Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
David Lodge
Harvill Secker 2008
Deaf Sentence, David Lodge’s first novel since 2004’s Author Author, a fictionalisation of the life of Henry James , sees a return to more usual Lodgeland. He writes of a retired professor of linguistics, Desmond Bates, who, for the last twenty years, has slowly been going deaf. He has become unwisely entangled with an American postgraduate student who specialises in the analysis of suicide notes. At the same time his father is coming towards the end of his life. Lodge explores death and deafness with his usual assured touch: the characterisation is very effective, there are (despite the subject matter) some hilarious set pieces, and he makes unfamiliar and potentially complex subjects (linguistic analysis, language acquisition, the causes and effects of deafness) effortlessly accessible. Above all, there is some very fine writing, in particular an utterly convincing and very moving description of a visit to Auschwitz – Birkenau. Apart from some swapping from first- to third-person, the reason for which was, for me, not very clear, Lodge eschews his characteristic playfulness with narrative conventions, and instead tells this very personal story (he also has hearing problems, and his father recently died) as it is – and rightly so: it makes the protagonist’s final acceptance of his deafness – and implicitly of the death sentence which faces us all – all the more convincing.
9th January 2009
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth62
Just click below.
Powered by CGISpy.com