting more. But there is no more. Alain-Fournier was one of many who died for the great lies of the Great War. That knowledge leaves me with the same longing for more that I feel when I look at paintings from Macke or Marc, who also fell in the war. Still I am thankful for them, as I am for Alain-Fournier, for all they gave us during their brief stay. May they rest in peace.

Audible Review

LE GRAND MEAULINES [THE WANDERER]

This classic French novel, originally published in 1913, tells the story of a young man of intense and sudden emotional commitments and the conflicts they create. While narrator John Hollingworth’s characterizations are admirable, Alain–Fournier’s ideas about two of his major characters (and this is a novel about ideas as well as action) sometimes move them completely off the stage. As in THE GREAT GATSBY, the story is narrated by a friend of the title character who is not privy to all the secrets until the conclusion. Hollingworth maintains a balance between the apparent closeness and the real distance between them. He also varies his tempo more than most narrators, and uses this powerfully. This is a wonderfully accessible introduction to a book that deserves a wider audience.

D.M.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MURPHY

by Samuel Beckett, Read by Stephen Hogan • Unabridged • MARCH 2017

The avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett is considered difficult by many readers, but much of his wordplay becomes much clearer when read aloud, especially by narrator Stephen Hogan. Beckett’s prose carries much of the sonic burden of poetry, and when performed well, we can hear the music. The story involves philosophy (some of it invented), social satire (of the Irish Free State in the 1930s), and a love quadrangle–but Hogan keeps it all relatively clear with deft voices and accents. This complex text rewards careful study, which may not be possible with an audiobook, but this reading is a strong introduction to a Nobel Prize winner’s early work.

D.M.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

THE SORRROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • Read by Leighton Pugh

“Werther is worth it!”

This is from UKEMI AUDIOBOOKS which produces an expanding selection of important works of the past superbly read – a wonderful way of absorbing those important books and writers you’ve never had the time or space to read. It took Goethe just six weeks to write The Sorrows of Young Werther but its impact throughout Europe following its publication in 1774 – from blue frockcoat and yellow waistcoat outfits, to copycat displays of sublime displays of exaggerated sensibilities and the whole sturm und drang Romantic movement – was sensational enough for it to deserve another 21st century life as a download. Especially as intelligently read as this is.

The novel is made up of Werther’s letters to his long-suffering but silent friend Wilhelm detailing his doomed-from-the-outset passion for the essence-of-goodness Lotte who is looking after all her younger siblings in what Werther sees as the Arcadian bliss of the countryside. From the start Werther knows she’s promised to the much older Albert whom she marries, but the very impossibility of ever winning her feeds his monster tear-filled passions and the outpouring of his exquisite suffering. Eventually he sees he must annihilate himself which he does with Albert’s pistols, taking twelve hours to die.

Werther (‘wert’ is German ‘worth’) is much concerned with worth. He questions the worth of living; the ‘the contemptible ambitions of rank’ of the worthless nobility; prizes the worth of Homer, Klopstock and Ossian ( although Werther reading Goethe’s translations of Ossian to Lotte really were an indulgence I could have done without!). There is a progression through the seasons with the flowers, trees and insects of early Summer and the burgeoning of Werther’s passion, through to the winter mists, storms and tragedies befalling rural locals as the inevitability of his suicide approaches.

There is so much torment and weeping and so on that the whole could become tiresome for a modern listener, but the narrator Leighton Pugh saves Werther was such a fate. It must have been a seriously difficult task (just as well it’s only 4½ hours!), but he creates Werther’s destructive anguish as not merely repetitive, but both pitiable and universally human, as well as illustrating the extreme but serious Romanticism which gripped its readers over 250 years ago and has spawned a Werther afterlife in literature and film.

So, yes, Werther is worth it!

Rachel Redford –10/02/2017 – Audible Review

THE ANTICHRIST • ECCE HOMO

By Friedrich Nietzsche

“Two Great Books”

These two books by Nietzsche are notorious, polemical, and insightful into the authors most intimate thoughts and revealing his character. The reading is of a superior nature and excellently done. The overall performance is only 4 stars because the books are based on older translations, however the conception of thought is still clearly presented except for some small nuances. Definitely a tremendous bargain and well worth the purchase price!

Juan Malo – 04/01/17 – Audible Review

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

By Friedrich Nietzsche • Read by Christopher Oxford

“Best Narration of this book thus far!”

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, if you’ve ever wondered if the prose of this book could ever been properly and well delivered. Then this is it! Christopher Oxford gives maximum effort and does a magnificent job of really paying attention to the text and appears to fully appreciate and understand it. This culminates in a listening experience that is enjoyable and helps get across some of the nuances of the text. I don’t believe this has been as well as this before. If you want to hear this book with a different perspective on delivery – then look no further and get this version without hesitation!

– Audible Review