9780062268303
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Carthage audiobook

  • By: Joyce Carol Oates
  • Narrator: Susan Ericksen
  • Length: 19 hours 28 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: January 21, 2014
  • Language: English
  • (3332 ratings)
(3332 ratings)
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Carthage Audiobook Summary

A young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice, and the atrocities of war from Joyce Carol Oates, “one of the great artistic forces of our time” (The Nation)

Zeno Mayfield’s daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father’s frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects–a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.

Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it’s ever truly possible to come home again.

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Carthage Audiobook Narrator

Susan Ericksen is the narrator of Carthage audiobook that was written by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

About the Author(s) of Carthage

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of Carthage

Carthage Full Details

Narrator Susan Ericksen
Length 19 hours 28 minutes
Author Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date January 21, 2014
ISBN 9780062268303

Additional info

The publisher of the Carthage is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062268303.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Eric

February 26, 2016

Reading a long epic novel by Oates is a wholly immersive experience. I became fully lost in this book, grew to love the uniquely individual characters and spent a lot of time contemplating the intellectual and emotional conundrums that the author presents. It’s a dramatic, extraordinary story that explores large subjects like the Iraq war, the American penitentiary system, alcoholism and spousal abuse. Yet, the main thrust of the tale is a deeply personal story of a family that’s been splintered apart and slowly draws itself back together to form anew. In the fictional town of Carthage, a small community in upstate New York, a young college-aged woman named Cressida goes missing. Her respected ex-mayor father Zeno desperately tries to find her. A war-veteran named Brett who is the fiancé of Cressida’s sister is suspected of being involved. Like the drawings of M.C. Escher (whose art Cressida has an intense passion for) the laws of logic/gravity are suspended as the family desperately tries to find out what happened to their youngest daughter and are forced to go around in endless circles while the search is conducted. Time becomes distorted for them “time passed with dazzling swiftness even as, perversely, time passed with excruciating slowness.” This description so perfectly encapsulates the feeling of life in a time of crisis. The truth of Cressida’s fate is surprising and heartbreaking. Over the course of the artfully composed narrative we learn what happens to her and the other compelling characters involved.Read my full review of Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates on LonesomeReader

S.A.

February 15, 2014

At one point, I feared I might end up disliking this book as much as I disliked "The Accursed." The point came mid-story via a switch from upstate New York to Florida, a displacement so jarring I suffered mental whiplash. Once I understood the reason, I overcame my emotional emergency and settled back into the novel— as much as one settles into a JCO novel. She is not a settling-in writer, not by a long shot. Oates is about as settling as sitting on a porcupine while scorpions dance around your bare feet.In this novel, at first Oates seems to hate the Mayfield family, her main players in this novel. She peels open their skin, inviting the reader to start spraying acid on them. Arlette, the mother, is basically a cipher married to a controlling man. Zeno, the father, is a well-intentioned do-gooder, the center of attention who secretly thinks the world of himself. He would never see himself as controlling or unkind. Juliet, the oldest daughter, is “the pretty one”, the good one, the devout one—the shallow one. Or is she?Brett Kincaid, Juliet’s ex-fiancée, a drastically wounded war vet, seems to be the only character who generates any sympathy. Then there’s the youngest Mayfield daughter, the novel’s center: Cressida, the smart one, the nonconformist, the critical, prickly one, the daughter who feels unloved and unwanted.Self-destructive Cressida is her own worst enemy. Her unwantedness, unlovesness, leads to a tragic decision which unravels her family. Her awful decision sends Brett Kincaid to prison for murder.As the novel moves along, Oates shifts the reader’s emotions with amazing skill. By the end, the reader huddles in a corner, ready to forgive everyone, even Cressida, although quite a few times this reader wanted to smother Cressida.“Carthage” is a powerful novel, one best read in large sweeps for the full sensation of unsettledness. Beware the dancing scorpions.

Jo

November 01, 2013

This book, reminiscent of We Were the Mulvaneys, is about how a single incident wrecks the lives of a whole family. This book is set in upstate NY, the scene o other books by this author. The affluent Mayfield family has two daughters, Juliet and Cressida. Juliet, older and the prettier of the two, is engaged to her boyfriend, Brett, who is serving the army in Iraq. However he returns home severely wounded in both body and mind. Juliet accepts his condition and is willing to help him through his rehabilitation. However the engagement is broken and son thereafter, Cressida disappears after being driven home from a bar by Brett. He is found blacked out at the wheel of his Jeep in a wooded area and Cressida is nowhere to be found.Each section of the book is told from the point of view of all the family members as well as Matt and his embittered mother and all lead to a startling conclusion. This is a riveting story that will keep you reading right to the conclusion.

Mari

January 26, 2021

Ha sido una lectura pausada, una lectura que requiere tiempo y paciencia, pero ha merecido la pena y mucho. Me ha encantado la prosa, las distintas perspectivas, los pensamientos de cada uno de l@s personajes, sus sentimientos ocultos y los que muestran al mundo. Lo que puede desencadenar un hecho concreto, un malentendido, el tiempo,la distancia.Muy recomendable.

Peter

February 12, 2014

Joyce Carol Oates is the Cormack McCarthy of the psyche. McCarthy uses his inside voice to explore the existential bleakness of the human condition; Oates uses her outside voice to explore the mind filled with angst, anger, and pain. It is 2005 and nineteen-year old Cressida Mayfield is missing in a state park near Carthage, NY. In the very beginning, Cressida speaks to us from her lostness. Her older sister’s fiancé is somehow implicated, but his body and mind have been so scarred in Iraq that even he doesn’t know. Is Cressida alive or dead? Is her voice real or someone’s imagination? Will Oates tell us? It’s worth finding out!The first third of the book reports the thoughts and actions of Cressida’s family as the days of her absence pass. The language is very Oatsian—-snatches of thought and verbiage that leave nothing clear about what happened, why, or even when. Cressida is a smart and difficult teenager who is on the “autism scale.” Her parents, Zeno and Arlette Mayfield, loom large in this section: Zeno is focused solely on finding his daughter and/or the responsible party; Arlette is focused on keeping Zeno together. From the outside, the Mayfields are a solid and strong family; on the inside they—-and particularly Cressida—-are fragile and fearful.The scene shifts suddenly to 2012. The Investigator is an elderly and mysterious academic specializing in social justice issues, very much like Barry Schenk focuses on criminal justice. Although his work is widely known, he reveals nothing about himself, and his complete commitment to his projects requires him to hire an assistant (intern) to manage his life. Sabbath McSwain, his new assistant, is a student in her mid-20s, wholly committed to The Investigator and his work. A searing portion of this section involves their tour of a Florida prison, given by a sadistic corrections officer. Sabbath is almost literally shattered by the trauma of entering the execution chamber. But what does this have to do with the Mayfields?Oates has written another compelling novel of pain and loss, crafted, as usual, in glorious prose. To Oates, characters are not flesh, they are thought—-love, anger, self-hatred, and fear. This story is more focused on the enigma that is “us” than her last novel, The Accursed, but it is as enthralling. An easy five stars!P.S. Joyce Carol Otes IS Cressida Mayfield!

Carolyn

January 07, 2020

Carthage is not an easy novel, not a story you simply read from beginning to end. The story is gathered from fragments of thoughts and emotion, from brief glimpses into the lives of the Mayfield family and the life of a young veteran of the Iraq war. Oates explores the nature of forgiveness and redemption, the lies we tell to ourselves, and to each other, how we construct our lives and how we project the image of ourselves to our families, friends and community, and essentially how we live with the decisions we make.

Xenja

May 30, 2020

Poiché Cressida non replicava, il professor Eddinger continuò, ma in tono più concitato, seccato. “Signorina Mayfield, è fuori questione che il suo sia un buon lavoro. Anzi, direi ottimo. Brillante. Il suo progetto mi ha davvero affascinato, anche se in un primo momento non volevo nemmeno esaminarlo, visto che era stato consegnato così in ritardo, e senza nemmeno una scusa, chessò, magari che aveva avuto dei problemi di salute.” Eddinger tacque, come per dare a Cressida la possibilità di dire qualcosa - ma cosa? (Soffriva di diselessia? di autismo? di schizofrenia, disordine bipolare, paranoia? di idiozia?)La Oates, secondo me, è sottovalutata. Viene considerata una scrittrice piuttosto commerciale, quasi una sforna-bestseller, in confronto a colleghe di fama letteraria più prestigiosa come Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout o Marilynne Robinson. La colpa è sua: è esageratamente prolifica. Ma è un equivoco. I suoi romanzi sono quasi sempre bellissimi, scritti con grande profondità e sottigliezza psicologica, solidamente costruiti, e tutt'altro che commerciali.Cressida, la studentessa scomparsa, è un personaggio bellissimo. Non è una ragazza normale, e tuttavia non è nemmeno anormale. Tutti conosciamo persone così: magari molto intelligenti, spesso piene di talento, eppure incapaci di vivere in mezzo agli altri, di adattarsi a usi e costumi della società, di fare amicizie, di avere relazioni con l'altro sesso, di affrontare esami, colloqui di lavoro, viaggi, dichiarazioni dei redditi. Finiscono, di solito dopo una giovinezza promettente e problematica al tempo stesso, per restare impantanati in casa dei genitori per tutta la vita. Ma qual è la diagnosi? Io non me ne intendo, ma credo che non esista nessuna diagnosi e soprattutto nessuna cura. Non hanno malattie mentali, né disturbi psicologici come gli asperger o i borderline. Forse sono semplicemente molto, molto sensibili.E cosa fare con queste persone? Come comportarsi, se si è loro genitori? a chi chiedere aiuto, consiglio? Il mondo fa finta di niente quando non sa che fare - in fondo ci sono problemi ben più gravi, disgrazie ben peggiori. Vero.Ma la Oates sa che queste persone possono diventare problemi ben più gravi e disgrazie ben peggiori, per se stessi e per le loro famiglie. È il caso di Cressida Mayfield, tanto sensibile e tanto orgogliosa da non poter sopportare d'esser sbeffeggiata da un bambino, d'esser criticata da un professore, d'esser respinta da un ragazzo: tanto sproporzionata è la sua reazione a questi episodi da innescare una catena di sofferenze e tragedie che coinvolgerà più di una famiglia.La Oates, altro che sforna-bestseller!, scrive dell'essenziale: del modo in cui le persone affrontano e sopportano la sofferenza e la felicità, la malattia, la violenza, la miseria, l'amore, la solitudine, la paura e la morte; e con quanta bravura, con quanta verità.

Ann

February 11, 2014

In her 40th novel, Oates once again depicts the tragic sundering of families. The damage is not gradual, but the result of misbegotten choices/perceptions.The focus of "Carthage" is Cressida Mayfield, the 'smart' younger sister - who feels unloved, unwanted, in spite of the obvious care bestowed upon her - of the 'pretty' Juliet. Juliet is betrothed to Brett Kincaid, who returns from the Iraq war scarred in body and mind. The setting of Carthage, New York is real, but I found it interesting to learn that child sacrifice is believed to have been practiced in ancient Carthage, especially in times of war. Although the parents of these three 'children' do not escape suffering, the greatest punishments await Cressida, Juliet, and Brett.

Danilo

February 04, 2017

Romanzo altalenante, ma scritto con competenza e profondità. È un libro fortemente introspettivo, in cui non c'è spazio per la velocità dell'azione ma anzi,questa, viene impiegata unicamente per scandagliare la psicologia dei personaggi che prendono parte alla storia. In alcuni punti la Oates riesce ad essere molto coinvolgente, in altri francamente un po' meno, ma il tutto risulta costruito secondo un logica che durante lettura si fa sempre più chiara. È un buon libro, con tanti temi interessanti e che è bene vengano portati alla luce però, per quanto sia lento in alcuni punti, in altri finisce con l'essere eccessivamente precipitoso. È una lettura gradevole, mai banale, scritta con garbo è indubbio talento. Non è un caso che la Oates sia tra gli autori più importanti del panorama letterario americano.

Fraser

August 01, 2021

4.5. I don’t know why I chose this as my first Oates book. I have others that are more popular and highly rated and shorter. Whatever drove me to pick this up first, I’m happy for it. The events in this book are wonderfully realized. Ostensibly, this is a mystery. When a young girl in a tight knit town goes missing, everything seems to point to a veteran who once was engaged to her older sister, but are now estranged as he’s been hurt in his two tours overseas. Hurt is the through line here. Surrounding the disappearance and the mystery, Carthage jumps around often, occupying family and community and beyond to shape the contours of its story. The format produces transcripts of conversations and letters, sometimes mixed with accompanying thoughts from the point of view character, sometimes just a document itself. The result is a vivid character study and a thorough examination of a historic event for said characters. The ripples of which are similarly traced into the future, rendering the hurt across time, rooting it in place, complex and dynamic psychology, long-term effects, and stark contradictions.I think plot fiends are the ones that must have driven the rating for this book so far down. It would feel meandering if it wasn’t so methodical and explicit in its goals to elucidate the systemic issues in American society (Western culture writ large). Blame isn’t so much a thing to be assigned, as it is in most genre fiction that people may conflate this with, it’s a subject to be examined along with the disappearance itself. How useful is it? How do we arrive at it? Who gets to assign it? A normal production would point to a person and say, ‘There. That’s the one responsible.’ And the book would be over. Here it’s a good start, but we can do better. This is almost a reverse engineering of a crime. And how did we get here? And where and how and what do we do with that contemporary hurt?Craft-wise, I was particularly struck by the foreshadowing. Oates notices and points to—correctly, I think—how much influence those around us have. There are seemingly throw away lines of dialogue that show the dynamics of the relationship. Especially initially, with the family interactions between the two daughters, father, and mother. The father throws cruel castaway comparisons between his daughters and peacocks in a way that is both charming in a men-who- are-socialized-Correctly-will-like-this-man-kind-of-way, but is actually clearly toxic and, sadly, formative for his children. Those callously dropped lines have a ring of truth to me, because all people I know similarly wield their influence like this. They drop bomb-like words that lift or crush and imagine the responsibility is on the listener; unable to empathize with those they speak with. Characters in Carthage spout truisms that, if one could snatch them from the air to examine, similarly indict the systems we’ve erected to help us, but actually beat us bloody daily. The prose and sentence-by-sentence text is engaging and similarly methodical. It won’t be for everyone, but even when it’s annoying repetitive, it’s in service to the psychology of the character. It’s pretty singular and interesting seeing Oates’ voice fill a person up. There’s a chameleon quality to it. Intelligence matched to diction and unusual cadences wrapped up in neurosis. All of them topped to the brim with humanity. Everyone is shitty and everyone is generous and kind. In a story where you expect to presented with someone to hate, what do you do when you understand every variable and aspect of those involved? You’re left with the impeccable themes to contemplate, as well as an interiority that manifests from occupying other people so fully human.

Michael

July 05, 2017

My review for this book was first published by The New York Journal of Books in 2014. I reproduce it here:Pity the first-time reader of Joyce Carol Oates.Consider his predicament, standing in front of the O section of the local library or bookshop, dozens upon dozens of her books staring back forlornly, 50 years’ worth, in all forms and genres, fighting for attention.Where does one even start? Does he first reach for the psychological family dramas (We Were the Mulvaneys)? Or perhaps the big gothic romances (The Accursed)? What about the epic re-imaginings of famous people (Blonde)? And those are just the ones under her own name!The good news is that Carthage, roughly Ms. Oates’ 42nd novel, will serve as a suitable introduction to any unsure newcomers, as well as a powerful reminder of why the rest of us keep coming back.What seems like a straightforward murder mystery evolves into a complex tapestry of conflicting voices and motivations, as ever touching on themes of identity, suburban angst, and violence: the dark secrets lurking within the postwar American family.Carthage begins at full sprint: Cressida Mayfield, the 19-year-old daughter of the town’s former mayor, goes missing during the summer of 2005. Her father Zeno, along with scores of volunteers, canvasses an Adirondacks nature preserve in hopeful desperation.As the search continues, Zeno and his wife Arlette soon have to reckon with the notion that Cressida might not have been dragged into the woods of upstate New York but willingly accepted her fate.The tomboyish daughter, the smart one, alone in her room all those nights with her M.C. Escher drawings and her brewing rage. Unable to compete with her more mannered, elegant older sister Juliet, the beautiful one.The daughter who hates her name, the self-conscious antiquity of it, that puts up a wall before she even gets to know someone. Who once told her mother, when asked why she never smiled in any pictures, that one of those pictures would eventually be used in her obituary, and “you’d be a fool to smile at your own funeral.”Then a development: Cressida was last seen coming out of a bar (so unlike her!) with local war hero Brett Kincaid, who until a week before had been engaged to Juliet. He can only recall fragments about that evening, but when police found him, his Jeep had skidded off a road and blood matching the missing girl’s type was splattered all over it.The first third of this novel focuses at great length on this investigation, exploring the depths of the Mayfields’ grief, and of the profound change in the corporal now suspected of murder, the soldier whose discharge from Iraq is shrouded in shame and mystery.A novice Oates reader, accustomed to the rhythms of standard suspense fiction, might expect the story to stay along this track, but the author audaciously thickens the plot by several degrees.The action jumps several years to a Florida university, where a mercurial, pseudonymous professor is trying to infiltrate a maximum-security prison to continue his Geraldo-esque exposés on the social welfare system.This lengthy chapter, which occasionally feels in tone and pace like it dropped in from another story altogether, is the novel’s riskiest section, but it’s one that pays off retrospectively: Only later can the reader understand the significance this digressive meditation on the penal system has on the circumstances of Cressida’s disappearance.Despite its 500 pages, Carthage maintains a brisk pace by featuring a JCO prose trademark: the torrential interior voice. She is able to drill into her characters’ heads so deeply that their thoughts feel less like passive reflections than as active kinetic bursts. It’s an effect that few authors do as well, and Cressida Mayfield, filled with self-loathing and accrued resentments, is the perfect vehicle for it.Which makes it all the more striking that she can’t achieve the same depths with Brett Kincaid, who stealthily emerges as the book’s most important character but the least understood. What happened in Iraq to turn this formerly well-mannered, generous young man into a medicated, guilt-ridden shell prone to violent blackouts is the book’s true and lingering mystery.Carthage shows an author still in command of her vision, one still grappling with the worst impulses of human behavior and with our capacity to forgive them. Don’t let her machine-like productivity fool you; more than 100 books later, Ms. Oates’s fiction remains as potent as ever.

David

May 28, 2014

In many ways, Oates' latest isn't vastly different to many of her other novels (a seemingly ideal upstate New York family torn apart by a terrible event involving a daughter - 'We Were the Mulvaneys' and 'My Sister, My Love' have both trodden the same path) but then it is her fascination with certain themes that keeps me reading her and finding something new even when there is this sense of déja vu. So, here, in addition to Oates's usual themes about identity, about violence, about family, she adds questions about punishment and the 'cruel and unusual' ways people can find to punish themselves, each other, and even those they love.'Carthage' (as the title implies) is rich with allusion - to myth, to fairy tale, to Shakespeare - but one of the central images is a drawing by Cressida Mayfield, the 'smart' daughter who goes missing (possibly murdered) in the opening pages, inspired by MC Escher, of a procession of human figures that change form from black to white and back to the same black shapes they began as - identical, yet undeniably changed. It is a progression echoed by Cressida's journey through the novel, but also by that of her family (Zeno, the lawyer father who never gives up hope that Cressida is alive; Arlette, the faithful wife who does; and Juliet, the 'pretty' daughter, who has been jilted by the troubled Iraq veteran Brett Kincaid, the chief suspect in Cressida's disappearance), and by the very structure of the book itself, which is in a constant state of flux: partway through the novel Oates suddenly fast forwards seven years and spends ninety pages on a tour of a maximum security prison in Florida - distracting at first, until it becomes evident where she is going with it - and when at the end we return to the city of Carthage and the Mayfield's everything seems the same as it was, but of course everything is utterly altered.It's all quintessential Oates - hypnotically readable, slightly melodramatic, psychologically astute. Of course you wish she'd take a little more care on a sentence-by-sentence level (Oates' writing always has a fevered quality) and not rely on the same words and phrases quite so often (I'm pretty sure this isn't the first Oates book I've read where a character is accused of 'catastrophising'), but then she probably wouldn't be churning out one a year, and there'd be so much less backlist to explore.

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