James Wood

speaker

815 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 15 Sep

James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Close Readings · Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy · 27 Apr 2026 podcast

And they immediately begin to think of promotions and transfers and maybe I'll get his job and, you know, that'll be 800 extra rubles and so on.

Then one of those friends and colleagues of Ivan Ilyich goes to the funeral or the wake rather.

It's an awkward situation where he doesn't really want to be there.

He's actually thinking of how he's looking forward to playing cards a little bit later.

Life is pressing in on this colleague of Ivana Lich's, and it's tedious to have to look at the corpse and talk to the widow.

But he does it.

And then the novella stops and restarts.

And part two begins where you thought the whole book might begin, which is telling the story of Ivan Ilyich's life.

Ordinary, simple, and terrible, says Tolstoy.

And then we get this sort of 20 or 30-page recitation of the rise and rise of Ivan Ilyich.

Everything is done comme il faut.

Everything is done just as it should be.

You go to the right tailor.

You join the right clubs.

You have the right affair with the little hat maker.

When you're in the provincial town, you find out where the brothel is in the back alley, and you go to that too.

But everything is done as it should be and perfumed in the right kind of French language and so on.

And so no offense is absorbed or given, as it were.

And following this, and this is where I think of Flaubert and the sort of received ideas, following this essentially received idea of what life should be,

Our hero gets his job and gets his wife.

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