If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things [Paperback]

Jon McGregor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2003

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, which keeps the reader in suspense until the final page. In a tour de force that could be described as Altmanesque, we are invited into the private lives of the residents of a quiet urban street in England over the course of a single day. In delicate, intricately observed closeup, we witness the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: the man with painfully scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house and who must now care for his young daughter alone; a group of young clubgoers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. The tranquillity of the street is shattered at day's end when a terrible accident occurs. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendering of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope. Rarely does a writer appear with so much music and poetry -- so much vision -- that he can make the world seem new.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McGregor's poignant, Booker-nominated debut examines in loving detail a day in the lives of the inhabitants of a single British block. It is a day like any other-a woman prepares breakfast for her family, boys play cricket, a man washes his car-until a terrible accident occurs, which is witnessed by all the neighbors but concealed from readers until the novel's end. Drifting from apartment to house to yard, McGregor reveals the stories found in each: there is the couple who fight bitterly and have brilliant sex; the man with hands scarred from trying, unsuccessfully, to save his wife from a fire; the aging veteran keeping from his wife the truth of his imminent demise. Weaving through these tales of the transcendental ordinary is the first-person narrative of a girl coming to terms with her unexpected pregnancy after a one-night stand. Her lover's twin brother arrives to drive her to her parents, but doesn't tell her the truth about his brother's absence; the girl's mother has her own secrets. McGregor's rapt attention to the exquisiteness of daily life sometimes makes his details ring falsely portentous, and his unwavering focus on minutiae-rain, traffic lights-can be wearying. But as the man with the scarred hands remarks, "there are many things you could miss if you are not paying careful attention. There are remarkable things all the time." This is the guiding principle of McGregor's novel, one that requires patience but yields ample rewards.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Nominated for the Booker Prize, this first novel has two narratives: first, there's the story of a single day in the lives of the residents of one street somewhere in England, from an old man struggling to tell his wife that he is dying to an eccentric young man who collects errata from the street and burns with unrequited love for one of his neighbors. The second story follows the aforementioned beloved young woman years later, after she learns she is pregnant. From the beginning, it's obvious that an accident happened on the street toward the end of the day, but we don't actually see the accident until near the end, and the two stories each inch closer to the moment. McGregor creates characters that brim with life and substance through exquisitely detailed descriptions of their lives and memories. But remarkably, almost no one has a name. Instead, the characters are known by their traits ("the man with the burnt hands," "the boy with the yellow sunglasses"), exposing both the disconnection and the unspoken intimacy between neighbors. A wonderful evocation of the beauty and horror of the literally everyday. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 275 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (November 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618344586
• ISBN-13: 978-0618344581
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #664,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Master of Observation, A Gem Of A Book, December 29, 2003

By 

Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Paperback)

What a simple, beautiful book. The most unique aspect of this story is the split narrative the author uses. The bulk of the book is spent in various flats on a suburban street in London. Over the course of one day we're let into the minds of the various tenents, their hopes, their fears, and their desires, as the narrative steams like a freight train to a tragedy that we know has happened at the start of the book, but don't know what it is until the end. The other narrative is told first person by a girl who was living there when the tragic event occurs, and the action shifts focus between past and present.
It's interesting to read that some of the other reviewers read the book in one sitting or close to it, because that's essentially what I did as well. The book demands a certain amount of attention from the reader because the author has dispensed with names and obvious physical discriptions for characters unless it holds relevence to what's going on with them emotionally.Consequently characters are referred to as: 'The young man in room 18'. or. 'the boy in room 17', but surprisingly this device only adds to the potency of the writing and made for me a more moving reading experience.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable, March 17, 2006

By 

Book woman (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Paperback)

When I, a nonwriter, read a book, one of the mental games I play is to ask myself if I would be proud to have written it. The answer with this book is that no one but Jon McGregor could have written this spectacular work. It feels more like poetry than prose, more like dream than reality.
McGregor's characters have no names. They are like neighbors that you see in passing and may remember something about, some more than others, but never really know. While the Remarkable Thing referred to in the title at first appears to be an accident witnessed by these characters, it soon becomes apparent that there are many things of which nobody speaks--love, death, fear, grief. This failure to tell the things that matter to the people that matter leaves everyone bereft. Only at the end does the protagonist start to speak and to listen, and the book ends on a note of hope.
McGregor uses repetitive thems in his imagery, including fire and water, birds, mirrors, and the mirror images that are twins. In particular, he focuses on the twins to represent continuity and hope.
There are scenes that have the surreal feeling of dreamscapes--flowers growing in a burned-out townhouse, people racing down the street in office chairs.
This is a book to read for the sheer joy of the language, the structure, and the poetry. It is truly a remarkable thing.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful work, July 13, 2006

By 

Reader and Writer "Chris" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Paperback)

The book is less a novel, (not that it matters, but don't expect one if looking for that sort of read.) It's more a lengthy poem or a novella -- I see it more as a musical tone poem. Declarative sentences of beautiful, sensitive construction build and awaken our eyes to an awakening day in London. The first few pages are stunningly strong and while all the book doesn't maintain this pitch, indeed no living person could, we don't particularily worry because at ever turn of a page is a new discovery.

Reading it in one shot is to be overwhelmed in the way watching the entire ring cycle or mahabarrata (sp?) would overwhelm. I enjoyed it over a series of nights, taking my time, and the language seeped into my dreams. It's a dreamlike work, and one any contemporary writer should check out both for it's strength and structure.