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Michel Faber Is Scared and Western Civilization Is To Blame
A review of the best-selling author’s first work of non-fiction, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us
Michel Faber has published a non-fiction book called Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, to a small extent, to show us about some rare LPs, EPs, and CDs he has, but mostly because he is worried and scared. This book is his declaration of innocence and a defensive self-flagellation employing text.
Despite a hackneyed writing tone and occasional attacks at the thesaurus to line up hard, pretty words, making it to the end becomes a chore. Unfortunately, my OCD does not let me leave things halfway through, so I have read three hundred and fifty pages of Faber’s meandering ramblings on, well, music. Difficult to tell.
You might have heard of Michel Faber as the author of the sci-fi novel Under the Skin. Probably not. You know it because it became a film starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien who preys on men in Scotland. What most of us remember it for, however, was Micah Levi’s bone-chiller of a soundtrack that almost overshadowed the plot, the director Jonathan Glazer, and the author.
Faber establishes firmly and repeatedly throughout the book that he detests his Nazi father. He detests his mother, too, for not being…
