Odessa

Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

By: Charles King

Narrated by: Andy Caploe

"Rich and riveting, complex and compelling, powerful and poetic." (Peter M. Gianotti, Newsday)

In Odessa, the greatest port on the Black Sea, a dream of cosmopolitan freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from the writers Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Yet here too was death on a staggering scale, as World War II brought the mass murder of Jews carried out by the city's Romanian occupiers. Odessa is an elegy for the vibrant, multicultural tapestry of which a thriving Jewish population formed an essential part, as well as a celebration of the survival of Odessa’s dream in a diaspora reaching all the way to Brighton Beach.

©2011 Charles King (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Fascinating story, appalling accents

This audio book would be greatly enhanced if its narrator stopped trying to mimic different accents when reproducing direct speech, a grotesque effort on his part that comes across as both amateurish and offensive.

Narration issues

A very interesting and well written work but the narrator mispronounced almost every name. Audible should be responsible for giving people pronunciation coaches. In addition he spoke in accents reminiscent Bullwinkle’s Boris and Natasha. Very distracting.

Major disappointment

I listened to the Audible version of this, and, for me, it was a new low in narration. Narrator Caploe decided to give faux accents to many of the speakers (Russian, Jewish, French, ...) and I loathed it. After the first instance, I had a hard time finishing the book, but Caploe kept the 'accents' going. I had to watch an episode f "Rocky and Bullwinkle" to listen to Boris Badenuv's (Mussorgsky joke) accent to give my ears a break. I really can't convey how much I hated Caploe's narration.
I have probably overrated the story on the theory that I might have liked the book if I had read it. I have read two of King's other books and really liked them. Not so here. I can understand that King might wander a bit far afield, but to spend that much time on Brighton Beach while glossing over the real Odessa after 1945 was just plain wrong to me. At the risk of sounding anti-semitic, I found King's attention on Jewish culture a mistake in that he gave short, or no, shrift to the other cultures in Odessa. But I was unaware of the Romanian element of Odessa's occupation in WW II. I also appreciated the brief history of the Black Sea littoral before the founding of Odessa. There nuggets of information here that I was unaware of, but I had no interest in several parts of this book as well.