Inspired by the prompt to find an “original audiobook” I chose to look at the New Yorker Fiction Podcast series, because it contains audio recordings of short stories chosen and read by other authors. Looking through the New Yorker archives I landed on an author whose work I know and love, but a story I had not yet read. I wanted to listen to the recorded voice first, without any formed ideas of the characters or the piece.
The story I landed on is Barn Burning written by Haruki Murakami and read by Andrea Lee, a renowned writer in her own right. The most unique feature of Lee’s voice is also the reason I chose a recording from this series; she cannot really be considered an amateur reader, but she is not a professional actor. Her voice does not “perpetuate the tradition of staged readings by celebrated actors more so than the domestic pastime of reading aloud in the Victorian parlour.” ( Rubery, P65) The sound quality is excellent, but the focus and the purpose of the recording and the conversations that follows, is to listen to the story through and explore the voice of Andrea Lee.
Her reading is a performance in the sense that she lends a different voice to each character, but this is done mostly to differentiate between the characters. She applies something very close to her own speaking voice to the narrator, only slightly at a lower pitch and slower, perhaps to get closer to the voice of a male character. This could be because the main protagonist also happens to be a writer who recants the story with some detachment. As in most Murakami stories and novels, he is also the narrator.
The most striking difference when I read the piece, after listening to it, is the visual transformation of the characters and places. In Lee’s voice the protagonist looked and sounded older and the setting was only vaguely Japanese. Settings looked more like in-between images of places I know. Much like the Mid-Atlantic accent it was neither Japan nor rural Ohio, but somehow it looked like both. The places were also more vivid when I read the story.
I considered Rubery’s “ear contact” as I was listening to the story. I felt an intimate connection with the voice, “whispered directly into my ear” but the connection I felt with was Lee’s voice. Through her narration I felt more distant to the events and characters. Listening to a recording of the story as part of this podcast that lands her voice as much weight as that of Murakami is at least partially responsible for this. Taking the podcast as a whole, there are many voices and different media that come together to tell this story. This is a taste of the potential of digital audio technology to change the way we think about literature that Rubery discusses in his piece. It is also another form of a community moving further away from the idea of writing as a solitary experience. The original title I considered for this post was something like, Barn Burning written by Haruki Murakami, read by Andrea Lee, in a recorded conversation with Deborah Treisman, in which they also discuss the film version by Lee Chang-dong, and the loose relationship with William Faulkner’s story of the same name.
