Deaf Sentence

Resumen del libro

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 behavior threatens to destabilize his life completely.

Biografía del autor

David Lodge (Londres, 1935) se licenció en Filosofía y Letras por el University College de Londres en 1959 y se doctoró por la Universidad de Birmingham, de la que fue profesor de lengua y literatura inglesas desde 1960 hasta 1987, año en que abandonó la docencia para dedicarse exclusivamente a escribir. Es miembro de la Royal Society of Literature. En 1989 presidió el jurado del Booker, uno de los principales premios de novela en lengua inglesa. David Lodge ha escrito varios libros de crítica literaria, algunos de los cuales, como El arte de la ficción (Ediciones Península), se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. De sus novelas, traducidas a diecisiete lenguas, destacan Intercambios, El mundo es un pañuelo, ¡Buen trabajo!, Noticias del paraíso, Terapia y Pensamientos secretos.