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Middle C
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
A literary event - the long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by the acclaimed author of The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime." - Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times; "An extraordinary achievement." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetter’s Luck ("The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation" - Richard Gilman, The New Republic); Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country ("These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language." - Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times).
Gass’ new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life - futile, comic, anarchic - arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.
It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up, becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy self - a professor with a fantasy goal: to establish the Inhumanity Museum...as Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless.
Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another.
William Gass set out to write a novel that breaks traditional rules and denies itself easy solutions, cliff-edge suspense, and conventional surprises...Middle C is that book; a masterpiece by a beloved master.
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Story
Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
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Believe the hype
- By gabe on 04-01-23
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
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The Making of Americans
- By: Gertrude Stein
- Narrated by: Amanda Stribling, Amy Soakes, Austenne Grey, and others
- Length: 52 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Gertrude Stein held a unique position at the center of the modernist movement. She was a novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in America, she moved with her family to Paris where she ran a Paris salon frequented by many famous historical figures, such as Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis.
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Super long anti-novel only for the completionists
- By Kindle Customer on 07-10-22
By: Gertrude Stein
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Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
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The Crying of Lot 49
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy.
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Good book, Average recording
- By James on 08-12-07
By: Thomas Pynchon
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Boswell
- A Modern Comedy
- By: Stanley Elkin
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Boswell is Stanley Elkin's first and funniest novel: the comic odyssey of a twentieth-century groupie who collects celebrities as his insurance policy against death. James Boswell - a strong man and professional wrestler (his most heroic match is with the Angel of Death) - is a con man, a gate crasher, and a moocher of epic talent.
By: Stanley Elkin
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The Complete Stories
- By: Clarice Lispector, Katrina Dodson, Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 22 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of 86 stories, now we have 89 in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don't know what to do with themselves - and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives - and hers - and ours.
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Wonderful Collection
- By XX on 04-25-20
By: Clarice Lispector, and others
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At Swim-Two-Birds
- By: Flann O’Brien
- Narrated by: Alan Smyth
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading, he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.
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Worth waiting for
- By Ken Watkins on 02-04-20
By: Flann O’Brien
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Satantango
- By: László Krasznahorkai
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. “Their world,” in the words of the translator George Szirtes is “rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”
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Tone. Sound. Psychology. Humor.
- By Anonymous User on 12-19-23
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The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
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Carpenter's Gothic
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter Gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission.
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the dialogue is superb
- By Monti Korbelle on 07-01-19
By: William Gaddis
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- A Novel
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Bernardo de Paula
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it?
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a straightforward tale
- By Felix on 09-29-23
What listeners say about Middle C
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 06-07-14
All the world was a stage. But not for all the wor
Another great author I backed into. Don't misinterpret me. I haven't just run backward over/into Gass. I haven't just "discovered" or "uncovered" the author. I've quoted him often. I've admired him and scanned used bookshelves for him. In my collegiate years I presumed to know more about Gass than I had a right to presume. I've carefully kept The Tunnel displayed, peacocking, on my shelf for decades. I've collected Gass essay collections, Gass criticisms, other Gass fictions. But all my Gass has, until today, remained unread, his books unopened, those pages uncut, words undisturbed.
'Middle C' is a funky book. A musical prose that dances around the center. A mediocre family in flight, in disguise from Austria to London to the Middle of Middle America. A narrator that hides and disguises, that plots and twists. He jumps from school to store to library to university. He climbs the American ladder, remaking each rung as he climbs. He creates a fictional life and dreams that mankind must perish but also fears we might just survive. He creates an inhumanity museum for himself; an exhibit of disasters and man-made horrors, clipped from papers and hung on flypaper. He lives with his mother, dreams of his father, and gains a certain satisfaction "at being to the world an artifice".
This isn't a plot driven novel. It is an ode to identity, a concerto between the two-selves of a man whose two identities (Joey and Joseph) are the contrapuntal themes we ALL listen to, if we listen closely, to those fuguing, fuging voices in our own head.
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18 people found this helpful
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- K.N.R.
- 03-10-16
Double Doubts and Identities
[rating = B+]
Mr. Gass is a wonderful stylist. His diction is superb and his sentences are fluid and effortless. The story is actually quite well plotted: the family comes over from Austria to England then to America. Joseph, Joey, Professor Skizzen are all one and the same, and Gass's ability to transition from he story, each time-period is quite masterful. I think the novel is about finding one's place; finding that middle C in the sea of other notes. There are many notes that go by the same name, variations are what makes the world go round. The idea that one person can have the same name or appearance but he utterly different, I believe, is what Gass's novel is trying to expose. At any rate, the language amazes the reader and even the smallest of phrases alights in the light and ear. Mr. Gass may go about philosophizing too much at times (the Inhumane Museum looses me as a bit random) but the idea of language as power is certainly there, and the thought humans can survive anything is still even more poignant
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5 people found this helpful
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- Terrance
- 11-24-19
Fantastic Novel from an American Master
From its early question of why fleeing the privilege of an oppressor is met with suspicion, to it's incredibly chilling and portentous final sentence, Middle C is a masterpiece. Regarding the title, it may be useful for non-musical readers to know that Middle C is the note that falls on an implied line between the bass and treble clefs of a grand staff, finding a home in neither.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Marc Silverman
- 10-15-22
Good story but not my cup of tea
The author is an incredibly talented writer. There were some interesting topics focused on and it did capture my interest at times. Overall, I found the story’s direction a bit dull and the protagonist somewhat aggravating. There had also been a confusing scene (that involved his librarian boss/land lord) that didn’t make any sense to me. No matter how many times I went through it. I wouldn’t really care that much, but it was an important scene. So that annoyed me.
I appreciated how the author included some of the classroom lectures. They were funny and intriguing.
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