PARZIVAL

This prose translation of one of the earliest of the Grail stories is a corker of a medieval romance, and narrator Leighton Pugh makes the most of its tension and occasional flashes of humor and emotion. Listeners should be prepared for some surprises. The Grail itself, for example, is a stone, not a cup, and has nothing to do with Jesus. By the time the legends reached Malory, who wrote LE MORTE D'ARTHUR, they had evolved considerably. Pugh uses a range of voices and accents to differentiate characters, but the text gives him little help; not until the Renaissance, for the most part, did the people in stories start becoming more than symbols. The one exception here is Eschenbach, who pops in occasionally as himself. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2021]