YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE
New audiobooks offer thrills — from 14th-century Norway all the way to present day politics, Katherine A. Powers writes.
Sigrid Undset
Translated by Tiina Nunnally Kristin Lavransdatter
Audible Studios Unabridged, 45 hours
This masterpiece by Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset has finally entered the audiobook universe in a truly superb, sensitive performance by Erin Bennett.
First published in the 1920s, the book is set in 14th-century Norway and covers the life of Kristin Lavransdatter and her journey from childhood to death through “the perilous and beautiful world.” She is seduced at 16 by a heedless knight while betrothed to another man and conceives a child out of wedlock in a society that insists on the “honour” of women.
Bennett’s voice captures Kristin’s rapidly changing moods, her transports of love and anguish, her guilt, courage and exhilarated wonder at nature’s immensity. The story twists and turns, taking on greater and greater psychological complexity.
It is rich in its portrayal of 14th-century material life and of the strain between Christianity and ancient pagan beliefs. The version narrated here is Tiina Nunnally’s award-winning translation, a rendering that eliminates the faux-medieval contortions of the 1920s version and restores Undset’s crisp direct prose style.
This is a long listen, but as you enter the final stretch, even as Black Death stalks the land and human sacrifice threatens, you will wish it went on forever.
Bad Dreams and Other Stories
Tessa Hadley
HarperAudio
Unabridged, 5 h 45 m
Emma Gregory reads Tessa Hadley’s spare, slightly chilly stories, capturing the listener in 10 seconds flat. The first begins: “Jane Allsop was abducted when she was 15, and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the 1960s, when parents were more careless.”
What follows in this story, An Abduction, is not horror, but unease and misunderstanding.
The title story strikes another unsettling note: Here a little girl pulls a prank that her mother silently attributes to her husband, insidiously altering their relationship. Most of these 10 stories deliver cool shocks, but all are buoyed by an undercurrent of wry humour.
Gregory reads the stories’ general narration in a well-bred, caressing voice, a manner precisely in keeping with Hadley’s own way of setting her characters up for disturbing developments. Elsewhere, when merited, Gregory adopts regional accents, as when a woman who has escaped her childhood upbringing in Leeds for a modish life in London, returns home to her estranged sister whose Northern inflection, “so wary and flattening and grudging,” accentuates family enmity amplified by class resentment.
Hadley’s genius and Gregory’s splendid performance have given us an audiobook that can be listened to over and over again.
The Switch
Joseph Finder
Penguin Audio Unabridged, 10 hours
Joseph Finder is the true master of the thriller in which your ordinary guy takes one wrong step and suddenly finds himself on the dark side.
In this case, it’s nice Michael Tanner, coffee entrepreneur. Rushing to catch a plane, he picks up the wrong laptop after going through airport security. It belongs to a U.S. senator and contains top-secret files on a scheme for government mass-surveillance. Rather than handing it back to its owner, Tanner hangs on to it for reasons you will have to discover yourself. Soon enough, he is pursued by heavies from the NSA, a thuggish Boston “problem solver,” a would-be Karl Rove, and Russian recruiter.
Steven Kearney brings a voice that’s all business with a sharp lethal edge to this suspenseful, intricately plotted story. His vocal characterizations bring out the best — which is often the worst — in this motley crowd of friends, enemies, political big bugs and fixers.
He distinguishes easily between men and women and handily executes accents that range from sinister Slavic through colloquial Bostonian to down-home Southern.