The Testament of Mary Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EHNSNO6 | Format: PDF
The Testament of Mary Description
Audie Award Finalist, Solo Narration - Female, 2013
Audie Award Finalist, Literary Fiction, 2013
Meryl Streep's performance of Colm T?ib?n's acclaimed portrait of Mary is hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "an ideal audiobook," presenting the three-time Academy Award-winner in "yet another great role." Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Colm T?ib?n's The Testament of Mary presents Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel. They are her keepers, providing her with food and shelter and visiting her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was "worth it"; nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone, in a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
Now Meryl Streep brings T?ib?n's tour de force of imagination and language to unforgettable life with "simplicity, honesty, [and] a clarity that draws us into the emotional landscape of the book through the beauty of the writing," writes Charles Isherwood in the New York Times Book Review. "Streep has an impressive ability to crest the structurally intricate sentences T?ib?n has fashioned, which sometimes have the flowing, rhythmic cadences of certain passages in the Bible itself," Isherwood writes of her performance. "Streep's voice is familiar to generations of moviegoers, but ...
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 3 hours and 7 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 10, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EHNSNO6
The subject matter for Colm Tóibín's "The Testament of Mary" is exactly what the title suggests in that it relates Mary's feelings about the death of her son, Jesus, whose name it hurts her too much to even mention. It's a curiously slight offering though. Its 100 odd pages lands it somewhere between short story and novella territory. Even so, with Tóibín's excellence as a writer and the emotive subject matter, I expected to be more engaged with the story than I was.
It's not often that I feel completely ambivalent about a book, but this is one of those times. It's well written certainly but fails to really engage the reader - or at least this reader. It's as if Tóibín is writing on auto-pilot (or given the subject matter perhaps that should be auto-Pilate?) - although that is still a very high standard of writing. It started life as a monologue play and I'm not quite so convinced of the merits of its expansion here.
At the start, it's unclear if Mary is under arrest or just being guarded for her own safety after the death of her son. Told in her voice throughout, there is the expected rage and sadness and most of all a sense of guilt about not failing to intervene in her son's final hours for her own safety. She recalls the story of Lazarus who, once her son had raised him from the dead, seems to be living life as not much more than a zombie with people afraid to even look at him, before describing the last time she saw her son at a wedding, to recalling the events of the crucifiction.
And that's sort of it really.
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