The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy
The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy
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The Last Gentleman

Author: Walker Percy

Narrator: Wolfram Kandinsky

Unabridged: 14 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/01/1994

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Synopsis

Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of déjà vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.The novel follows Will Barrett’s adventures as he becomes involved in the complex troubles, loves, and fortunes of a Southern family, the Vaughts, that is living in the shadow of their youngest son’s illness. With settings ranging from New York to Alabama, Louisiana to New Mexico, this is an ambitious, funny, compulsively readable novel about the dilemmas of modern man.

About Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916–1990) was the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning The Moviegoer and the New York Times bestsellers The Thanatos Syndrome, Love in the Ruins, and The Second Coming . He is considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He went to medical school, intending to be a psychiatrist, until he had a bout with tuberculosis. He married and converted to Catholicism. He became a writer, and his first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award and has never been out of print.

About Wolfram Kandinsky

Wolfram Kandinsky (1940–1993) was a popular audiobook narrator whose career spanned the earliest days of commercial audiobooks. He was a familiar voice of the classics for millions of audiobook fans, and his résumé encorporated the greats of American literature, from Mark Twain to Saul Bellow.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Leif

I am a Percy addict, I admit it, and a vein full of this didn't help. Percy's novels are like non-fiction disguised as fiction, which I think throws a lot of people. He has ideas, and fiction is a vehicle for them. But just like with O'Connor, you can read his books without having a clue about the a......more

Goodreads review by Ade

I ended my review of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree by adding almost as an afterthought that it is very funny. I’ll start this on Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman by saying it too is very funny. It’s slapstick and absurdist at times, satirical, iconoclastic, wickedly spurting out stereotypes, and if you......more

Goodreads review by David

Walker Percy is one of the great novelists of the South and is at his best when he describes quotidian life there. The protagonist, whom Percy shapes as an engineer, is the personification of the Deep South. The engineer is a Princeton man with a high-powered telescope living in New York City with e......more

Quotes

“Splendid…A beautifully textured novel…A distinguished work of art.” New York Times Book Review

“Breaks your heart in the midst of laughter.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Nothing I can say about this novel will convey the sense of constant delight that it provides, a rich essence that is always right…It is art—and more vivid and alive and meaningful than our own living…tender-funny and full of references to things we were certain no one else had ever noticed.” Houston Post

“Brilliant…It shimmers with the chaste and civilized ornaments of irony, understatement, and compassion.” Time

“Lovely and brilliant…A highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Canneau.” Joyce Carol Oates, Nation

“Kandinsky’s narration employs a steady and sardonic voicing, appropriate to the prose.” Kliatt

“Kandinsky’s presentation…brings the words sharply in focus…His characterizations are engaging and distinct. Unhurriedly and conscientiously, Kandinsky gives depth to this amusing, yet difficult, search for fulfillment in the baffling world.” AudioFile

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