Dept. of Speculation

By: Jenny Offill

Narrated by: Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.

The narration by the author was excellent. The first-person POV and interiority is also well done.

The style of the novel doesn’t lend itself well to audio. Being able to literally see the pages as well as flip back and forth to track would help the reader.

Sorprendentemente interesante

Sin nombres propios, Offill cuenta la historia de una mujer. Y de los q la rodean. Su boz interior habla sobre sus amores y el encuentro del q se volvería si esposo. La vida familiar. Las subidas y bajadas. Li bueno y lo malo q convierten esta historia en algo tan ordinario q se vuelve un reflector de la normalidad. Narración muy buena.

Sparse looping beautiful

Talented writer. knows the names of things. Downloads Weather immediately. Annoyed they are making me have a 15 word min.

Fun facts!

Loved it! it had a journalistic feel to it that made it hard to stop listening to.

Not really a story

This reminds me of Virginia Woolf in a way. The stream of thoughts of the nameless narrator, the switching of tones by the reader. I would recommend it to those who are willing to listen to almost pure thought.