The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West

Written by Nathanael West
Read by David Goetz
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

National Library Service for the Blind, 1978
Length: 5hrs

The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West’s Hollywood is not the glamorous “home of the stars” but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their by their own desires — from the ironically romantic artist narrator, to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America’s heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after.

An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.

”Where else could they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough.

They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. The daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

There are several later recording of The Day of the Locust but this is the one I have. It is a recording for the blind recorded on tape in 1979. Sound is not bad. I removed the tape index info on the ends of each side.