Finn - Audio CD - Unabridged Author:Jon Clinch, Ed Sala (Narrator) In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature's most brutal and mysterious characters: Huckleberry Finn's father. The result is a strikinly original tour de force that springs from Mark Twain's classic novel but takes... more » on a fully realized life of its own.
It was more than a century ago that Twain left the notoriously violent Finn dead, surrounded by such oddities as a wooden leg and women's undergarments. But just exactly how did Finn end up in that room? Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body -- flayed and stripped of all identifying marks -- drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim's identity, shape Finn's story as they will shape his life and his death.
Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn's terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn's mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity -- not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.
Finn is a novel about race and slavery; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family.
Unabridged: 10 Compact Discs, Running Time: 11.25 hours, Narrator: Ed Sala.« less