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Born on the shores of Lake Ontario, Grania O'Neill suffers a childhood illness that destroys her hearing. Grania's life without sound is also a life bounded by a powerful family love that tries to protect her from suffering. But when it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive among the hearing, her family sends her to the Ontario School for the Deaf. There, protected from the often unforgiving world outside, she learns sign language and speech. And there she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, and the two, in wonderment, begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But a war is raging on the other side of the world. Only two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave home to serve as a stretcher-bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania are pulled to the centre of cataclysmic events that will alter civilisation forever.… (more)
User reviews
However, because I was mostly interested in the deaf culture aspect of the book, I found myself a little impatient with the war scenes. The juxtaposition of Jim's attention to sound with Grania's life without sound was interesting, though I did not really attend to that theme as well as I could have (or maybe that was a fault in the narrative, that it wasn't as acute as it could have been).
In general, I've found Itani's novels to be better than pop fiction, but not quite at "literature status" (the distinction being my own scale). This story is a perfect example of that.
It tells the story of Grania, a young girl growing up in the small Ontario town of Deseronto, on the Bay of Quinty. Grania loses her
Grania`s grandmother, Mamo, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the novel. The descriptions of the horrors of the trenches ring true, and I think Itani does convey well the sense of separateness of the deaf, and the sometimes well-meaning, but more often just ignorant and condescending attitude of many hearing people.
Each chapter begins with a quote from The Canadian, a magazine published by the director of the School that Grania attends, and which I suspect is real. One quote caught my eye: Ìt is just as pleasant and grand a thing to die for Canada and the British Empire today as it was for Rome in the brave days of old`. Which, of course, recalls Wilfrid Owens` great line about `the old lie`: Pro Patria Mori
That's the story. The descriptions of being deaf
There are many parallels drawn between the silence of the deaf and the deafening noise of the war, between the psychological and physical devastation of the war, disability and severe sickness.
Intense research made the details of everyday lives from 1903 to 1919 feel very personal and visceral, and we are made to feel the privations brought by World War I. Sound, both its absence and intensity, is a thread throughout the story, as is isolation.
Reading Deafening made me think about how diferently we seem to regard hardships today, even how differently we define them, complain about them, seek compensation and blame for them.
The story is also about the love between Grania and a hearing boy who joins the army to fight in first world war. The descriptions of war, destruction, injury, danger were too long and tedious for my taste. I'd rather have found out what happened to them after the war ended and how Granias sister and her husband dealt with the situation.
Grania was left deaf after a bout of scarlet fever when she was 5. She was finally sent to a school for the deaf at 9 years old, and by then was very good at lip reading, and she did speak some. Just before World War I, she met and married her husband, Jim, a hearing man, who went to war
I really enjoyed reading about the deaf culture near the beginning of the 20th century. Later in the book, it shifts between Grania's and Jim's perspectives during the war. I found both stories intriguing. I thought Itani did a good job describing the war scenes and I loved Grania and Jim's relationship, as well as Grania's relationships with her grandmother and sister. I really liked this and I don't know why it took me so long to read it.
After that it turned into a WWI novel, a genre I find too upsetting to read any more, so I skimmed it to the end. The friend who lent it to me loves this novel, but she is a braver reader than me. I wish we had found out how Jim and Grania's marriage fared after his return.
Grania has a protective mother (who feels guilty for her daughter's
Set in Canada as well as World War I France Deafening is well-researched, with insights into what it might be like to live without sound.