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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
The speaking book
By Pradeep Sebastian
Two marvellous things about the audio book strike me right away: first, like movies and music, the experience is immediate and can be shared with others, and second, reading (listening) to an audio book takes you away from the solitude a book imposes — suddenly there is another voice in the room, in your ear, offering companionship.
Graphics by NETRA SHYAM
`THE snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of the situation. It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found." I'm listening to the actor Robert Sean Leonard read the opening passage of Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I know the book well, and as I close my eyes and follow the voice of young Richard Papen confessing to murdering his classmate, Bunny, I wonder what my experience of listening to an audio book version of one of my all-time favourite books is going to be like. Let me make my confession here: like many of you, I'm an audio book virgin. The audio book is a billion-dollar-a-year industry with over 1,139 publishers putting out more than 55,000 audio titles in 2004 alone. And yet, our bookshops carry only a handful of audio titles — mostly management and self help related. I can understand their hesitation: will it sell? Will readers switch from reading a book to listening to it? Perhaps the answer to that might be audio books of our own writers. If Indian publishers can put out audio titles of classic and contemporary Indian literature read accurately and beautifully and with feeling by theatre and film actors (as in Naseerudin Shah reading Karadi Tales) even writers reading their own work, or just about anybody who reads well, audio books might catch on here. Besides, it will be wonderful to hear — whatever the language — our own literature read aloud. (Imagine what fun an audio book of English, August would be).
Immediate experience
Two marvellous things about the audio book strike me right away: first, like movies and music, the experience is immediate and can be shared with others, and second, reading (listening) to an audio book takes you away from the solitude a book imposes — suddenly there is another voice in the room, in your ear, offering companionship. (If heard alone they are best listened to on a Walkman/Discman). We read with our eyes but when you close our eyes to listen to a book, you feel cut lose, your hands are free; strangely, so is your mind. With actual books you can do what I call deep or close reading: stopping at a passage, rereading it, looking closely at meaning. This is not possible with the audio book but what takes its place is a kind of intense, meditative reading. You are listening of course but it can feel like you are reading with a newfound intensity. More often what happens with the audio book is that you read (listen) lazily, letting your mind wander, coming back to the words when you want to. Listing to stories is an old thing, after all. A childhood thing. Most religious scriptures talk of The Word being there before anything else — the spoken word, that is.
Famous actors reading famous books I thought was a selling gimmick till I heard Meryl Streep or Jeremy Irons read something. The quality of their voice, the feeling they brought to it is made listening to the book a double pleasure. Jeremy Irons reading Lolita (he played Humbert in Adrian Lyne's film version) is a revelation: hearing him read these famous lines: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the plane to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.", makes you realise that Nabokov meant for us to hear the book as much as read it. Since listening to Irons read this way, I have, even when reading a book with my eyes, tried to hear the sound sentences make. I managed to get hold of the audio book of Martin Cruz Smith's Polar Star. I was eager to re-listen to a story I loved. The opening passages went well but once the narrator began to speak in various voices for the various characters, I began to distance myself from the reading. And when Arkady Renko spoke, it wasn't the voice I had imagined for Renko. That's the kind of problem you frequently run into with the audio book: it isn't how you imagined the characters would sound. Happily, listening to The Secret History proves different: I am spellbound by Tartt's prose, and find myself lost in the sound of the book. A new literary experience for me. The word — written or spoken — can lay us bare.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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