Toad

A Novel

De: Katherine Dunn, Molly Crabapple - foreword

Narrado por: Christina Delaine

"Delaine has the perfect deadpan narration that conveys the hopelessness of our protagonist."- Booklist

Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world.

She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties, when she was a fish out of water among a group of eccentric, privileged young people at a liberal arts college. There was Sam, an unabashed collector of other people’s stories; Carlotta, a troubled free spirit; and Rennel, a self-obsessed philosophy student. Self-deprecating and sardonic, Sally recounts their misadventures, up to the tragedy that tore them apart.

Colorful, crass, and profound, Toad is Katherine Dunn’s ode to her time as a student at Reed College in the late 1960s. It is filled with the same mordant observations about the darkest aspects of human nature that made Geek Love a cult classic and Dunn a misfit hero. Daring and bizarre, Toad demonstrates her genius for black humor and her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque. Fifty-some years after it was written, Toad is a timely story about the ravages of womanhood and a powerful addition to the canon of feminist fiction.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Katherine Dunn (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A gentle, funny, heartbreaking indictment of the naïve excesses of the 1960s and the testament of a woman who survived them." —Kirkus, starred review

"A sobering look at the reality of what one’s glory days actually entailed, shot through with the unmistakable undertow of pain and self-loathing." —Publishers Weekly

“Toad is a gift to those of us who have been dreaming for decades of a new novel from Katherine Dunn, and a book that will bring her many devoted new fans. Nobody’s sentences heave and breathe like Dunn’s do. Her language scintillates and sheds its scales, revealing truths that nobody else dares to utter, or can. She is Portland’s bard of ‘the genuine wound,’ exploring the deep world within the body and the human animal’s capacities for savagery, tenderness, loneliness, friendship, loathing, and love.” —Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Orange World and Other Stories

Performance is bad

I am having the most trouble listening to this narrator. Her “take” on the main character is not at all sustaining for this book. Every. Single. Sentence. is dripping with the same tone of someone who is just reading words and not involved in what is happening.

Beautifully rendered characters, perfect narration

Delaine is first rate as a narrator. Her laid back, sassy tones are perfectly suited to the strange, sleazy yet mystical vision of the various characters we meet through our heroine's flat, almost sociopathic understanding.
This is a weird and thoroughly bewitching read.

love love love

do you ever finish a book and want nothing else except the story to continue??? i want more!!!

To think this was almost never published

The narration is so well matched to Dunn's writing. A grim, unsparing novel, but so vivid and well-written.

Can’t get through it.

The narrator’s voice is annoying. She sounds like she should be on a sex line. I can’t get through the book. I love Katherine Dunn and Geek Love is my favorite novel but this narrator ruins this book for me. 4 chapters in and I had to stop.

Fabulous

I’m so happy I came upon this author. I read Geek Love years ago, but will probably do so again. This story is unbeatable in its depiction of characters, who are fully realized and intriguing. The plot line is not meant to be the thing. This is about people—how and why they do what they do, and what drives them to gladness and madness.

Beautifully written and well read.

This book is on par with the rest of Katherine Dunn’s amazing work. If you are a fan of her other work. This will not disappoint!