‘The voice must do what the eye does effortlessly’: Audiobook narrator Sneha Mathan
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I first discovered Sneha Mathan’s voice narration in the audiobook of Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Over a period of three days, I listened to 25 hours and 35 minutes of narration of this multigenerational diaspora epic novel, which Desai took nearly 20 years to complete, having started writing immediately after she won the 2006 Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss.
In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai displays a fine attunement to the edges of possibility of what a novel can actually be – she firmly establishes her mastery over form and Mathan’s narration of this work left me spellbound.
I was wandering around the French countryside novel gazing, ruminating on the loneliness, panic, geographical displacement and vertigo in vast unknown spaces, the intimate trials of being in a mixed-couple relation.
Listening to Mathan’s narration, I would erupt with laughter or recoil with horror and fear as I followed the dangers that Sonia encounters as a young woman shuttling between the cultural, political and economic disparities between two worlds.
Listening to other audiobooks, I was intrigued by the narration of The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, whose punchy and elegant short story “Lara’s Theme” recently appeared in The New Yorker. I reached out to Mathan, who lives in Seattle, to...