I Hear Voices

by Paul Ableman, Margaret Drabble (Introduction)

Overview

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life.
This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006.
'The book, not excluding Lolita, which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias
'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer
'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571314157
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	03/20/2014
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	200 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Ableman
I Hear Voices, in which his writing is inspired not only by the modernist avant garde but by psychoanalytic theory. He also wrote plays and scripts for radio, television and theatre. He was chief fiction reviewer for the Spectator and the Evening Standard, and London literary correspondent for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

Margaret Drabble, born 1939, is a novelist, critic and biographer. Her novels include The Millstone (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Jerusalem the Golden (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Needle's Eye (winner of the Yorkshire Post Book Award . Her biographies of Angus Wilson and Arnold Bennett are reissued in Faber Finds.
Her most recent book is a memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws.

Editorial Reviews

First published in Paris 30 years ago, this novel by noted playwright Ableman is being released in the United States for the first time. Although the narrator is a young schizophrenic confined to a hospital bed, the reader gets involved with his wanderings ``outside of the hospital walls.'' The characteristics associated with the narrator's severe mental disorder include intellectual deterioration, social isolation, and perhaps delusions about life; and certainly the social isolation becomes evident whenever the narrator hears the voice of his brother Arthur--a voice that, throughout the novel, he is always trying to impress. The reader finally comes to empathize with the narrator and his plight. Strongly recommended.-- Vicki Cecil, Johnson Cty. P.L., Greenwood, Ind.

Library Journal