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The Midwife

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The Midwife

Von: Katja Kettu, David Hackston - translator
Gesprochen von: Tanya Eby
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Orphaned into an unforgiving foster home and raised as an outsider, Weird-Eye shoulders her unflattering nickname. She relies on her vivid imagination to sustain her work as a midwife bringing newborns into the world while World War II overruns her native Finland, desecrating life. She finds herself drawn to the handsome, otherworldly Johannes Angelhurst, a war photographer working for the SS. To be near him, Weird-Eye - whom Johannes lovingly calls Wild-Eye - volunteers to serve as a nurse at the prison camp where he has been assigned.

From the brutality of the camps to the splendor of the aurora borealis above the Arctic Sea, The Midwife tells of a stormy romance, the desolate beauty of a protective fjord, and the deeply personal battles waged as World War II came to an end.

©2011 Katja Kettu and WSOY. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Translation © 2016 by David Hackston. Belletristik Historische Romane Krieg & Militär Magischer Realismus Saga
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When the boom first came out, I attended a public reading with the author in Germany. Katja Kettu read in Finnish, afterwards a translator read the same passages in German. In between, there were stunning performances of Finnish tango. I loved Kettu's Gothic outfit and her voice, and the German translation was extremely touching and powerful. So I was really looking forward to this audiobook in English. But although the reader has a pleasant voice, the audiobook was disappointing. This is due to the awful English translation. Besides, the reader is struggling with all foreign language expressions. As a native speaker of German, I sometimes had to listen twice to understand phrases in German.

English translation of this daring novel is awful

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Bitte versuche es in ein paar Minuten noch einmal.
I have to agree with one of the other reviewers here about the quality of the voicing. The narrator (sorry, "performer") not only did not bother to research the correct pronunciation of German and Finnish words and names (I speak fluent German, and her pronunciation is often so wildly off the mark that I had no idea what word she was trying to say), she also mispronounces several English words. I was really surprised when I looked her up that she's apparently "award winning."

I thought the translation was not bad, but there were a few moments where I did think the wrong translation choice had been made. And the translator was clearly British, using UK English, which jarred with the US accent of the narrator.

As for the book itself, well, it's a lot. If I'm being flippant, I'd say it's like a *very* sexually explicit romance novel with a lot of melodrama. The story has some really interesting elements, but it gets very repetitive and long-winded, and veers sometimes into being almost trashy. There's something a bit distasteful about making an SS officer into a romantic hero. My favorite parts were the descriptions of the natural world, and the deep connection with it that the main character has.

Sloppy voicing job

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Bitte versuche es in ein paar Minuten noch einmal.