The Centaur Audiobook By John Updike cover art

The Centaur

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The Centaur

By: John Updike
Narrated by: John MacDonald
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER

The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

Accolades & Awards

National Book Award
1964
Literary Fiction National Book Award Mythology Fiction Greek Mythology Genre Fiction Psychological Ancient Greece Sagas Family Life Mash-Ups

Critic reviews

“A triumph of love and art.”—The Washington Post

“A brilliant achievement . . . No one should need to be told that Updike has a mastery of language matched in our time only by the finest poets.”—Saturday Review

“Unsurpassed . . . Natural, pertinent, fresh, subtle, and superbly written.”—Newsweek

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All stars
Most relevant
It might be cute to have a regional accent, but it is not so easy to understand this narrator. Just listen to the first sentence of the book--I had to listen to it three times to understand it

Narrator eats words

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... he tainted everything in his path. There are too many great books to waste your time reading this. A failed experiment at best.

Father was toxic waste...

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