Lodge Deaf Sentence

Review: Deaf Sentence by David Lodge | Books | The Observer

Desmond is enthused to learn of a new book about his condition, Being Deaf, until a trip to Waterstone's reveals this to be Jim Crace's novel Being Dead. We find ourselves earwigging on one such skewed conversation as the novel opens. A tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man is 'nodding sagely' at a young blonde. Desmond cannot understand a word, but pretends to agree wholeheartedly. He later learns he's offered to help a graduate student with her dissertation. Desmond is a professor of linguistics, a fact that only serves to heighten the bathos of his condition.

Deaf Sentence is Lodge's first return to the campus novel since 2001's zeitgeisty Thinks, an audacious fictive take on cognitive science. Now we are back in familiar territory, in a place approximating Rummidge (the name is never given). 'Post-campus' might be a better definition of the genre, for Desmond has recently stopped working. The quiescence of retirement is mirrored by the prose; both the novel and its subject potter agreeably.


http://johnboyne.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/may-reading/

I’ve long been a fan of David Lodge’s fiction and *DEAF SENTENCE *was a wry, thoughtful novel about an ageing professor, Desmond Bates, who (like Lodge himself) has suffered increasing deafness in old age and must confront the demands of an elderly father, arrogant wife and possibly psychopathic postgraduate student while not being able to hear any of them very well. The premise sounds like a typically funny Lodge campus novel but it’s darker than you might expect and all the better for that. With the exception of a slightly unresolved plot strand (the student) it’s an inventive piece of work with some wonderful set-pieces (the sauna scene in particular).