3.5
The Mayor of Casterbridge The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge A Story of a Man of Character
by Thomas Hardy
Product Description Michael Henchard, a callous grain merchant and mayor of the town, finds that his cruel actions in the past have come back to haunt him. From AudioFile G. K. Chesterton noted that in Hardy's dour novels of the English midland Hardy became a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. Perhaps, but the broody heaths of Dorset were never more powerfully, more oppressively portrayed. Can one, therefore, claim to enjoy a reading of a Hardy novel? One can if the reader is as superb as Nigel Anthony, who in tone and style nicely communicates all the vividness, beauty and depth, as well as the fatalistic gloom, for which Hardy is justly esteemed. Earthy enough in his spot-on characterizations, he lacks only a certain virility that this reviewer finds an essential wellspring of Hardy's irony. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Literature & FictionLiterary
RELEASED1996
PUBLISHERCover To Cover.
LENGTH4
LANGUAGEEN
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, during his lifetime he was much better known for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, which earned him a reputation as a great novelist. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional land of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
3.5
The Mayor of Casterbridge The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge A Story of a Man of Character
by Thomas Hardy
Product Description Michael Henchard, a callous grain merchant and mayor of the town, finds that his cruel actions in the past have come back to haunt him. From AudioFile G. K. Chesterton noted that in Hardy's dour novels of the English midland Hardy became a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. Perhaps, but the broody heaths of Dorset were never more powerfully, more oppressively portrayed. Can one, therefore, claim to enjoy a reading of a Hardy novel? One can if the reader is as superb as Nigel Anthony, who in tone and style nicely communicates all the vividness, beauty and depth, as well as the fatalistic gloom, for which Hardy is justly esteemed. Earthy enough in his spot-on characterizations, he lacks only a certain virility that this reviewer finds an essential wellspring of Hardy's irony. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Literature & FictionLiterary
RELEASED1996
PUBLISHERCover To Cover.
LENGTH4
LANGUAGEEN
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, during his lifetime he was much better known for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, which earned him a reputation as a great novelist. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional land of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
