Bibliobabbler

Overall, a satisfactory listen

Revisado: 01-24-23

Nevil Shute tells his insightful novel well, but there are some reservations about a few concepts.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Outstanding!

Revisado: 11-06-21

"The Singapore Grip" is a magnificent work of historical imagining. The writing is stellar, the characters are depicted in all their varied realities, and the setting of Singapore in the 1930s and wartime probably cannot be more honestly drawn even in a work of non-fiction history. And the gifted narrator? To borrow from a Dickens character describing another narrator: He do them in all in different voices.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Excellent portrait of a complicated writer

Revisado: 04-09-21

Lycett's biography leaves no doubt about Kipling's strong admiration of and support for British imperialism, but also reveals that as an incisive thinker and brilliant writer he cannot be confined or defined by that label alone. Writers and other noted observers as diverse as T.S. Eliot and Bertolt Brecht have found found reasons to praise him.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Terrific narration of a true American classic

Revisado: 01-15-21

Narrator expertly employs several distinctive voices to bring to life the blues-drenched story of a doomed American young man in a wretched Chicago neighborhood post-World War II.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Superb narration of a superb novel

Revisado: 09-05-20

if any novel of the 20th century deserves that elusive mantle, "The Great American Novel," it is Ross Lockridge's "Raintree County."

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Narrator has an uphill battle with so-so Marquand

Revisado: 12-18-19

Harry Pulham is essentially an early draft of Charles Gray, the central character of John P. Marquand's later, and best, novel, "Point of No Return." Though they are cut from the same cloth -- New England-born businessmen, scions of the middle class and upper-middle class and solid privilege -- in the first half of the 20th century, Gray is a more realized, and therefore believable, creation than Pulham. Their stories are much alike, men of middle age trying to figure out how they got where they are and wondering if it was worth it. The narration is good, but the reader must feel some sympathy for the narrator, for he is hobbled -- or seems to be -- by something that is not his fault: an authorial tic of Marquands's. Marquand appends each bit of dialogue with an attribution of the speaker -- "he said," "she said," "Bill said," "Kay said" -- even when it is perfectly clear who is speaking. This continual repetition, less noticeable in reading it, is annoying when read aloud. Other than that, the narrator does a fine job of fitting his voice to various characters and to the narration of descriptive text.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Grim but honestly realistic novel superbly read

Revisado: 11-17-19

Gordon Comstock, an impoverished, angry literary slacker, fights against the "money world," his only weapons being his slim output of poetry and his rage (largely inner). Gordon is so wretchedly unhappy that the reader wonders that he doesn't cut his own throat. He is so enraged that money controls the world and all aspects of life that he cannot bring himself to accept a fairly well paying job even though it could be his for the asking. Anyone who knows about George Orwell and his opinions and principles can easily discern that Gordon is a stand-in for him. Though Orwell's point in the novel is sound and reasonable, Gordon's negativity and gloom are so abysmally deep and as to verge on being a one-note samba and therefore off-putting. But at the end, the other side of Orwell emerges -- the Orwell who has a an abiding affection and admiration for ordinary English men and women -- breaks through, and life eases for Gordon and his long-suffering girlfriend Rosemary.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Deft narration of an average novel

Revisado: 11-07-19

The title creature and the audio narration of the mystery surrounding it are the most recommendable features of "The Essex Serpent." Characterization of the principal figures is also good, but beyond that the novel is much of a muchness, given over to inflating the significance of the mundane activities of everyday folk and their inter-relationshios by investing their speech and their thought with an archness that does not fit the place of that time (lEngland in the late 19th century). And it expends way too many words in doing so.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Exciting adventure and history

Revisado: 10-13-19

Though the many unfamiliar names are sometimes difficult to keep straight and the many bloody battles tend to blur into one another, this excellent novel gives a satisfying and entertaining (and probably historically sound) glimpse into the age of Vikings and Anglo-Saxons at the end of the first millennium A.D. Heartily recommended, and the narrator is perfectly suited to the subject.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Marvelous Narration of Marquand's Finest Novel

Revisado: 08-29-19

A masterfully controlled, intricately woven masterwork about the present, and most significantly the past, of a businessman of the first half of the early 20th century. The narrator's skillfully inflected voice could hardly have been improved upon, so deftly does it convey the melancholy mood and the measured pace of this novel. John P. Marquand is one of those once-prominent writers we mostly don’t remember but somehow can’t quite forget. Marquand died in 1960, after riding the best-seller lists throughout the 1940s and ’50s, and shortly thereafter so did interest in his writing. Marquand’s critical reputation never reached Everest altitudes. It could not even be said of him what Somerset Maugham said of himself, that he was in the front rank of the second-raters. Marquand was tarred – with some justice, and for his part, with some perverse pride – with the brush of “formula writing,” a label he earned from his lucrative years of writing for “slick” or “smooth” magazines, mostly the old Saturday Evening Post. Nevertheless, in the 1940s and ‘50s he produced, among his many works, a small handful of novels that received some critical acclaim, most notably “The Late George Apley” (for which he won the Pulitzer), “Wickford Point” (wickedly witty and satirical), and this one, “Point of No Return,” his best. It is told, like others, employing Marquand’s patented, mesmerizing flashback technique, and, also like the others, is concerned with the central character’s past. In this case the central character is Charles Gray, a banker in the late 1940s, who returns after many years to his hometown of Clyde, Massachusetts, on an assignment from his bank. The assignment is brief, no more than two days, but all through the long novel frequent flashbacks serve as ruminations on how his family, particularly his father, and the experiences of his boyhood and young manhood contributed to the man he has become. The subjects of the ruminations are many, but the chief one probably is fate – or destiny, or predestination, or even freedom. Was there never any possibility of his escaping the path his life took? He is not discontented, not really, or anyway not deeply. He does not scorn his hometown; he likes it and defends it against criticisms. But did certain constraints of his life there prevent him becoming something other than this man who is striving for promotion at the bank? At the end he experiences in his mind a short flash of “freedom” – and subsequent relief -- that suggests the answer might be “yes” and he may be off that long path and onto the path of “freedom.” And then the very last couple of pages suggest something different.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 2 personas