Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s final novel, is a notoriously challenging read. In the late Eighties, New Yorkers would organize “marathon group reads” of the book that would start at noon on New Year’s Eve and let the words flow until the evening of New Year’s Day. It took a Chinese translator eight years to get through the first third of the tome, since nearly every word required a footnote since most are neologisms or portmanteaus. But largely, the novel, first published in 1939, is best known for how little read it actually is.
- 6/14/2021
- by Kory Grow
- Rollingstone.com
My new voice belongs to Edward Herrmann. He has allowed me to use it for 448 pages. The actor has recorded the audiobook version of my memoir, Life Itself, and my author's copies arrived a few days ago.
Listening to it, I discovered for the first time a benefit from losing my own speaking voice: If I could still speak, I suppose I would probably have recorded it myself, and I wouldn't have been able to do that anywhere as near as well as Herrmann does.
My editor, Mitch Hoffman, suggested a few readers he was confident would do a good job. Herrmann's name leaped up from his email.
I've always admired his acting, and there is a little newspaperman in his lineage: He played William Randolph Hearst in Bogdanovich's "The Cat's Meow." If my voice is performed by the actor who played Hearst, doesn't that make me only two degrees of separation from Orson Welles?...
Listening to it, I discovered for the first time a benefit from losing my own speaking voice: If I could still speak, I suppose I would probably have recorded it myself, and I wouldn't have been able to do that anywhere as near as well as Herrmann does.
My editor, Mitch Hoffman, suggested a few readers he was confident would do a good job. Herrmann's name leaped up from his email.
I've always admired his acting, and there is a little newspaperman in his lineage: He played William Randolph Hearst in Bogdanovich's "The Cat's Meow." If my voice is performed by the actor who played Hearst, doesn't that make me only two degrees of separation from Orson Welles?...
- 8/28/2011
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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