David Lodge

Frustrated by hearing loss and his messy personal life, retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates reluctantly journeys to London to check up on his elderly father and finds his hearing problems resulting in an unintended relationship with a young woman.

Deaf Sentence

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

i love the feeling this part gave me; sometimes being not perceived is what you need even if it's bittersweet

blue

Students poured out of seminar rooms and lecture theatres, swarming on the landings, cascading down the staircases, swinging their rucksacks and briefcases, chattering and calling out to each other, releasing all the pent-up energy and frustration and boredom of the past hour, or perhaps, who knows, the awe and excitement of an inspiring educational experience. They carried me along like a river in spate, indifferent to my presence, oblivious of my identity. I floated on their tide like a piece of academic wreckage, until they spilled and spread out over the ground-floor lobby as far as the revolving door, which expelled me into the damp November air.

Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse.

'labiodental fricative' makes so much sense; don't we love it when we call phenomena by names that make sense!!!

‘F’ is called a labiodental fricative because you produce it by bringing your top teeth into contact with your bottom lip and allowing some air to escape between them.

Of course, you could argue that blindness is a greater affliction than deafness. If I had to choose between them, I’d go for deafness, I admit. But they don’t differ only in degrees of sensory deprivation. Culturally, symbolically, they’re antithetical. Tragic versus comic. Poetic versus prosaic. Sublime versus ridiculous.

Never thought of it this way, but with the way people joke, i see why he'd think such of our society?

Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.

They did an audiogram: you wear a pair of headphones and hold a pressbutton thingy which you squeeze when you hear a sound. The audiologist is using his apparatus out of your sight, so you can’t cheat, not that there would be any point in cheating. The sounds are not words, or even phonemes, just little beeps, which get fainter and fainter, or higher and higher, until you can’t hear them, like the cries of a bird spiralling up into the sky.

Frustrated by hearing loss and his messy personal life, retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates reluctantly journeys to London to check up on his elderly father and finds his hearing problems resulting in an unintended relationship with a young woman. By the author of The Art of Fiction. 30,000 first printing.

Judith Van Laere

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research.His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely.Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

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