Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
فرمت کتاب
audiobook
تاریخ انتشار
2006
نویسنده
Josephine Baileyناشر
Tantor Media, Inc.شابک
9781400172559
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
These first-person ponderings of Timothy, an aging land tortoise living in an English country garden in the mid-eighteenth century, offer a meandering meditation on life, nature, and finding one's place in the world. Though Josephine Bailey enunciates clearly and offers a respectful interpretation, her tremulous voice, appropriately suggestive of Timothy's age, sounds strained and lacking in fluency. Timothy's discerning contemplations of the seasons and other species call for a thoughtful reading, but the lyrical quality of the narrative is often lost as one struggles to follow Bailey's quavering account. While it is appropriate that the narration mirrors the plodding quality of the tortoise, the performance should convey more energy if the reader is to stay engaged. M.H.N. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
Starred review from October 24, 2005
In a gorgeous hybrid of naturalist observation, novelistic invention and philosophical meditation, Klinkenborg, a member of the New York Times
editorial board and chronicler of the rural life (Making Hay
), views the English countryside through the eyes of a tortoise and gives his human readers rich food for thought. For 13 years, Timothy the tortoise lived amid the bounty of 18th-century curate and amateur naturalist Gilbert White's garden. White, author of A Natural History of Selbourne
, had inherited the reptile from his aunt, who had kept her (Timothy was a female, "stolen from the ruins I was basking on" and brought to "cold, manicured" England) for thrice as long. Timothy, as Klinkenborg imagines her, is melancholic, wise, resigned; her patient narration reveals extraordinary powers of observation and empathy: "the Hampshire sky staggers me now with loveliness. Creeping fogs in the pastures. Gossamer on the stubbles. The parish rings with light. Whole being of the world distilled into a moment." The only plot is the passage of time, and Timothy's scrutiny of life around her: humans are "great soft tottering beasts" who, blinded by their humanness, believe that "the language of the brute creation is no language at all." This "true story," as Klinkenborg describes it, offers studied, beautiful reflections on the present and memory, earth and weather, love and utility, human and beast. This is a wholly unexpected and astonishing book.
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