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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
4.5
Que livro inesperado. Nunca pensei que a história seguisse este rumo. Dei por mim a passar por vários estados emocionais que só comprovam o talento do autor e o impacto da sua escrita. É um livro divertido e com humor inteligente. Ri-me muitas vezes e achei imensa graça aos diálogos entre marido e mulher, pai e filho. Emocionei-me com a morte de uma personagem. Fiquei sem respirar nos momentos de suspense com a Alex. Gostei muito de Desmond e criei um carinho especial pela Fred. Não dou cinco estrelas, porque senti que foi tudo muito acelerado no final e, por mim, continuava a ler calmamente para perceber como tudo ficaria. No geral, é um excelente livro e fiquei com muita curiosidade em ler mais de David Lodge.
Que livro inesperado. Nunca pensei que a história seguisse este rumo. Dei por mim a passar por vários estados emocionais que só comprovam o talento do autor e o impacto da sua escrita. É um livro divertido e com humor inteligente. Ri-me muitas vezes e achei imensa graça aos diálogos entre marido e mulher, pai e filho. Emocionei-me com a morte de uma personagem. Fiquei sem respirar nos momentos de suspense com a Alex. Gostei muito de Desmond e criei um carinho especial pela Fred. Não dou cinco estrelas, porque senti que foi tudo muito acelerado no final e, por mim, continuava a ler calmamente para perceber como tudo ficaria. No geral, é um excelente livro e fiquei com muita curiosidade em ler mais de David Lodge.
My mother has been partially deaf since before I was born, and I picked up this book with the idea that it might provide some insight and shed some humorous light onto the situation. It did.
I found Desmond attaching and likable, and actually grew fond of all the characters - expect for Alex Loom.
She was advertised on the back cover as an important element of the book, and I expected the plot to revolve around her, but I actually found myself wishing that she'd been left out of the book entirely. She seemed to come right out of another book. Her plotline added little to the story that couldn't have been introduced without her, and the lack of an eventual resolution regarding her character left me a little frustrated.
That aside, I enjoyed this book - I especially liked the relationship between Desmond and his father, which was both funny and touching.
I found Desmond attaching and likable, and actually grew fond of all the characters - expect for Alex Loom.
She was advertised on the back cover as an important element of the book, and I expected the plot to revolve around her, but I actually found myself wishing that she'd been left out of the book entirely. She seemed to come right out of another book. Her plotline added little to the story that couldn't have been introduced without her, and the lack of an eventual resolution regarding her character left me a little frustrated.
That aside, I enjoyed this book - I especially liked the relationship between Desmond and his father, which was both funny and touching.
medium-paced
‘Deafness is comic, blindness is tragic,’
The first thing I noticed about Deaf Sentence is that its first sentence draws out for 24 (Kindle) lines. That’s a heck of a lot of lines. And that’s was a heck of a lot of fun. David Lodge sure likes to play with word-order, puns and linguistic stuff and I giggle at the sight of things like that. What can I say? I’m fascinated by languages and their quirks. When I’m reading a book, I’m constantly checking the dictionary for new words or etymologies of words. Obviously, I liked this book from the start.
And two chapters in, I was already pitying the poor translators as well as wondering how they could manage to translate this book. I’m seriously considering getting a Spanish copy. David Lodge knows its too, because he thanks the translators of his books in the acknowledgements.
This book is a tragicomedy, which its funny moments but also very sad and despairing ones. And it is mostly a series of reflections on life in general, little pieces of information I liked very much. I selected a few passages that resonated with me and I also think are better to get an idea of what the book it about.
This one made me laugh:
“What would be the equivalent of a guide dog for the deaf? A parrot on your shoulder squawking into your ear?”
[...] ‘How did you know?’
‘I’m a linguist,’ I said.
‘Oh, are you? What languages?’
‘Only the one,’ I said.
I selected this passage because I have a “personal” acquaintance (that has to do with a book) with this painting and I liked that it got mentioned:
But the one that always has the most spectators lingering in front of it, intrigued and puzzled, is lighter in colour tone than the others. It’s known as the Dog Overwhelmed By Sand (none of these titles was Goya’s). It might be a modern Abstract Expressionist painting, composed of three great planes of predominantly brownish colour, two vertical and one horizontal, if it wasn’t for the head of a little black dog at the bottom of the picture, painted almost in cartoon style, buried up to its neck in what might be sand, looking upwards pathetically and apprehensively at a descending mass of more of the same stuff. There are lots of theories about what the picture means, like the End of the Enlightenment, or the Advent of Modernity, but I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness, deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suffocation.
A part of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament:
Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you . . . It was impossible for me to say, to people, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’ Ah, how could I possibly admit to an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy . . . Oh, I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would gladly have mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas, I must live alone like someone who has been banished. It’s a very poignant document, an outpouring of suppressed emotion, a cry wrung from the heart. Sometimes, he says, he would yield to the desire for companionship. But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.
What kind of a speech act is a suicide note? It depends of course on what classification system you’re using. In the classic Austin scheme there are three possible types of speech act entailed in any utterance, spoken or written: the locutionary (which is to say what you say, the propositional meaning), the illocutionary (which is the effect the utterance is intended to have on others) and the perlocutionary (which is the effect it actually has). But there are lots of further distinctions and subcategories, and alternative typologies like Searle’s commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative, indirect speech acts and on. Most utterances have both locutionary meaning and illocutionary force. The hazy area is the line between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Is the perlocutionary properly speaking a linguistic act at all? Austin gives the example of a man who says ‘Shoot her!’ (a rather odd example to invent, when you think about it, a symptom of male chauvinism and misogyny among Oxford dons perhaps). Locution: He said to me ‘Shoot her’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘her’ her. Illocution: he urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her. Perlocution: he persuaded me to shoot her. The interesting level is the illocutionary: even in this example you can see how the same words can have quite different illocutionary force in different contexts. A little exercise I used to give first-year students was to imagine such contexts. ‘He ordered me to shoot her’, for instance, might describe an SS officer’s command to a guard in a concentration camp. ‘He advised me to shoot her’ needs a little more imagination, there’s such a moral gap between the cool finite verb and the brutal infinitive; some Mafia godfather perhaps, speaking to a member of his family whose wife has been unfaithful to him. (On further reflection, only beta minus for that one: normally both the weapon and the target must be present for ‘shoot’ to be felicitous.) What about a suicide note that consisted entirely of the words, ‘I intend to shoot myself’? Locution: he stated his intention to shoot himself, meaning by ‘intend’ intend, by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘myself’ himself. Illocution: there are several possibilities here. He could be explaining, to those who would find him dead, that he shot himself deliberately, not accidentally, or that he was not shot by another person. He could be expressing the despair which had driven him to this extreme step. He could be making his family and friends feel bad about not having realised he might kill himself, and not having prevented it. Without more context there’s no way of knowing. As to the perlocutionary effect, I suppose that would depend on whether or not he actually committed suicide. Or would it? You don’t need to say or write the words, ‘I intend to shoot myself’ in order to have the effect of shooting yourself. You don’t perform suicide in words as, say, you perform marriage. The perlocutionary level of a suicide note is inseparable from the illocutionary level - its intended effect on those who read it. But that will probably be affected by whether you succeed or not.
After that he expounded to a musicologist from the University a theory he had long entertained that it had been of enormous advantage to song writers of American popular music that so many American place names, because of their Spanish or native Indian origins, were anapaestic, the stress falling on the third syllable, like California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Carolina, San Francisco, or iambic, like Chicago, Atlanta, Missouri, words which were easily set to syncopated music, whereas English place names were typically dactylic, like Birmingham and Manchester or trochaic, like Brighton and Leicester, inherently unmusical. To illustrate the point he crooned, ‘When you go to Birmingham, Be sure to wear a flower in your hair’, and in a creditable imitation of Frank Sinatra, ‘Leicester, Leicester, that toddling town, Leicester, Leicester, I’ll show you around’. Amused heads turned around the room.The musicologist, who had seemed disposed to challenge his argument, seemed impressed, and was certainly silenced, by this demonstration.
I recalled an interesting observation about collocations of happy in a book on corpus linguistics I reviewed years ago, and after a short search I found it. In a small corpus of 1.5 million words the most frequent lexical collocates of happy in the three words occurring before and after it were life and make. Not surprising: we all desire a happy life, we all like things which make us happy. The next most common collocates were: entirely, marriage, days, looked, memories, perfectly, sad, spent, felt, father, feel, home. I am struck by how many of them are keywords in my own pursuit of happiness, or lack of it, especially the nouns: marriage, memories, father, home. Of the verbs, feel is obviously the verb most frequently combined with happy, counting feel and felt as one. Predictably the only adjective among the words, apart from happy itself, is its opposite, sad. It surprised me that the most common adverbs qualifying happy in the corpus were entirely and perfectly, rather than, say, ‘fairly’ or ‘reasonably ’. Are we ever entirely, perfectly happy? If so, it’s not for very long.The most interesting word is days. Not day, but days. Larkin has a wonderful poem called ‘Days’, which also contains the word happy. What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? The familiar, nostalgic collocation happy days doesn’t actually occur in the poem, but it’s inevitably evoked; it echoes in our heads as we read, and reminds us of the transience and deceptiveness of happiness. The days we live in always inevitably disappoint, by not being as happy as they were, or as we falsely believe they were, in ‘the good old days’, when ‘those were the days’. But where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields A footnote to the above: it occurred to me that negative particles might have been omitted from the analysis of collocations of happy, so I did a check on the small corpus I have on CD here at home, and sure enough, entirely happy is frequently preceded by not or some other negative word like never. But perfectly is usually unqualified. In fact the distribution is almost exactly equal: not entirely happy occurs about as often as perfectly happy, and entirely happy is as rare as not perfectly happy. I wonder why? Corpus linguistics is always throwing up interesting little puzzles like that. I looked up deaf a few years ago in the biggest corpus of written and spoken English available, about fifty million words, and the most common collocation, about ten per cent of the total, was fall on deaf ears (counting fall as a lemma, standing for all forms of the verb). Now it’s no surprise that the main contribution of deaf to English discourse is as part of a proverbial phrase signifying stupid incomprehension or stubborn prejudice; what’s puzzling is the verb fall, given that the human ear is positioned to receive sound waves from the side, not from above. And the enigma is not peculiar to English. A quick dictionary search revealed that German has auf taube Ohren fallen, French has tomber dans l’oreille d’un sourd, and Italian cadere sugli orecchi sordi. Subject there for another article that never got written.
The most moving of those cited in the book was a letter from Chaim Hermann, a Sonderkommando, to his wife, which was written in November 1944 and dug up from a pile of human ashes near one of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1945. The Sonderkommandos were able-bodied prisoners who were compelled to work in the extermination process itself, ushering the unwitting victims towards the gas chambers, removing their corpses afterwards and burning them in the ovens of the crematoria. To refuse the work was to invite instant execution; to perform it brought better living conditions - for a finite period. In a way the Sonderkommandos were the most unfortunate of all the victims of Auschwitz. The great majority of those who died there went unsuspectingly to the gas chambers. The Sonderkommandos lived for months with the certain knowledge that sooner or later they too would be killed, because the Nazis could not risk allowing them to survive as witnesses, and in fact their first duty was likely to be disposing of the corpses of their predecessors on the ghastly production line of death. Chaim Hermann described Auschwitz as ‘simply hell, but Dante’s hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eye-witnesses, and we cannot leave it alive’. He also said that he intended to die ‘calmly, perhaps heroically (this will depend on circumstances) ’, hinting at a final act of resistance, but it is not known whether he achieved that. He himself had no way of knowing whether his wife would ever receive his letter, but in the midst of all this diabolical evil he asked her forgiveness for not sufficiently appreciating their life together, and this was the sentence in his letter that most affected me: ‘If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.’
As Wittgenstein said, ‘Death is not an event of life.’ You cannot experience it, you can only behold it happening to others, with various degrees of pity and fear, knowing that one day it will happen to you.
By the way, I was reading this book and [b:Beat the Reaper|3173125|Beat the Reaper (Peter Brown #1)|Josh Bazell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316092271s/3173125.jpg|3205574] at the same time, and in both books, the main characters visit Auschwitz. What a coincidence.
David Lodge’s latest novel feels like two separate stories forced to cohabitate. Like most of Lodge’s fictitious marriages, the combination is kind of awkward. The first story involves retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates struggling with his premature hearing loss and with his stubborn, ill father. The second, which is much more wacky and sex-charged and in certain ways more typical of Lodge, finds Desmond becoming involved (though not quite involved) with an unstable female graduate student named Alex. I greatly preferred the first narrative. Alex’s behavior is way too Fatal Attraction to seem plausible to me (can the fact that she shares a first name with Glenn Close’s character from that movie be a coincidence?). The contrast between the subtle maturity of the first story and the juvenile sub-par early-Lodge-set-on-mince feel of the second is quite jarring. Maybe in some ways this novel represents Lodge saying goodbye to such youthful follies, but while I still enjoyed the book in parts, I found the divorce process distracting and rather coarse.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
I have conflicted feelings about Deaf Sentence. For the first hundred pages or so, I was blown away by Lodge's treatment of his subject matter, which is so authentic that it could only be autobiographical. Lodge's narrator, Desmond, is a retired academic in is mid-sixties who is slowly losing his hearing; his disease is incurable and will ultimately leave him completely without hearing. Desmond, a linguist, discusses the nature of his disease with breathtaking honesty and insight, and recounts the affects of his deafness on his marriage, his academic career, and his relationships with others, including his father.
Deaf Sentence is a novel in diary entries and, occasionally, apologetically, in the third person ("I feel a fit of the third person coming on"). When it's good, it is very, very good, but Lodge is balancing too many plot lines: we have Desmond and his wife, Desmond and the eccentric graduate student, Desmond and his father, Desmond and himself. Lodge technically wraps up each each plot trajectory, but the book is a slim 300 pages, and it felt like a squeeze to close each story.
The sensitivity with which Lodge writes of deafness makes this book a wonderful read for those interested in hearing loss, but the plot was lacking and somewhat unsatisfying.
Deaf Sentence is a novel in diary entries and, occasionally, apologetically, in the third person ("I feel a fit of the third person coming on"). When it's good, it is very, very good, but Lodge is balancing too many plot lines: we have Desmond and his wife, Desmond and the eccentric graduate student, Desmond and his father, Desmond and himself. Lodge technically wraps up each each plot trajectory, but the book is a slim 300 pages, and it felt like a squeeze to close each story.
The sensitivity with which Lodge writes of deafness makes this book a wonderful read for those interested in hearing loss, but the plot was lacking and somewhat unsatisfying.
Wonderful book! Very well written, each word placed exactly in the place where it should appear. The story itself is rather banal, but this is why it was such a joy to read. I also learnt a lot about being hard of hearing - I'm sure it will happen to me at some point.