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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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Story
Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective in literary history. For the first time since the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a new Holmes story has been sanctioned by his estate, whetting the appetites of fans everywhere. Information about the book will be revealed as deliberately as Holmes himself would unravel a knotty case, but bestselling novelist and Holmes expert Anthony Horowitz is sure to bring a compelling, atmospheric story to life.
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A disapointment
- By GP on 05-05-12
By: Anthony Horowitz
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Amerika
- The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.
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ha ha ha this is terrific
- By tom on 01-29-14
By: Franz Kafka
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The Fencing Master
- By: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
- Narrated by: Michael York
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Abridged
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Don Jaime de Astarola is Spain's greatest fencing master...a man of honor, an anachronism...and the perfector of the deadly unstoppable thrust technique. He lives an ordered and celibate life dedicated to one passion: the art of fencing...until the beautiful and mysterious Adela de Otero destabilizes his tranquil existence, and he finds himself involved in a plot of seduction, politics, secret documents, and murder.
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The fencing master and the amazon
- By Mario on 12-12-16
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Justine
- The Alexandria Quartet
- By: Lawrence Durrell
- Narrated by: Jack Klaff
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Set amid the corrupt glamour and multiplying intrigues of Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1930s and 1940s, the novels of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (of which this is the first) follow the shifting alliances - sexual, cultural and political - of a group of quite varied characters. In Justine, an English schoolmaster and struggling writer falls in love with a beautiful and mysterious Jewish woman who is married to a wealthy Egyptian.
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Ruined...
- By Murasaki on 05-29-11
By: Lawrence Durrell
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Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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Excruciating
- By Devoted Online Shopper on 03-15-23
By: Rachel Cusk
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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1984
- New Classic Edition
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police - a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, a hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.
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Come one, Come all into 1984!
- By Kit McIlvaine (GirlPluggedN) on 02-18-08
By: George Orwell
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The Magus
- By: John Fowles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.
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One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: John Fowles
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An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world.
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Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
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This is an AMAZING Book!
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Marcovaldo
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Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
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In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
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Marcovaldo
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Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.
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Perfect narrator and wonderful story
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By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Difficult Loves
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Fantastic Tales
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Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of 19th-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a 20th-century master of the speculative.
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Unexpected pleasure
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Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are 36 immediately relevant, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists.
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At Last: Unbridled Delight
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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Uneven but worth listening to if you like Calvino
- By Daniel on 02-21-24
By: Italo Calvino
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Collection of Sand
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- Unabridged
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Italo Calvino's unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his lifetime. Here he applies his graceful intellect to the delights of the visual world in essays on subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.
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Beautiful prose, topics, and narration
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By: Italo Calvino
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Last Comes the Raven
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- Unabridged
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Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.
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Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
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- Unabridged
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Un viaggiatore, una piccola stazione, una valigia da consegnare a una misteriosa persona... Da questa premessa si possono snodare innumerevoli vicende, ma sono dieci quelle che l'autore propone in questo sorprendente e godibilissimo romanzo. "È un romanzo sul piacere di leggere romanzi: protagonista è il lettore, che per dieci volte cominica a leggere un libro che per vicissitudini estranee alla sua volontà non riesce a finire. Ho dovuto dunque scrivere l'inizio di dieci romanzi d'autori immaginari, tutti in qualche modo diversi da me e diversi tra loro." (Italo Calvino)
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Lettura interessante e sgradevole
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The Book of All Books
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Roberto Calasso's The Book of All Books is a narration that moves through the Bible as if through a forest, where every branch—every verse—may offer some revelation.
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Good book... glad I found it...
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Six Memos for the Next Millennium
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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Numbers in the Dark
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- Unabridged
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Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
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The Tin Drum
- A New Translation by Breon Mitchell
- By: Günter Grass
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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To mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication of this runaway best seller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass' publishers all over the world, offer a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources. The result is a translation that is faithful to Grass' style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After 50 years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance.
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It's a metaphor, right?
- By Barry on 08-11-12
By: Günter Grass
What listeners say about If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- literate rose
- 02-09-18
The position of the feet during reading...
Mine were dancing!
I'll start by acknowledging that I don't really need to review the book itself: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler has long been one of my favorite books of all time. It continues to be one of the most original, inventive, delightful, thought-provoking pieces of literature I've ever encountered. It was my first Calvino book, and remains my favorite. The title caught my eye, in a bookstore, and when I opened the book to the table of contents and saw that the titled chapters formed their own tiny story of sorts, I just knew I had to read it. (And please, if you can, go look at a copy in a bookstore or library, or even online if you can find an electronic visual of the table of contents, because that is just one of the many sly, wonderful elements of this endlessly creative book that should be experienced, but really must be seen to be appreciated fully.)
But my excitement seeing this as the Daily Deal, and my irresistible dancing while listening to the first chapter (and oh, I was so nervous about the narration, but not to worry: it's marvelous!) have another source, as well. For many, many years, the first chapter of this book has been one of my top two Read-Aloud pieces to anyone who will sit still long enough to hear it. I've read it to groups of people, to individuals. It never fails to delight. And my very first time reading this book was done with my (now ex) husband: we took turns reading chapters to one another. So I have a long history with hearing this book read aloud, and it works so well. Having it in my permanent audio library, to hear at will, is a true delight.
Don't hesitate. It may not be like other books you've read (probably not); it definitely doesn't go in anything like a straight line. But the writing is sublime, the narration is lovely, and if you're a bibliophile of any degree, there are moments, passages, and whole chapters that will make you squee with delight. Go on, dodge past all those other books calling to you, get Italo Calvino's masterpiece, find a position or activity that satisfies you (this is audio, after all: you can listen in the dark, or while walking or even running--don't forget, the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance--while baking a cake or cleaning out the garage...or even in bed!) and dive in. I suspect you won't regret.
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177 people found this helpful
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- Gillian
- 02-09-18
Brilliant For Writers--Engaging For Listeners
As a reviewer stated--the fourth wall is completely and unutterably broken with If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Because you, my dear friend, are absolutely necessary as a character of this book.
Calvino involves you from the get-go, and if you're a writer, you'll learn SO much about the craft and engaging your audience. He critiques his own style of writing, and what a tremendous use of words and phrases. He is obviously a skilled, skilled writer.
As with any literary novel, don't expect a lot of plot but do expect some pretty fantastic writing, that ability to drag you in and look at the edges of a book's binding with new eyes. There is a bit of a detective feel to it, though, that makes it rather fun, and things, after going all over the place, wind up neat and tidy, all in clever manner.
I did, however, have to listen at x1.25 speed because Jefferson Mays, while very good, gets rather pause-y, and he lingers over some of the phrasing.
I can't tell you if this is a book you'll want to listen to in one sitting -because- the chapters split themselves in two and then pick up back at the beginning and you don't want to fall behind. Or if you'll want to listen to this in pieces -because- the writing is so good, the words/phrasing so clever and you can savor things/learn a thing or two about how to work words.
But, hey! Who am I? Don't expect perfection; do expect some cutting here and there, some genre switching; a different kind of an experience...
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117 people found this helpful
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- Aaron
- 10-09-17
Unreal! An amazing reading for an amazing tale!
I feel unworthy writing a review for this. I'm sorry my words will be the first you see before you start, since the book you're about to listen to is otherworldly, and I don't want to taint your experience with an appraisal from a random person whose opinion you have no way of trusting. Still, for what it's worth, this is an incredible book; and I'm truthfully quite jealous of you, since you're about to experience it for the first time!
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67 people found this helpful
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- Will
- 12-18-17
An experience hard to find! Objectively beautiful!
Here we have great naration accompanied with clean audio. There are no chips or qirks in the production. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has given me a new perspective on writing. The 4th wall is abducted to offer an intimate point of view of the novelist. The book explores the uncreated "idea" of the story. This is not a casual read and if you reader, are prepared to strain your brain, it's right here, the book that you've been looking for.
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40 people found this helpful
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- Sara
- 03-01-18
The Emperor Indeed Has No Clothes
To me this was a self-centered repetitive collection of words and phrases that circled around and occasionally got knotted up in themselves. No worries or concern about character development or storyline here as nothing seems to make sense or really to matter. Further, telling the reader where and how to sit and what to think and feel is beyond the control of the writer. For me the whole experience was a total waste of time. My suggestion when you read all the raving reviews is to hesitate or better yet run. I wish I had.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Mary K Foster
- 09-01-18
Infuriating, but Consuming
Listen, if you've arrived at this book looking for a simple fabulist novel, then, buckle up. There is absolutely nothing straight-forward about this book except that you will go flying through the windshield of the narrative if you don't relax and lean into the sharp turns it takes when jumping plot-line to plot-line. You should not read this book if you do not like absurdist writing, meta-fiction, or a coercive second-person narrator. But! If you're down for a whacky international postmodern fabulist tale that infuriatingly plants dynamite in your mind for 9 hours and then makes them all explode at once with (literally apocalyptic) realizations about the vulnerable, powerful, passionate, intimate, insane, and divine experience of reading, this book is for you. Godspeed, fellow Calvino acolytes.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Chris Hoffman
- 02-12-18
Self-Satisfied Boring Claptrap
In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't get even halfway through this book. I read a review that was so glowing I thought I couldn't go wrong, especially with a daily deal. One of my simple gauges for an audiobook is how much my attention drifts away from it as it develops. A truly riveting story/narration should hold my attention, should it not?
I honestly did not know what was going on after a couple hours of listening to this one because it did not hold my attention. What I do remember is both the author and the reader adopting a self-satisfied, arrogant attitude and telling me - yes literally addressing the reader - how I should be feeling and reacting to the scene they laid out. Much like if the director of a movie decided to save money on special effects and get in front of a blank screen and say "a large explosion just occurred, you should be scared."
Well, I had no such reaction. Sorry, but the writing was just not that evocative. Bored, I move on.
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- Thomas R Eberhardt
- 04-22-19
What did I just listen to??!
This book, if nothing else, is entirely unique. I've never heard anything like it and probably never will again. The opening passage immediately sucked me in with it's fourth-wall shattering (is there a fourth wall in books?) introduction. I was even on board for the first few stories-within-the-story. But by the fifth, sixth, seventh embedded stories with no resolution, my interest was flagging. By the last quarter of the book, I was begging for it to be over.
While I'm sure the book was attempting to say something very profound about the relationship between author and reader and what the act of reading means on a very deep level, much of that was lost on me. The narration was top notch and I give the book high marks for originality. Beyond that, it was hard to find much to like in an anthology of barely-started narratives loosely bound to one another by the overarching meta-plot.
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- nikolas
- 02-13-18
Don't waste the credit
There are a just a few parts of this book worth reading and all the rest is literally nothing. No story, no wisdom, no final product.... Don't waste a credit
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- Darwin8u
- 01-16-20
Slick trick and trap of a novel
A slick trick and trap of a novel, a complex story of cogs and frames. Narrators and readers collide and disappear. Styles float by (are experimented on) and are quickly replaced by other metafictional techniques. Anyway, I'm going to need more time and more sleep to absorb this book, but I'm not sure how anyone after first reading it could dislike the spirit, creativity, and absolute panache (yeah, I'll edit out panache tomorrow) of this novel.
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6 people found this helpful