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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
I started out this book in tears cracking up! I loved Desmond's character. I was really interested in hearing an adult's perspective of hearing loss, so I could relate to my son's. The last half of the book lost momentum. I got it - dealing with aging and all, but it just descended into a lot of details that seemed unnecessary.
Overall, I enjoyed it and will look into other books by this author. Just think the story lost steam in the second half.
Overall, I enjoyed it and will look into other books by this author. Just think the story lost steam in the second half.
I marked this as "read" but I quit after 70 pages. The story started out well but then bogged down in tedium. He seemed to be endlessly describing taking his hearing aids out or in and then stating that he couldn't hear something instead of just letting the dialogue and action tell the story. Everything else was equally over described and drawn out. This book got a lot of high ratings so perhaps I missed something but I don't have time to waste on boring writing. The switching between 1st and 3rd person was annoying. After writing this review I went and read more of the one and two star reviews. Others found the same weaknesses I did.
Bookmarks Magazine described this book as "funny and moving". I found it to be neither, and several times debated quitting it altogether. There was one storyline about a crazy undergraduate that I found mildly entertaining and kept me reading. Horrible resolution, though, and I'm not glad I spent the time finishing.
The book wasn't as funny as promised. The story spans a few months in a retired linguistics professor's life and the troubles he experiences due to his hearing problems. There are some good and interesting aspects to the book, like the changing narrative (from 1. person to 3. person narration), or his linguistic expertise, or the first hand experiences he gives on slowly going deaf. But apart from that the story isn't all that gripping. There are some promising starts but they don't live up to expectations and rather die out flat.
Un 3,75/5 mais que je n'ai pas voulu arrondir à 4/5 car mon impression générale reste mitigée. Si j'ai apprécié l'idée de départ et les premiers chapitres, j'ai assez vite commencé à me lasser mais surtout j'ai commencé à trouver le narrateur un peu trop imbu de lui-même, surtout quand on voit certains de ses comportements dignes d'un adolescent pas très futé (alors qu'il a plus de 60 ans et qu'il est professeur d'université !). Par contre, c'est bien écrit et je me demande comment les traducteurs se sont dépatouillés des "jeux de mots" inhérents aux problèmes d'audition. J'ai aussi beaucoup apprécié les passages parlant du langage de façon un peu plus universitaire et/ou technique car j'ai appris différentes choses et qu'ensuite, on perçoit différemment comment les choses dites s'articulent et on fait attention aux petits détails. Même si je n'ai pas beaucoup aimé le héros de l'histoire, j'ai retrouvé beaucoup de mon expérience dans son récit : sa relation avec son père et le comportement de celui-ci qui m'a rappelé le mien (l'éloignement physique, le fait qu'il soit veuf et ne s'occupe pas beaucoup du ménage chez lui mais qu'il refuse toute aide extérieure, son refus de porter des prothèses auditives ...) et ce, jusqu'à la fin du roman (qui est plus ou moins ce que j'ai vécu en début d'année et qui m'a donc fait verser quelques larmes). Il y a donc beaucoup de points intéressants dans ce livre mais il m'a manqué un lien fort avec le narrateur qui m'a souvent énervée par son attitude !
A painful, yet funny examination of getting old and how our physical bodies inevitably begin to betray us. It's a topic nobody thinks about before they hit their 30s, and even then, the thought process is more along the lines of "ow, I guess I'm not young and invincible anymore. Oh well!"
Lodge's descriptions of disability-induced shame and the ensuing coping methods are great; they're helpful in understanding why anyone would knowingly make their lives a little bit harder sometimes.
This story has everything, but I can also see how it might be a total turnoff for someone who has zero interest in linguistics: the protagonist is a retired linguistics professor, and Lodge doesn't shy away from launching into linguistics at any opportunity. Then again, there's also a great scene where the protagonist is trying to compensate his hearing loss at a party by talking without pause about any subject at all until his listeners get annoyed and turn away from the seemingly pompous git. There's a lot of meta here: what is how we truly feel and what we truly fear, and what is us trying to obfuscate those feelings by focusing our energies on relaying the knowledge we have.
A fun read all in all, even with the Manic Dream Pixie Girl at Uni side plot.
Lodge's descriptions of disability-induced shame and the ensuing coping methods are great; they're helpful in understanding why anyone would knowingly make their lives a little bit harder sometimes.
This story has everything, but I can also see how it might be a total turnoff for someone who has zero interest in linguistics: the protagonist is a retired linguistics professor, and Lodge doesn't shy away from launching into linguistics at any opportunity. Then again, there's also a great scene where the protagonist is trying to compensate his hearing loss at a party by talking without pause about any subject at all until his listeners get annoyed and turn away from the seemingly pompous git. There's a lot of meta here: what is how we truly feel and what we truly fear, and what is us trying to obfuscate those feelings by focusing our energies on relaying the knowledge we have.
A fun read all in all, even with the Manic Dream Pixie Girl at Uni side plot.
Insightful and touching story humorously taking us into the challenges of our aging bodies giving out (incipient deafness here) long before the rest of our faculties atrophy. Good characterizations of the impatience and self-criticism in relating to and caring for a difficult elder parent.
Wow. I want to read other books by David Lodge now. I love the way he writes--very straightforward, very smart, very real. This novel, about a man who is prematurely losing his hearing, was so real that I stopped several times to make sure whether I was reading a novel or a memoir.
I just couldn't engage with the main character at all. I didn't finish it.