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Jacob's Room

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's own modernist manifesto. Ostensibly a study of a young man's life on the eve of the Great War, it is really a bomb thrown into the world of the conventional novel, as she attempts to capture the richness and randomness of life's encounters. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and without a controlling viewpoint. But it seems that the author could not maintain this rigorous impersonality, and the radical technique breaks down, so that we finally see Jacob as a person, just as his world is blown apart.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      JACOB'S ROOM, a classic modernist text, is more about language and the art of fiction than it is actually a story, which means the narrator has to be as alive to the pleasure of the exact right word as a thriller narrator is to the power of a car bomb. Juliet Stevenson is a perfect actor for the challenge. Her voice is lovely, her diction clean and precise, and she is so sensitive to nuance, to the rhythm of Woolf's sentences, that she communicates her own excitement at Woolf's achievement in a way that delights and even instructs. There is much beauty here, owing equally to Woolf's art and Stevenson's, and the ending is indelibly moving. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      Jacob is so hard to manage. Ever since his father, Seabrook Flanders, passed away, he has been a somewhat aimless boy. As Jacob grows, we watch his aimless spirit wander like a butterfly from flower to flower, sipping nectar, but never lighting for long in one spot. Nadia May reads Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness--her cataloging of voices and images--with such force and authority that gradually in the poetry of these images, a character, albeit somewhat lost and stillborn, breaks through into a hollow world, exactly as Woolf intended. It is the narrator's assurance, as it was the writer's belief before her, that this stream of consciousness cataloging would produce both world and character, and so it does. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2015

      Woolf's (Mrs. Dalloway) brilliant novel is a classic of modernism, that literary style that developed after World War I in opposition to classic novels that required a hero or heroine, major and minor characters, and an organized plotline. Like another, better-known modernist work, James Joyce's Ulysses, which was published around the same time, Jacob's Room is a disjointed ramble though various individuals' thoughts and actions. Through his or her described thoughts, each person who interacts with Jacob provides a significant glimpse of his or her own and Jacob's existence. However, these thoughts are frequently splintered and often not about Jacob at all. Juliet Stevenson gives a highly competent reading of a difficult-to-follow text. Even so, many listeners may find that an exceptional effort of concentration is required to appreciate this or any other modernist text in audio format. VERDICT Recommended for individuals interested in Bloomsbury writers, modernist literature, or 20th-century feminist fiction.--I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Ames, IA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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