UnderManyAStar

Ecstatic memoir beautifully narrated

Revisado: 08-13-24

Alfred Kazin's sensory impressions of his boyhood are a beautiful read, but Steven Jay Cohen's narration raises them to a new level. His facility with accents and voices creates an absorbing atmosphere of 1930s Brooklyn. A wonderful listen!

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Masterful Performance Deepens the Novel's Magic

Revisado: 05-12-22

I read The Children's Book years ago and found it enthralling. Because the setting relates to a project I'm doing for work, I wanted to re-read it, and I did so alternately with listening to this performance on Audible. I found myself coming back to the audiobook again and again and looking forward to my commute so I could plug it in.. Rosalyn Landor is an outstanding reader, able to evoke character, time, and place with her voice alone; her expressive interpretations of multiple characters across age, class, regional accent, and sex distinctions is nothing short of magical. You feel as if each character is real, and as if you are eavesdropping on their lives and conversations. This performance is truly the best one I've experienced in a decade of listening to audible, and I can't recommend Landor as a reader highly enough -- she is marvelous.

The book itself is also a phenomenon. It is a sweeping, Dickensian narrative of the various aesthetic and political movements connected to three families in late Victorian-Edwardian England, using children's literature, ceramics, and puppetry as symbols of innovation, cultural change, and the inner lives and relationships of the characters. Highly recommended for lovers of historical and literary fiction.

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More questions than answers

Revisado: 12-28-20

One of Jonathan Biss's great strengths is his ability to write engagingly and movingly about music for a general audience; another is his mastery of digital media. He has drawn on both of these not-inconsiderable abilities to create Unquiet, a memoir interspersed with recordings from Beethoven's piano repertoire. Not only is Biss a masterful musician and writer; he is also a delightful reader, and his self-effacing, confessional tone, combined with his witty and sympathetic prose, make Unquiet a pleasant listen, especially for music lovers.

Nevertheless, Unquiet left me with a sense of lack and missed opportunity. Biss sets out by telling the listener that playing and recording Beethoven's complete sonatas almost destroyed him, but he never explains how, or even what he means by this dramatic statement. We are expected to take his word for it. Biss skirts detail and explanation by engaging in long analyses of Beethoven's music and personality, elided with the most cursory description of his own experience growing up as a musically gifted, closeted teenager in a family that he implies (no doubt rather unfairly) was made up of a long line of schlemiels, and his subsequent struggles with anxiety. And that's it.

Biss tells us that he has violated his maxim of total honesty as a musician, and that Unquiet is a setting straight of the record. He never explains, though, how he has "lied" to his audience, aside from not having totally exposed his inner life to them in his music or his previous prose works. Yet he goes no further here to reveal much of anything about his interior life, aside from the briefest mention of his gayness. He finishes with an anodyne statement about self-acceptance. The listener is left with a frustratingly incomplete portrait of a complicated, insecure, and charming man and musician, who we somehow end up not knowing any better than we did before.

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