The Story of My Marriage - Zeno's Conscience

By: Italo Svevo

Narrated by: Deaver Brown

Length: 19 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

A remarkable history of one man, Zeno, his psychoanalysis, smoking addiction, philandering, love, hate, meanness, business life, family, and more told candidly and not-so-candidly by himself in a unique novel set in Europe in pre-World War I and during World War I.

Public Domain (P)2019 Deaver Brown

Classic novel ... radically unacceptable recording

I was highly enthused to revisit this favorite of mine and quickly swept up this audio recording when it cropped up. The drawling narrator not only stops and stutters through this comic masterpiece but sounds as if he recorded it on his iPhone. The decision to cover up the background hiss with an incessant loop of morose piano noodling only cemented the bizarrely ill conceived production as an all time fail in my expansive history as an audiobook listener. Highly recommend the book and equally recommend this version be stricken from the site.

Terrible Narration

To a backdrop of repetitious music which becomes more and more irritating, the narrator haltingly reads as if he were translating it from a language he is just learning.

Worst reading I have heard on Audible.

For a couple of hours, I tried to convince myself that the stumbles, stutters, implausible pauses, the rhythms of half-drunk speech all might have some relevance, misguided, but, still, some intended relevance to the text. I gave up. I've never returned a selection before; now, I have.