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If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things Jon Mcgregor 9780618344581 Books

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If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things Jon Mcgregor 9780618344581 Books

I first encountered Jon McGregor through his 2012 collection of stories, THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF THING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU, brilliant, oblique, some wildly inventive, all touchingly human. So I was prepared for something quite unusual from this, his first novel, 2002 Booker nominee and winner of the Somerset Maugham award. But I was not expecting something that, though written in prose, is virtually a poem, beginning thus:

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house…

Six pages of the soundscape of a city at night, distant traffic, air conditioners, Bollywood music from a late-night curry house. All beautifully observed, but perhaps slightly self-indulgent? But necessary, for it is poetry that gives the peculiar balance of immediacy and distance that is unique to this novel. Turn the page, and it changes into the breathless lines of a first-person narrator, describing some disaster that she can barely comprehend. She cannot see it, but she is meticulous in describing the reactions of everybody around: "There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his window-frames. […] The girl next door to me dropping her can of beer and swaying backwards, as if from a shockwave. […] The boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing." Every detail recorded in a frozen instant of time, a dozen everyday stories, interrupted for a split second, burned into the retina of an observer who doesn't yet realize how much it has affected her.

Her, as we later realize; at the time, we do not even know her gender; we never know her name. Nor those of most of the inhabitants of this ordinary British city (Bradford, I believe). Only very gradually do we discover their various races and back-stories. For now, they are merely the children, the teenagers, the lonely singles, the couples, or old people in the various houses. For a while, I thought of making a map on which I could enter the various scraps of information. But then I realized that the author wanted the individuality to emerge from this mass of humanity at its own pace. The way it does, accelerating and expanding towards the end, is one source of the novel's momentum. It is a bit like watching Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN, only harder-edged, more citified, less folksy.

The other source of momentum is provided by that first-person narrator, in alternating chapters. We soon discover that she is pregnant, but reluctant to seek help from her family or friends. Hers, too, is an ordinary story, and in a normal novel it might seem merely banal. But set against the life of that Bradford street, it is tender, disturbing, suspenseful, and increasingly mysterious as it seems to move away in both time and place from the original setting. Indeed, it is not until the end that you realize how the two strands connect, and even then McGregor has the wisdom not to tie everything up too neatly. Like his stories, this is a novel in which the reader must do a lot of the work. Bravo!

Despite the title, nothing in this beautiful novel is especially remarkable. And yet everything becomes so. There is a magnificent description of a city rainstorm that brings the same benediction as the close of James Joyce's story "The Dead." There are flashes of sudden understanding, human connections that bring tears to the eyes. And everywhere the traces of sheer love:

-- He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
-- He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?
-- He looks at her and he knows she doesn’t understand, he doesn’t think she’ll even remember it to understand when she is older. But he tells her these things all the same, it is good to say them aloud, they are things people do not think and he wants to place them into the air.


Tags : If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things [Jon Mcgregor] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>Risky in conception, hip and yet soulful, this is a prose poem of a novel -- intense, lyrical, and highly evocative -- with a mystery at its center,Jon Mcgregor,If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things,Mariner Books,0618344586,FIC019000,City and town life - England,City and town life;Fiction.,England;Fiction.,Life change events,Life change events;Fiction.,Psychological fiction,Suspense fiction,City and town life,ENGLISH FIRST NOVELISTS,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Literary,GENERAL,General Adult,Literary,Modern fiction,United States,England

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things Jon Mcgregor 9780618344581 Books Reviews

Artful, beautiful prose, an absolutely stunning work. Easily as good as McGregor's later work "Even the Dogs." Jilly Bond's narration is perfect. Her performance of each character is excellent & her timing is brilliant. It couldn't have been done better.
Beautiful prose, but a torture to read if you are trying to get to the story. The story was somewhat hidden from the reader until the end. It was a relief when the book ended.
Just begun to reaf
Get lost in this book. Makes ya think and that's never a bad thing
I found this book to be a beautiful piece of writing, and I absolutely loved it. That being said, the book is written almost entirely in prose poetry. It's not pretentious, but it is a writing style that some people won't particularly like. So, I'd recommend reading a sample before you buy.
Not sure how I feel about this book. It is very different and at first difficult to "get into" but then you are compelled to finish it
I liked this book. On the surface it was just an ordinary street but like all streets behind closed doors each family had it's own sorrows and joys. It reminded me that in everyday life we appear to be surrounded by unremarkable things but if we slow down and open our eyes life is more complex. What I did find a bit confusing about this book was that everyone was referred to by their house number and not by name. While I understood why the author did this, it slowed me down in getting to know the characters as I kept getting confused and it took me longer to get caught up with the story.
I first encountered Jon McGregor through his 2012 collection of stories, THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF THING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU, brilliant, oblique, some wildly inventive, all touchingly human. So I was prepared for something quite unusual from this, his first novel, 2002 Booker nominee and winner of the Somerset Maugham award. But I was not expecting something that, though written in prose, is virtually a poem, beginning thus

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house…

Six pages of the soundscape of a city at night, distant traffic, air conditioners, Bollywood music from a late-night curry house. All beautifully observed, but perhaps slightly self-indulgent? But necessary, for it is poetry that gives the peculiar balance of immediacy and distance that is unique to this novel. Turn the page, and it changes into the breathless lines of a first-person narrator, describing some disaster that she can barely comprehend. She cannot see it, but she is meticulous in describing the reactions of everybody around "There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his window-frames. […] The girl next door to me dropping her can of beer and swaying backwards, as if from a shockwave. […] The boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing." Every detail recorded in a frozen instant of time, a dozen everyday stories, interrupted for a split second, burned into the retina of an observer who doesn't yet realize how much it has affected her.

Her, as we later realize; at the time, we do not even know her gender; we never know her name. Nor those of most of the inhabitants of this ordinary British city (Bradford, I believe). Only very gradually do we discover their various races and back-stories. For now, they are merely the children, the teenagers, the lonely singles, the couples, or old people in the various houses. For a while, I thought of making a map on which I could enter the various scraps of information. But then I realized that the author wanted the individuality to emerge from this mass of humanity at its own pace. The way it does, accelerating and expanding towards the end, is one source of the novel's momentum. It is a bit like watching Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN, only harder-edged, more citified, less folksy.

The other source of momentum is provided by that first-person narrator, in alternating chapters. We soon discover that she is pregnant, but reluctant to seek help from her family or friends. Hers, too, is an ordinary story, and in a normal novel it might seem merely banal. But set against the life of that Bradford street, it is tender, disturbing, suspenseful, and increasingly mysterious as it seems to move away in both time and place from the original setting. Indeed, it is not until the end that you realize how the two strands connect, and even then McGregor has the wisdom not to tie everything up too neatly. Like his stories, this is a novel in which the reader must do a lot of the work. Bravo!

Despite the title, nothing in this beautiful novel is especially remarkable. And yet everything becomes so. There is a magnificent description of a city rainstorm that brings the same benediction as the close of James Joyce's story "The Dead." There are flashes of sudden understanding, human connections that bring tears to the eyes. And everywhere the traces of sheer love

-- He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
-- He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?
-- He looks at her and he knows she doesn’t understand, he doesn’t think she’ll even remember it to understand when she is older. But he tells her these things all the same, it is good to say them aloud, they are things people do not think and he wants to place them into the air.