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

You know, she's not the prettiest.

She's probably not the finest match, but it's fine.

And it's time to marry anyway.

And this extraordinary, slightly sort of weary, it's an amazing bit of writing, but this kind of slightly weary, it's hard to explain what the tone is.

It's something like a weary fable, right?

Do you know what I mean?

Like children came, you know, children came, children died.

It's it's almost done in sort of done done in the kind of close third person from inside Ivan's mind.

But it's also completely external in another way, too.

Hence the fable like it's it's quite technically interesting, I think.

Don't you feel that?

This is so well put.

And I also, with my realist cap on, what you're talking about, defamiliarization and Natasha at the opera, it makes me think, I think that's so well put, this disease of descriptions.

I can't help noticing that

So when in War and Peace, when Natasha goes to the opera and we get this classic example of estrangement, which is that Natasha doesn't understand and doesn't like the opera.

So we get something like, you know, she went to the opera and large people were yelling at each other pointlessly in front of bits of painted cardboard.

And that's technically, as we know, as you know as a novelist yourself, that is free and direct style.

That's close third person essentially being used as a tool of sort of ironic estrangement.

Well, what's so amazing about the passages you were just talking about in The Death of Ivan Ilyich is that it's not the character anymore.

It's Tolstoy himself doing it.

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