David Lodge

A retired professor strugles with the domestic and social conflicts incurred by his encroaching deafness.

Deaf sentence

Gavin

Gentle, silly-solemn but limp campus novel. Examines being middle-class middle-age without angst, despite the narrator’s being very hard of hearing. Though there is a sudden token Auschwitz section which gets about one page of build-up and is soon left behind (when the actual plot revives itself). 

It's less farcical - its characters' ambitions less contemptible - its plot less unabashedly neat than Lodge's usual style (though there is this: “Perhaps one day we’ll turn up in a campus novel” – “God, I hope not”). I miss that.

Deaf sentence

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