South of Broad
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- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
Listening to Pat Conroy's first novel in 14 years reminds one of just how mesmerizing and affecting a true storyteller can be. The slow, sonorous voice of Conroy's protagonist, Leo King, is perfectly performed by narrator Mark Deakins as he delivers King's loving descriptions of the people who live South of Broad in picturesque Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1960s and 1980s. Deakins is most affecting when 11-year-old Leo finds his beloved and beautiful older brother has committed suicide. This act hangs like a dark cloud over Leo for decades and is finally explained with heartbreaking emotion. Leo and an assorted band of friends reveal what is most beautiful and most ugly about the South, making this a must-listen for fans of the bestselling author. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
June 1, 2009
Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy’s first novel in 14 years. In the late ’60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach’s son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo’s coterie stormed Charleston’s social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator’s awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group’s love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy’s florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat.
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