Deaf Sentence

By: David Lodge

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

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

I will have to buy a hard copy of this

I listen to audiobooks for entertainment. Oftentimes I find they stay with me, perhaps subtly changing how I view some experience or other, but this one really jolted me at several points. It's not a remarkable plot. Spoiler alert. He goes deaf, then gets back some of his hearing. His father dies. He has an annoying student. Middle age is tedious. His marriage is difficult, and he works on it. What is worthwhile is what the narrator tells us about his experience. There are passages that are absolutely delicious. When I finished the book, I was utterly shocked and thrown into grief.