And so it goes: James Franco narrates ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’
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Version 0 of 1. James Franco jumps through time this week with a new audio version of “Slaughterhouse-Five” to be released Tuesday. His narration of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1969 novel completes more than a dozen volumes recorded by Audible Studios in association with the Vonnegut estate. For Franco, who’s pursuing a PhD at Yale University while maintaining his busy moviemaking career, this project offered the chance to spend two full days immersed in his favorite Vonnegut book. “Vonnegut is writing about these horrible events in World War II — mass death and the worst kinds of things that we can do to each other — but it’s couched in narratives that veer off into fantasy and aliens and time travel,” Franco says. “In that way, it’s very contemporary and postmodern.” [Listen to James Franco read from ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’] Inspired by Vonnegut’s experience as a prisoner of war during the bombing of the German city of Dresden, “Slaughterhouse-Five” is widely considered one of the greatest satirical novels of the 20th century. “Humor can keep things vital if it doesn’t get dated,” Franco says. “If someone else wrote this book, it’d just be a historical novel, but Vonnegut has all these different ironical layers that turn it into something else. I guess because it’s not set up as punch-line humor. It’s not like laugh-out-loud humor. It’s more painful humor, I guess, sort of fish-out-of-water kind of humor, and the fish is in the worst situation possible.” It is, you might say, a novel filled with freaks and geeks. Franco describes narrating an audiobook as a weekend “marathon” and notes that the process is only tangentially related to acting. “It’s not exactly like doing a movie,” he says. “It’s sort of halfway between my normal speaking voice and taking on a whole character, because in a book, when it’s third person, as the reader, you become the narrator. And so I’ve found that that voice is a little more neutral, a little less performative, less emotionally expressive than it would be if I were acting or playing a character.” [Watch John Malkovich narrate Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Breakfast of Champions.’] The essential quality, Franco says, is subtlety. “There are usually light suggestions of a character’s voice, something that gives each of the characters their own lilt or inflection. A little of that goes a long way. When readers go too far, it just becomes a distraction, and it becomes more like a play than a reading.” He would love to narrate more audiobooks. “I read a lot,” says the actor, who can’t seem to get enough of school. “I read a lot to other people. If I can do it for an official recording and have many more people hear it, that’s great.” Lately, he has been enjoying the novels of Alabama writer Tom Franklin. “I’ve read ‘Hell at the Breech,’ ‘Smonk,’ ‘Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.’ They’re good.” Franco discovered Franklin’s work this year while directing and starring in a movie version of “The Long Home” by the late Tennessee novelist William Gay. One of his fellow actors, Garret Dillahunt, recommended Franklin. “We both sort of love Southern literature,” Franco says. (“The Long Home” is expected to be released in 2017.) The audio “Slaughterhouse-Five” isn’t Franco’s only recent book-related, time-traveling project. In February, Hulu will release a nine-hour miniseries based on Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” about an English teacher — played by Franco — who tries to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Audible’s Vonnegut series began in June with “Breakfast of Champions,” narrated by John Malkovich. Audible is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, whose founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post. Charles is the editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles. Read more: Review of Charles J. Shields’s biography of Kurt Vonnegut Review of Stephen King’s ‘11/22/63’ Review of Tom Franklin’s ‘Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter’ |