Deafening - Softcover

Itani, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554684781 ISBN 13: 9781554684786

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

Itani’s beloved, award-winning novel, set on the eve of the Great War and spanning two continents, tells the story of Grania, a young deaf woman who falls in love with Jim, a hearing man. As the war explodes across Europe, Jim becomes a stretcher-bearer, and through the years of separation, he and Grania attempt to sustain their love in a world as beautiful as it is brutal.

About this title

Review

In Deafening, Canadian writer Frances Itani's American debut novel, she tells two parallel stories: a man's story of war and a woman's story of waiting for him and of what it is to be deaf. Grania O'Neill is left with no hearing after having scarlet fever when she is five. She is taught at home until she is nine and then sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, where lifelong friendships are forged, her career as a nurse is chosen, and she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, with whom she falls in love.

The novel is filled with sounds and their absence, with an understanding of and insistence on the power of language, and with the necessity of telling and re-telling our stories. When Grania is a little girl at home, she sits with her grandmother, who teaches her: "Grania is intimately aware of Mamo's lips--soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says 'C' and shore, over and over again... This is how it sounds." After she and Jim are married and he is sent to war, he writes: "At times the ground shudders beneath our boots. The air vibrates. Sometimes there is a whistling noise before an explosion. And then, all is silent." When Grania's brother-in-law, her childhood friend, Kenan, returns from war seriously injured, he will not utter a sound. Grania approaches him carefully, starting with a word from their childhood--"poom"--and moves through "the drills she thought she'd forgotten... Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables."

A deaf woman teaching a hearing man to make sounds again is only one of the wonders in this book. Because Itani's command of her material is complete, the story is saved from being another classic wartime romance--a sad tale of lovers separated. It is a testament to the belief that language is stronger than separation, fear, illness, trauma and even death. Itani convinces us that it is what connects us, what makes us human. --Valerie Ryan

From the Publisher

Deafening is being published around the world by the following publishers:

Brazil (Portuguese) - Editora Objetiva
Canada (English) - HarperCollins
Catalonia (Catalan) - Columna Edicions
France (French) - Editions JC Lattes
Germany (German) - Berlin Verlag
Greece (Greek) - Livani Publishing Organization
Holland (Dutch) - Arena
Italy (Italian) - Frassinelli/Sperling & Kupfer Editori
Japan (Japanese) - Shincho Sha
Portugal (Portuguese) - Dom Quixote
Spain (Spanish) - Ediciones Maeva

UK (English) - Hodder & Stoughton
US (English) - Grove/Atlantic

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1554684781
• ISBN 13: 9781554684786
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416