The Tragic Muse, Volume 1

De: Henry James

Narrado por: Victor Villar-Hauser

Duración: 11 h y 12 m

Resumen del Editor

"You must paint her just like that... as the Tragic Muse," suggests one of James' characters to Nick Dormer, the young Englishman who, during the course of the novel, will courageously resist the glittering Parliamentary career desired for him by his family, in order to paint. His progress is counterpointed by the "Tragic Muse" of the title, Miriam Rooth, one of James' most fierily beautiful creations, a great actress indifferent to social reputation and triumphantly dedicated to her art.

In portraying the conflict between art and "the world", which is his novel's central idea, James engaged obliquely with current debates on the new aestheticism of Pater and Wilde and on the nature of the actor's performance. Through the living complexity of his protagonists, he reveals how much, as Philip Horne puts it, "to take art seriously as an end in itself...is still a provocative course."

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impossibly bad reader

Seriously, this is the worst reader I have ever heard. The voice is very fine and the accent is perfect for James but he doesn't seem to understand what he is reading. The inflection is sing-song - pitched and paced seemingly without regard to the meaning of sentence or word. Ninety-percent of the time the reader puts emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word and/or the wrong word in a sentence. Luckily, the reading is slow enough to allow a listener to sort out the word-puzzle sentence by sentence without falling behind. At first I honestly thought the reading style was some sort of conceptual play on the bad acting of the Miriam Ruth character - I soon realized it was just a terrible performance by the reader - as though he were reading from a book that had only one word per page-turn and could only guess the likely role each word might play in a sentence before flipping the page to read the next - it was torture.