Search -
The Optimist's Daughter (Audio Cassette) (Abridged)
The Optimist's Daughter - Audio Cassette - Abridged Author:Eudora Welty Pulitzer Prize-winner Welty reads from one of her best novels, in which a whole life is richly evoked in all its complexities of human relationships. — This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past - a poetic study of human relations. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospit... more »al from Mount Salus, Mississippi, complaining of a "disturbance" in his vision. To his daughter, Laurel, it's as rare for him to admit "self-concern" as it is for him to be sick, and she immediately flies down from Chicago to be by his side. The subsequent operation on the judge's eye goes well, but the recovery does not. He lies still with both eyes heavily bandaged, growing ever more passive until finally, with some help from the shockingly vulgar Fay, his wife of two years, he simply dies.
Together Fay and Laurel travel to Mount Salus to bury him, and thus begins the inward spiral that leads Laurel to the moment when "all she had found had found her", when the "deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself" and begins to flow again.
Welty manages to compress the richness of an entire life within the novel's pages. This is a world, after all, in which a set of complex relationships can be conveyed by the phrase "I know his whole family" or by the criticism "When he brought her here to your house, she had very little idea of how to separate an egg". Does such a place exist anymore? It is vanishing even from this novel, and the personification of its vanishing is none other than Fay, petulant, graceless, childish, with neither the passion nor the imagination to love...Fay and her kin, who must be the most small-minded, mean-mouthed clan since the Snopeses hit Frenchman's Bend.
There's more than just class snobbery at work here (though that surely comes into it too). They are a special historical tribe who exult in grieving because they have come to be good at it, and who seethe with resentment from the day they are born. They have come "out of all times of trouble, past or future, the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them".
An abridged recording of the novel read by the author.
2 audio cassettes, 4 hrs, analog, Dolby processed.« less