Product Details
Simon & Schuster Australia, February 2010
Trade Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0731814517
ISBN-13: 9780731814510
Description
Bertram Reiner, a charismatic and brilliant man diagnosed with a severe case of Battle Fatigue is treated by Dr. Harrison, the distinguished and steadfast head of the hospital, finds the most challenging patient of his career.
Their sessions leave Dr. Harrison slipping into a frightening, but also strangely enlivening twilight existence that renders the boundaries between sanity and insanity disquietingly blurred. When Dr. Harrison discovers that Bertram is having an affair with Matilda, the head nurse, who he himself has feelings for, his own state of yearning rises and throws his sanity into the balance.
Their sessions leave Dr. Harrison slipping into a frightening, but also strangely enlivening twilight existence that renders the boundaries between sanity and insanity disquietingly blurred. When Dr. Harrison discovers that Bertram is having an affair with Matilda, the head nurse, who he himself has feelings for, his own state of yearning rises and throws his sanity into the balance.
"The Listener explores with great subtlety and perceptiveness the issues of trauma and guilt, illustrating the complexity of the way in which a mind that has experienced horrors -- whether as perpetrator or victim -- may create elaborate defenses that are paradoxically selfdestructive. Combining a psychologist's insight with the skill of a gifted novelist, Shira Nayman dramatizes brilliantly the futility of the belief that there is any absolute point of objectivity from which the most horrific experiences may be examined."
-- Charles Palliser, author of The Quincunx and The Unburied
The Australian, February 12, 2010
...The Listener By Shira Nayman Simon And Schuster 428pp,$26.99 ANY novel that seeks to navigate the subconscious, to define the motivations of its characters in psychological rather than dramatic terms ...
Cleveland Live, January 18, 2010
...favorite books in 2006, "Awake in the Dark," was also exquisitely difficult to convince friends to read. Shira Nayman's short stories bristled with craft and psychological acuity. I believe that O. Henry himself would have been stunned by ...
STLtoday.com, January 8, 2010
...as 'didactic' by Publishers Weekly in her first book, remains workmanlike and frequently veers into cliché. In 'The Listener,' autumn days are crisp, silence is brooding, and lunch is rustled up. Night falls and ice skaters glide. This is ...
New York Times, January 6, 2010
...Hill still sits forlorn and free of tenants. [Lost City] The based on Shira Nayman?s latest novel, ?The Listener,? on Thursday evening. [] What is going on with the of the Ugg store in SoHo? [The Shophound] The poem ?,? by Amy Lowell, to ...
Miami Herald, January 5, 2010
...THE LISTENER. Shira Nayman. Scribner. 305 pages. $25. With U.S. involvement in Afghanistan ramping up, examining the effects of war on the psyche has never seemed more important. Shira Nayman churns ...
Shira Nayman's Books
-
Awake in the DarkA provocative and haunting collection about the psychological legacy of the Nazis in contemporary life from a remarkable new writer.Read More
Displaying 1 of
