Reviewed by Sylvia Brownrigg in the Los Angeles Times. David Lodge’s “funny and touching new novel”  documents a linguistics professor’s journey into hearing loss, mixing comedy with very real grief.

The novel is structured as the diary of Desmond Bates, who brings the reader along as he attempts to understand his changed circumstances. For such an intelligent and sociable man, the loss of his hearing is both comic and humiliating. Eventually the reader comes to understand …

that “Deaf Sentence” is, as its punning title suggests, primarily a sustained reflection on death and life, and the mini-death that is encroaching deafness … There is deaf in life, as Desmond might say, and life in deaf, and this touching, humane novel richly explores the meeting between the two.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under books, deaf/hard of hearing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post