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Deaf Sentence

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Deaf Sentence

By: David Lodge
Narrated by: Steven Crossley
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Summary

 When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. But his daily discontent is nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke.

It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behavior threatens to destabilize his life completely...

©2008 David Lodge (P)2008 W F Howes Ltd Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Comedy Funny
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As always with David Lodge's work the interesting story is interspersed with clever observations and short essays. It is an ideal listen and a very well read performance.

reflections from later life

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This book is an interesting mix of the humorous and the serious. It really brings our attention to how deafness is viewed in our society - we tend to find it irritating rather than having compassion for its sufferers. There are definitely a few cringe-worthy moments in there, and it is well narrated.

Entertaining, but with a serious message

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David Lodge remains in vintage form in this charming rumination on later life. A joy from end to end.

lovely quirky novel from Lodge. the prose is as smooth as ever.

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A nice, rambling comforting story with great narration. Really interesting subject matter- I loved it.

lovely!

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I really enjoyed this book; brilliant characters, brilliant prose style. The story and underlying message does get darker as the book progresses and I stopped sniggering quietly at the character's social humiliations after a while and it made me really think about the deaf people I know, and how they must feel. to begin with, Desmond Bates does come across as being pompous. By the end, he is enjoying meeting up with, and respecting, ordinary people and keeps his own high education to himself, The descriptions of hearing aids and how the batteries often fail was very realistic. The way the main character kept forgetting to put his aids in, the ways people had to shout at him to get a message across was also a slice of real life. One of the less depressing episodes was how he was able to still do some lecturing in Poland, having prepared the ground properly, and made sure everyone was aware of his situation. It made me feel that, with openness and the right attitude, all things are possible, and towards the end of the book, the protagonist is taking lip-reading lessons and clearly, for him, this is the start of his being able to cope with his disability. There is no mention of BSL which might have given an even more positive message as well, but perhaps that was not Lodge's experience. If it had been, I think it would have been a very different book with a less downward trajectory. Some people seem to have expected a big reveal or Disneyesque ending but I felt the ending was very much in keeping with the overall story. It's a slice of life, well worth a read, especially if you have family members who are going deaf, or you are also developing that problem yourself. If Lodge was still with us, I'd be sending him fan mail.

Dark, dark humour.

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