If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

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She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah. Though this level of poetry is tempered by the idiomatic in the following chapters, the principle of finding wonder in the mundane is the essence of the novel. As the authorities take the body away for autopsy and cremation we are shown the events leading up to and immediately after the death through the eyes of those acquainted with him. And ineffectual prose emerges as the self-defining mediatrix between reality and the inexplicable mysteries of bare existence. Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.

Here McGregor’s work again takes on a cinematic quality and this part is rather like watching a documentary. The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars. You do all that, you'll enjoy being here, A plot full of healthy plants, crops coming off, flowers out, that's the best little place in the world.His novel Reservoir 13 (2017) won the Costa Book Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. We understand that he is not welcome, flowers are difficult to find, suggesting rationing or scarcity caused by some cataclysm – we are led to understand that the man is after something but McGregor is the conveyor of unease, an author who whets our imaginations and, as so often in his work, it is up to the reader to draw his conclusions. The family moved to Thetford, in south Norfolk, when he was 12; it was a rural upbringing, he says, "but with an edge of urban decay".

Through the windows of these once-grand houses, McGregor points his authorial lens just as the enigmatic boy at number 18 collects Polaroids of the street's inhabitants; in one house, an old man tries to hide his terminal illness from his wife to spare her pain; in another, a group of students prepares to leave a life of communal safety for an uncertain adult future; in each of the others, small dramas of family life are being played out, observed with beautiful exactness. This is a more serious novel than McGregor’s previous ones and it lacks the humour of those of say Roddy Doyle or Frank McCourt and yet there is a sweetness, a nostalgia in the reaction of Robert’s friends to his demise. William Leith, writing for The Daily Telegraph, stated "this is an ordinary world, shabby and melancholy, but McGregor describes it with mesmeric power.McGregor has spoken in interviews of how part of the book’s inspiration came from the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana, and the way in which other deaths which happened at the same time were overlooked. It's a day when the many residents - few of them identified by more than house number or hair colour - experience a terrible, violent, communal event.

How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone.By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers. In Caroline Edwards’ “An Interview with Jon McGregor”, McGregor himself states that the neighborhood is based heavily on observations of small details or events, saying “This sense of observing…the idea of lives pivoting on single moments and lives being changed by passing remarks and stray comments and accidents and coincidences” (Edwards 220-221).

It is important to stress that there is nothing new or fresh about If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, considering the hype - never mind its recent Booker long-listing - this is a novel that never moves beyond its self-satisfaction.

It’s set principally in one street in a northern town - unnamed, of course - which is rather like Bradford, where he used to live, and the texture of the story comes from people doing ordinary things. e., the event binding these people together is not going to be happy)…I kept on thinking protagonist X or Y or Z was going to be the unfortunate person who experienced the event at the end of the book.