Allenby

Don't waste your time

Revisado: 03-22-24

This book is narrated by a "virtual voice." You'd think that since the voice is virtual, the publishers could have created a pleasant one. Regrettably they did not. It's annoying and ill-suited to the material.

Many of the German words and names in the book (there are dozens -- it IS about Berlin, after all) are badly mangled. There are some problems with English words as well. For example, the nationality "Polish" is pronounced repeatedly as though it were something you do with a polishing cloth.

The story isn't very interesting. It just fizzles at the end.

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Interesting story, poor narrator

Revisado: 05-14-23

There are hundreds of French words, phrases and names in this book. The narrator mispronounces nearly all of them, many by a wide margin. Her voice is irritating. Would it have been so difficult to find a pleasant voice who has a decent knowledge of French? After all, the name is "Paris."

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A challenge

Revisado: 05-15-22

This is interesting historical fiction, though it's a challenge to keep track of the characters because the cast is huge. Perhaps not the best book to listen to, as opposed to reading in print. Names seem to stick in the mind better when one sees them.

It's also interesting that the three narrators apparently didn't listen to each others' performances since there are distinct differences in pronunciation. One of them talks about President Balaguer while another says Balagwer. One pronounces Crisóbal with the accent on the last syllable while another puts it on the second. One narrator refers to Trujillo as Generalismo until near the end of the book, then switches to Generalísimo, as though someone had corrected her late in the game but decided that it wasn't worthwhile to re-record her earlier hours of performance.

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Problems with the performance

Revisado: 03-08-22

I won't comment on the story. Other have fulfilled that function admirably here. I'll just state that the performance is irritating. The narrator's accent, his speech patterns, and his manner of dramatizing the text combine to make many words garbled and indecipherable, at least to an American listener. He tends to swallow the ends of sentences before they're completely out of his mouth. All this makes it difficult to understand what's going on in a lot of places.

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The Performance !

Revisado: 01-02-22

An interesting story, but ruined by the performance -- one of the worst that I can remember hearing. The narrator tends to hurry through sentences then comes to an abrupt halt, giving the narration a choppy feel. The narrator has no knowledge of how to pronounce French and was given no direction. That's a problem because a good part of the action takes place in France and there are references to France throughout the book. A string of badly mangled place names is a good way to destroy verisimilitude.

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Pronunciation problems

Revisado: 09-02-18

You'd expect the narrator of a book named "Flowers from Berlin" to have a basic understanding of German pronunciation. In fact, it's probably safe to say that most educated English speakers know that the German letter w is pronounced like an English v. So there's little excuse for the narrator's constant repetition of "ab-whar" (for abwehr) or "where-mak" (for wehrmacht). Frequent mispronunciations of English words ("panalopy" for panoply, "nonpulsed" for nonplused, "obstensibly" for ostensibly) also distract from the story. Doesn't the publisher have an editor?

The story itself is okay as a routine spy thriller but isn't top-drawer.

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