Cathedral Audiobook By Raymond Carver cover art

Cathedral

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of titles.
Yours as long as you’re a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for $8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Cathedral

By: Raymond Carver
Narrated by: Norman Dietz
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $18.06

Buy for $18.06

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The 12 stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work and "overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life...Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty...his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart" (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).

©1983 Tess Gallagher (P)2017 Tantor Anthologies & Short Stories Literary Fiction Short Story Fiction Anthologies Genre Fiction Classics Heartfelt
All stars
Most relevant
I appreciate that with recordings of work, the performer has the license to perform the work in the way they see fit, presumably in a way that might help the listener understand the nuance of the writing.

I simply found the choice for the performance of this work to be overwhelmingly distracting, rather than effective. Norman Dietz reads through the prose as if he's reading a dictionary. Particularly, the insistent, unvaried rhythm he reads at paints Carver's stories as monotonous rather than restrained. While he does choose to alter his voice for some characters' dialogue (very slightly), and throw in an inflection when a character is raising their voice (again, slightly), overall, I feel he's only been able to accomplish sucking the emotion out of each of these pieces, leaving behind what sounds like to me a recitation of individual words wholly unconcerned with the word that came before it, or that comes after.

This is a work I wished I had read myself, rather than listened to here.

Disaffected performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A t l e a s t f i f t e e n w o r d s

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story will carry you along, very well written;however, the narrator’s tone is somewhat grating and over-accented/flat.

Good book, annoying narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I'm a big fan of Carver however I couldn't listen to this narration. The narration is incredibly awkward and doesn't flow.

Narration is TERRIBLE

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Story was okay, not great. Interesting collection of short stories. I did not find any to be engaging or exceptional.

Narrator was good

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews