Reviews for The Cloud of Unknowing

The average rating for The Cloud of Unknowing based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-09 00:00:00 Paul Sasso Try as I might, I could not finish this audiobook. In fact I couldn't even get beyond the first CD. As I mentioned in my only progress comments, the reader sounded as though he had eaten a fistful of Quaaludes and washed it down with a pint of cough syrup. Maddeningly slow, breathy and tired-sounding, he reads this first-person (occasionally second person) darkly cast narrative as though he had just emerged from a coma. I forced myself this morning to listen to more of the book, hoping I would either become acclimated to the reader's depressed affect or find the story sufficiently gripping to soldier on. Neither occurred. It was like listening to Eckhart Tolle read the phone book. This is no reflection on the book itself or the talents of Mr. Cook. But the experience of the novel was ruined for me by an awful delivery. Disappointing to say the least.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-08-05 00:00:00 Sergei Chnaiderman It's not that this book was bad, exactly, but I just didn't think that it accomplished what it was trying to do. Another book delving into perception versus reality, this time with latent paranoid schizophrenia thrown in, all with the intent (so I felt) of drawing the reader into the cloud of unknowing as if they were experienceing it rather than just reading about it. I don't know if it was the format or the length, but it just didn't happen for me. Instead, I felt like we just had the classic case of an unreliable narrator who is somewhere between announcing and trying to hide that fact. By the time I got to the twist at this end, I thought "so this is it?" Not that I had been expecting the twist all along, but that I hadn't expected this book to need one if it had in fact created for me feelings of doubt and unreality instead of just describing them for me in unsatisfying snippets and quotes. I probably would have liked it better had it been straight up detective novel; a little more The Usual Suspects and a little less Fight Club.