Snow Crash
Sep. 15th, 2004 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
herewiss13Listening to 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson on an audiobook. It's extremely well done. The narrator has good character voices and nice pacing. Stephenson's dry, ironic style works well with the spoken word. There is, however, one glaring incongruity.
As anyone who knows anything about the book knows, 'Snow Crash' deals, in some small part, with "speaking in tongues" or "glossolalia." So, as scene-breaks, the audiobook's producers decided to use a little montage of people babbling random syllables. And it works better than it might sound here. One problem though.
One of the more prominent voices during the babble interludes says "KWA-reyn-ti-KWA-tro" in a very slow and deliberate sing-song. Say this out loud. It just happens to be the phonetic spanish translation of "forty four".
Oops.
I think that, in the chapter breaks (a different medley of babble) someone says "fifty five" in spanish, but that's not nearly as clear.
Basically, this all tickles me way out of proportion.
Still a really good audiobook, though. And a great book in general.
As anyone who knows anything about the book knows, 'Snow Crash' deals, in some small part, with "speaking in tongues" or "glossolalia." So, as scene-breaks, the audiobook's producers decided to use a little montage of people babbling random syllables. And it works better than it might sound here. One problem though.
One of the more prominent voices during the babble interludes says "KWA-reyn-ti-KWA-tro" in a very slow and deliberate sing-song. Say this out loud. It just happens to be the phonetic spanish translation of "forty four".
Oops.
I think that, in the chapter breaks (a different medley of babble) someone says "fifty five" in spanish, but that's not nearly as clear.
Basically, this all tickles me way out of proportion.
Still a really good audiobook, though. And a great book in general.
