Timberlake Wertenbaker

Well, listening to this is not the same as reading the books, though it's very very good. The only one of these books I've read is Swann's Way several years ago. I wanted to dip in again, and read as I've done on walks, but a hours and hours of the same voice sometimes gets a bit old. This production is a superb dramatization of the novels, with very good voices, and it is narrated by Derek Jacobi who is always excellent. This read is very good for getting the story (of which there is, show more truthfully, not a lot), and the major characters, events, and even the pace of the novels. I dipped into Time Regained, the final novel in the series the other night and noticed two things: in the novel, there is more time spent on the sanitarium than in the dramatization (which largely skips over them). And the other thing was that when I was reading Proust's narration, I heard it in Jacobi's voice. That's very good, as his is such a terrific voice. My plan is to actually read that final volume; we'll see if I do that.

Comparing this to Ulysses which I read last year, in a way I find this book a little more daunting. It's much much longer, of course, and Ulysses focus on a single character is so much more vivid than this.

At any rate I very highly recommend this dramatization, and may listen to it again. show less

Another entry in the endless 1990s obsession with the "biological clock". Another play about women who regretted the decisions they made, and blamed feminism for giving them the right to make the decisions. Another tired play about how women reach a certain age and must, just must, have children before it's too late. To give this play credit, there is a female character who doesn't have children and is quite good with that, but her story is a background story, serving only as a slight show more balance to the two female characters who must race the clock to have children. The other thing that is different in this play is that the men are also characters who are struggling with failure, so at least it is not set up against a "men get to do all these things without problems" whine. The characters are not convincing to me, the dialogue is dull, and I had trouble keeping the characters straight until the end of the last act, when I finally had it sorted out who was who, just as it ended. Add in the subplot of a young woman who has gotten pregnant, hates everything middle class, sees attempts to convince her to abort and finish her education as oppressive, and is as obnoxious a brat as any I've seen, and it completes the picture. show less

Darwin is a subject of endless fascination for playwrights. This one has a little different take - it is a play within a play, and it concerns Darwin's relationship with Captain FitzRoy. FitzRoy is treated with compassion and sympathy here, which is nice, but at the same time, Darwin is reduced to a stereotype of someone who doesn't really care about people, which is a difficult view to arrive at through reading the vast literature on Darwin. The author does not appear to be making an show more anti-evolutionary or anti-Darwin statement, so it appears this is merely something she has derived from her own review of the Darwin literature, though it's difficult to see how. The modern story she tacked on, about actors performing the Darwin play, is less compelling, and is a clumsy attempt to make some sort of analogy on natural selection, but without grasping the fine points of what the theory of natural selection actually says. In fact, the opportunity to correct a huge popular misunderstanding is present, but is missed badly in this portion of the play. show less

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