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Narrated by Xe Sands
Lydia MilletUnabridged — 6 hours, 50 minutes
Narrated by Xe Sands
Lydia MilletUnabridged — 6 hours, 50 minutes
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"Millet's writing is as lush as the house Susan lives in. There's a marvelous musicality to her prose; she's a writer who tackles human emotions with scientific precision and an artist's voice…. There's a cataloging going on here of the ways that people navigate the world once their world has shifted; Millet does a fine job of breathing life into people who are surrounded by dead things."
"...[U]unnervingly talented Lydia Millet completes a trilogy... each stands independently; you can read just one of them if you please. But you won't want to, any more than you'd want to leave Chez Panisse after the appetizer.... There is something of Paula Fox in the way Millet provokes deep thinking without being overbearing. But I hate to compare Millet to anyone; she's truly an original."
"...[W]arm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashion…Millet’s lush prose has you in her thrall from the start."
"Starred review. Millet brings her searching, bitterly funny, ecologically attuned trilogy of Los Angeles–based novels (How the Dead Dream, 2008; Ghost Lights, 2011) to a haunting crescendo. ...Millet is extraordinarily agile and powerful here, moving from light to shadow like a stalking lioness...."
"Lydia Millet's Magnificence is a novel of ideas. I mean that as a high compliment, for the ideas Millet invokes are the only ones that matter: life, death, love, longing, extinction, the ongoing existential quandary of what we are doing here.... [A]n ambitious book, not so much for the sweep of its action, which is essentially domestic, but for its deep and nuanced investigation of inner life...."
"[Magnificence is] elegant, darkly comic…with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is."
"[A] novel of ideas or philosophy, disguised as a portrait of one woman’s midlife upheaval."
"There’s much to explore in Magnificence, which is ambitious, often funny and deliciously provocative. One needn’t have read the entire series to be consumed by its pleasures, but by the time you reach its beautiful end, considerable comfort lies in the existence of two more novels in which to delight in Millet’s writing and imagination."
"Millet’s prose, which is both sensitive and strange... creates a thick atmosphere that immediately pulls the reader deep into this saga of love, death, sex, and taxidermy."
"Millet is simply an incredible writer. Her prose displays the exceedingly rare combination of philosophical introspection with poetic grace and flourish."
Earphones Award Winner. "[Xe] Sands presents a complex character whose complaints are balanced by a quirky sense of humor and musings on the meaning of life. Sands's narration is nuanced, entertaining, and thoughtful as Susan emerges from her self-absorption and takes on the role of conservator of the house and its inhabitants." - AudioFile Magazine
A Best Fiction Book of 2012. Starred review. "A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story beyond that tired tale of a grieving widow struggling to move on, instead exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers." - Publishers Weekly
Starred review. "Millet is extraordinarily agile and powerful here, moving from light to shadow like a stalking lioness as Susan's strange stewardship casts light on extinction and preservation, how we care for others and seek or hide truth, and crimes both intimate and planetary." - Booklist
One of the "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2012 Book Preview" titles. - The Millions
"...provocative, evocative...[Millet's] oblique, elliptical style serves her vision well." - The New York Times
"...Millet's lush prose has you in her thrall from the start..." - The Boston Globe
"Millet's writing is as lush as the house Susan lives in. There's a marvelous musicality to her prose; she's a writer who tackles human emotions with scientific precision and an artist's voice." - Star Tribune
"Magnificence, the final book of a trilogy, is more fable than realism, and promises a kind of moral or eerie warning at the end. It is also more of a long short story than a novel, as all of these subplots are funneled into the service of a single, graceful, short-story-like epiphany." - The Globe and Mail
The newest novel from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Millet (for her 2009 short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys), the final installment in a trilogy that began with How the Dead Dream, tells the lyrical but somewhat flat story of the newly widowed Susan Lindley. Susan, whose husband discovered her adultery shortly before his death, channels her feelings of guilt and grief into the restoration of a mansion and taxidermy collection inherited from a distant relative. Her relationship with her paraplegic daughter, Casey, changes rapidly, even as Susan unwittingly accumulates an extended family comprised of several older women and a married boyfriend. Xe Sands provides a serviceable narration, although her male voices lack the distinctness of the novel's female characters. VERDICT Neither author nor narrator is at her best here. Recommended only for collections where Millet's work is popular and for libraries with a strong interest in literary fiction. ["The story develops naturally, an ironic contrast to the artificiality of the preserved animals, and the novel becomes a lyrical meditation on what it takes to survive and evolve," read the review of the Norton hc, LJ 9/1/12.—Ed.]—Nicole Williams, Englewood P.L., NJ
Xe Sands’s narration reflects the sense of foreboding and guilt that permeate the life of this novel’s main character, Susan. A new widow, whose husband discovered her infidelity shortly before he was murdered, Susan finds her life changes dramatically when she inherits a mansion from her uncle. There she experiences a strange feeling of belonging amid the myriad hunting trophies of every conceivable animal peering from the house’s many nooks and crannies. Sands presents a complex character whose complaints are balanced by a quirky sense of humor and musings on the meaning of life. Sands’s narration is nuanced, entertaining, and thoughtful as Susan emerges from her self-absorption and takes on the role of conservator of the house and its inhabitants. J.E.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940175605823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
