The Dead Father
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dennis Holland delivers a well-paced, entertaining performance of Barthelme s classic. As the titular character the Dead Father, a huge, half-dead, semimechanical godlike ruler is dragged by a group of his children across his lands toward his burial spot, bizarre and increasingly absurd exploits and conversations unfold. Holland, a seasoned reader of Barthelme s work, does ample justice to the tone and spirit of the text. His comedic timing is superb, as is his voice for the Dead Father. While the narration will delight Dead Father devotees, listeners less familiar with the author s work may be confused by the novel s experimental style and unconventional plot structure, which transitions unsteadily to audio book. A Farrar, Straus Giroux paperback.
