The Dead Father (Audible Modern Vanguard)

"Dennis Holland delivers a well-paced, entertaining performance of Barthelme's classic. As the titular character — the Dead Father, a huge, half-dead, semimechanical godlike ruler — is dragged by a group of his children across his lands toward his burial spot, bizarre and increasingly absurd exploits and conversations unfold. Holland, a seasoned reader of Barthelme's work, does ample justice to the tone and spirit of the text. His comedic timing is superb, as is his voice for the Dead Father. While the narration will delight Dead Father devotees, listeners less familiar with the author's work may be confused by the novel's experimental style and unconventional plot structure, which transitions unsteadily to audio book. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. (Feb.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

?There is nothing unusual about the foot, except that it is seven meters high.? Nineteen people are dragging, by means of a cable, an immense carcass through the countryside. The carcass is that of the Dead Father, a half-dead, half-alive, part-mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself, although he is, effectively, dead. Thomas, Julie, Edmund, Emma, and the others variously insult, placate, cater to, and defend the Dead Father as the procession moves through the country of the Wends, the territory of the Great Father Serpent, and a variety of encounters and explorations toward its mysterious goal.In the austere, extraordinary prose that strongly influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered in The Dead Father a glimpse into his unique fictional universe: a many-shaded landscape of first and last things, striking, comic, manic, inevitable.