At least he was on the verge of doing something. The ending annoyed me -he finally does something constructive. The narrator of the audiobook was Kevin Foley. You don't get a feel for Christiania either. I simply wasn't convinced he was really starving. A brain does not function without glucose! This book will appeal most to those who are interested in reading about the delusional. Well, first you need some food and a bed and a lamp to write by. Virginia Woolf claims one needs a room of one's own to write. I hardly even felt pity for this guy, who seemed more worried about what others would think of him than figuring out how to solve his problems. The author, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, was one of the first to use stream of consciousness writing, but since the central character's thoughts are so delusional I wasn't interested in getting inside his head. He was ether hallucinating, due to a lack of food, or he was quite simply crazy. If you are really starving do you refuse food? One thing is clear. At the same time he had such pride and this stopped him from accepting any help offered him. I guess he was, because his hair was falling out in clumps. The basic problem for me was that the central character, an author in Christiania (Oslo), Norway, just didn't convince me he was really hungry. I generally don't like it when audiobook narrators use too much emotion or act the characters, but the narration here is just too detached. Especially in a first person narrative, I think the narrator should show a little more emotion most of the time, Foley's tone sounds like the voiceover on a nature show, which made it harder to focus on the story. I found the following review of his work on another audiobook in AudioFile magazine, and I think it fits my impression perfectly: "Narrator Kevin Foley plods along with a listener-friendly cadence, something like that of a radio newscaster, avoiding high emotion or monosyllabic detachment-professional to the nth degree but adding little to a true and sad tale." I couldn't agree more.
As for the narrator: he's clearly very good, but not the best choice for this book, I'm afraid. However, I think the book could have been better had there been more of a story or structure to it. The book is very well written, and reminiscent of Dostoevsky or Kafka in its description of a man struggling to keep his self-dignity while losing his grip on reality, in this case due to lack of food. The description of the book gives the plot quite well, so I won't repeat it here.
0 kommentar(er)
