Another
interesting book from David Lodge who cannot resist including in the story some
notes on grammar and literature.
The title can be a
bit confusing if you do not read it and see that it is a play on words as deaf
is spelt d,e,a,f.
The story concerns
Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor and is written as a kind of
diary. He lives with his wife Winifred
(Fred for short) in Brickley.
Desmond is very
hard of hearing and wears a hearing aid most of the time as his wife gets very
cross with him if she is talking to him and it is not wearing it, because he
cannot hear what she is saying!
It usually works
quite well, except at noisy parties. It is at one of these that he meets Alex
Loom, a young, attractive, American postgraduate who for her PhD topic is
undertaking a stylistic study of suicide notes. Desmond cannot understand a
word she is saying due to the surrounding noise, but nods in what he hopes is
the right places.
never got round to
telling his wife about these one-to-one sessions with this attractive young
lady.
He tries to stop
helping her but she is very persistent. He accepts a lecture tour in Poland to
escape her clutches and this goes well. He makes a visit to the second world
war nazi camp for the Jews and gives a very moving description of his feelings
on visiting the place and also the nearby extermination camp at Birkenau where
the gas chambers and the cremation ovens were.
Desmond is
recommended to go to lip-reading classes and he finds this quite rewarding.
I found the book
very interesting , learning the problems that deaf people suffer from.
One relevant
statement I found quite poignant was : Deafness is comic – Blindness is tragic.
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