Hey, guys. Remember when I used to always be the first to post on the blog and everyone would make fun of me? Back in the day? I remember that.
I'll post something more worthwhile later, but for now, I just want to say Hot DAMN, I really loved Nowhere Man. How the narrator is somehow both omniscient and an actual person? Like suddenly IN THE ROOM with them? WTF? Crazy.
And as for Woody Allen, I mean . . . I got the same feeling from reading this lobster story as I did while suffering through the outrageously schlocky schlockfest called "Whatever Works." Like Really, Woody Allen? Really? You think you can write short stories and publish them in The New Yorker just because you're Woody Allen? You think you can make terrible, awful movies like "Whatever Works" because you're Woody Allen? Well, I guess you can. I really guess you can. Sigh. It takes a courageous man to sling mud at someone on an internet forum, I know.
I was intrigued by some of the formal (formatting?) elements of Nowhere Man—particularly the use of justified text-blocks, rather than traditional paragraphs with indented first lines, especially in the beginning. These seem to be acting as mini-section breaks, always appearing after a double space, and I was wondering if people thought this choice might have something to do with the fragmentation of the narrators and characters and so forth beyond the simple sub-division of the various chapters and parts of the book. Similarly, is the formatting of a piece of prose something that people are conscious of in their own work, and, if so, do you experiment with changing or subverting the sort of “standard” format?
I was also struck by the formatting choices of this novel, and agree with Joseph that perhaps it contributes to the fragmented nature of the novel's format as a whole. Another choice that seemed strange was in part 6, where there were headings (almost like chapter titles--The Dolphins, etc.), although it seemed like time moved linearly in this section...so were the headings necessary? This section almost felt like a small novella, which I really liked. The role of the narrator was great throughout this novel, too, and I love the last part where the author briefly becomes a character (Alex Hemmon). I am still trying to figure out how the narrator is working--is the narrator a character? A more ethereal presence that occasionally breaks into the action of the story? At times this novel feels like it's parodying biography as well, but a biography of a man that hardly exists, a man without an identity. I'm thinking the fractured nature of the narrative resembles Pronek's fractured identity...so the form is working with theme. So many layers. This was a great novel!
I just this instant finished /Nowhere Man/ so I am still trying to work out exactly what that last section is doing (aside from tying together many of the references and characters). For me the novel really took off in "Soldiers are Coming" (163-221). Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for a love story. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for chronology. I mean, my other favorite sections were "Fatherland" [love story! chronology!] and "Translated by Jozef Pronek" [chronology! Friendship [which is a kind of love story]! epistolary!]. Could that really be all I want in a story?
No. Maybe. I don't know. I'm reminded of how Smiley said in her essay on the novel that "the time sequence can be abused however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency, at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the reader will keep track of beginning, middle, and end on her own" (17). I'm not sure I can really do that with this novel... Parts of it, yes. Individual section, for sure. The whole thing? Not so much.
OK, so back to "The Soldiers are Coming." While I was initially confused by the first-person narration that opens the section ("So I kissed Pronek's forehead for good luck and sent him up") and then disappears into third person, I thought it worked so well when the first person came back (200, 221) and was revealed to be Pronek's double, the personification of Pronek's thought "that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons." It's beautiful how the whole section works to show the contrast between Pronek’s past and his present, between how Pronek speaks and what he thinks, what he wants and what he gets, how he perceives himself and how others perceive him.....
What I kept wondering about as I read this novel were the ideas that Bell discusses, that "all these shifts and rearrangements are held back from the brink of total anarchy by observing certain basic principles of order, symmetry, and balance" (214) and that modular design has "less to do with motion (the story as a process) and more to do with overall shapeliness (the story as a fixed geometric form)" (215). So what principles of order, symmetry, and balance are at work in /Nowhere Man/? Is it just that every section revolves around Pronek in some way? Is it the dates at the beginning of each section (which I really didn't find all that helpful)?
For Skye and all the non-fictioners in the class, how is modular design different from the disjunctive form? Or is it the same thing? Or is it the old, a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square thing?
And for once, Paul and I agree: Lobsters? Woody Allen? Blech. They're both icky. By icky I mean that I am horrified by lobsters in general and the logic of this story in particular. What Hemon does so well with POV in "The Soldiers are Coming", Allen completely botches. Why do we begin with an omniscient narrator who then becomes first person? Who is this narrator? What is Allen's point in having the omniscient narrator enter the story and become first person? (Personally I don't think he has one, other than thinking he's being funny or clever or cute somehow).
I am definitely conscious of formatting in my work and have only recently began experimenting with it. For instance, I've been doing away with traditional dialogue/quotation marks. To me, it makes my dialogue feel more narrative and more connected to the reader/narrators flow of thought.
Erin, I'm not sure that the modular design is any different than the disjunctive form. They feel the same to me and the Bell article seemed to explain the disjunctive form more thoroughly.
As promised, I gave the Wallen story another go. For the record, I like Woody Allen, just not during "Whatever Works," and not during this story. Anyway, I don't have a problem with the narrator in the story. I think the first person narr. coming into the story actually clarifies a lot of things for me. The whole time I'm thinking WTF? How does this lobster know he's in a tank on 3rd Ave? And how does this other lobster know about all these other people who've come back as hamsters and whatelse. AND HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT TWO LOBSTERS CAN ROCK A TANK ONTO THE GROUND? Answer, they can't! None of this is possible, even given a world where Jews come back as lobsters. Like I'll buy the setup, but I don't buy the particulars for a second. Is this a failing on my part? So but then when the narrator asserts himself as first person, the reader goes, Oh. Okay. This is a tail. A tale. I get it. It's like a little fable. Okay. That explains a lot. Does it excuse all the that-can't-possibly-be that exists in the first 97% of the story? I'd say No, no it doesn't. The drama of/in the story is not who the narrator is or whether it's supposed to be believable or just a tale/tail. So I still say Big Fail, Woody. My question, I guess, is What's Allen's point? Is he just trying to be funny? If so, how or where and why is he successful? I really wish he'd shed a little light on the whole, like some new light I mean, on the whole Madoff thing, because the portrait he paints here is the same one we've all heard a million times. Madoff the crook. Ponzi scheme. Rapatata. Shrugs. I just really didn't think this "story" was successful.
As for Nowhere Man, re my comment about the impossibility of the narrator, I feel like that's the kind of thing you can get away with if you're a good enough writer. The reader just goes, "Whatever. This guy knows what he's doing. I'll go with it." That's my reaction to it (and other novels I've liked), anyway. Was anyone put off by the fact that this narrator was like, so nebulous and often impossible? Is it just a matter of how good the writing is or isn't? Are there things even Nabakov can't pull off? Even Faulkner?
So, I'm finding myself 'narrating' myself as I'm going about my day - in third person - irreverently and bleakly - a sure sign Nowhere Man has gotten under my skin. Which is my question, how does Hemon do that? On the 'surface,' considering the fact that we don't even know who some of these narrators are (I'm not done yet, so maybe we find out?) and as in 'Yesterday' the narrator seems to only barely tolerate Pronek, AND considering the ironic and bleak tone, somehow I find myself totally drawn in. Maybe, it's because, as Erin points out, this novel, for all it's professed 'coolness' is actually about the passions of love. I, too, am a sucker for a good love story...At any rate, I agree with the review on the back that Hemon 'cannot write a boring sentence.' I applaud his fearlessness with his narrator-inventiveness: "someone else will have to talk about that part of his life," "allow me to introduce myself: I am Victor Plavchuk," as well as his piercingly beautiful descriptions of falling in love: "It was as he was fumbling for the word literature that I befriended him," "Then it was Lvov, and we disembarked from the train together, stepping into a nipping eager air. We inhaled deeply, simultaneously, as if holding hands. What country, friends, was this?" "Would I were a rock - I stood there trembling with throbs of want, watching Jozef, with the sun behind his back. I replay this scene like a tape...trying to pin down the moment when our comradeship sliped into desire - the transition is evanescent, like the moment when the sun's rays change their angle, the light becomes a hairbreadth softer..."
I thought the first person narrator in the Soldiers Coming was annoying. It only comes up twice and I wonder what Hermon is gaining from doing this, would it be better if the whole section was in that voice? Worse? Also I don't know what I'm supposed to get from the last section, Nowhere Man. Could it could have existed without the long parts about the Russian captain? I thought it really detracted from looking at the other pieces of the novel and my attempt to string them together.
I enjoyed Nowhere Man, despite it's shameless negligence of so much of what we studied in craft this semester. It boldly defies conventions of narration and voice, and seems a fitting conclusion to the class. I have to say, during the read I oscillating bipolarly between love and hate for the reading, and now, after reading the end, I'm nowhere closer to making up my mind. I'm extremely interested in the last chapter. It almost seems to suggest that Jozef Pronek's life is all a story, or a dream, as elements from Captain Pick's carousing reference characters and motifs from Jozef's life. Or is Captain Pick the fiction? It vaguely reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up, fingering the audience around her bed, "You were there, and you were there..." There is a line on Page 41 that caught my eye: "The hard part in writing a narrative of someone's life is choosing from he abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events...one denies the real substance of life..." I find it interesting that in the end, Joseph Pronek is a pseudonym Pick used to swindle "...a few seducible French mademoiselles and greedy English ladies," (231). A microevent in his life, rendered so utterly meaningless, along with all the other microevents we recognize from the rest of the novel. I have to believe these two concepts are related. Are we meant to believe that Jozef's life was constructed from element's in Pick's, and if so, what does this say about the narrator? Is this all a dream the narrator in the last section had while studying Pick? The last line, after all, is, "So I get up." Or did Jozef use his own life to fabricate the tale of Captain Pick? This might suggest that the narrator in the last chapter is Pronek himself. It seems like there's a puzzle in here, but I'm not sure that Hemon even has the answer, and I can't decide if I love that or despise it. Is the book just a metafictional trip? Is it a long-winded poem about the creation of life? Is Hemon comparing the writing process to Intelligent Design? Is he saying writers are like God? Is the narrator God, or Hemon, or a coalescence that is neither or both?
Oh man, I'm forty pages from finishing "Nowhere Man," so I don't want to read too much of your comments when I think it might be giving parts of the end away! But I'm trying to hit my blog deadline (especially since I've been absentmindedly neglecting it in past weeks; I recently discovered hot cocoa!--and have been going to town)!
I couldn't stand the opening section--the way everything seems to be indirectly told, all the white space keeping me oft-kilter; it was hard for me to sink in. I really dug the 2nd section about Pronek's childhood, felt grounded for once (begone white space, whack indirect storytelling, and questions like "Who the fuck is this first person narrator?"!) even though I didn't really know where the novel was going, other than hovering around Blind Josef Pronek (I still crack up, when I read in the book that he referred himself as that). Hemon's voice, his cleverness, the beautiful way he described some things, and "lonesome dwarves" is what propelled me through. With war and death as a background (which conjured life's inevitable end, the fleetingness of everything, including these characters), I guess that was enough to carry me. I understand what Pauly D. is sayin' when he talked about the narrator and said "that's the kind of thing you can get away with if you're a good enough writer."
I'm still not sure what to make of this book. I too wonder--like Erin--what holds this book together, besides stories that hover around Pronek and Hemon's bad-ass prose. I'm not sure how much I like this book and wonder if people are struggling with that question, too, especially with this strange novel.
Paul, you mentioned how as you were reading Woody Allen's piece, you felt that it was trying to pass off its ridiculousness by setting itself up as a fable, and you said that didn't excuse things. I'm inclined to agree with you; I think that if a story is going to purport itself as a fable and use that to justify the elements of the fantastic or the unbelievable within it, it has to be up front with the reader. You can't just say with 3% remaining, "Oh, by the way, it's all an allegory! Or a fairy tale! Or something! I don't know!" It's like telling a joke, forgetting that it was supposed to be funny, and thinking that throwing the punchline in at the last second will win you points for absurdity. Mice try, amirite?
As for Nowhere Man, I'm with Ian. I found myself bouncing back forth between being in awe of the book and grinding my teeth at some of its idiosyncrasies. The formatting threw me off at first, but I got used to it. I find that's often the case when I'm reading; departures from conventional formatting drive me nuts, but if the writing excels, I quickly forget all about them and just roll with it. I found myself doing that, so I guess that says pretty much everything about my final opinion on the book.
I am with you Juan, and Erin as well it seems. I am not sure I am in love with this book. In fact, I find myself just trying to get through it instead of actually sitting down and enjoying it, and to me that is not a good sign.
I wondered if this disconnect I was having had to do with character jumps, although I have read books before where the narration has jumped from character to character and I have been ok. The truth is, I am not sure what is bothering me so much about this book and keeping me from feeling truly connect to the voices in "Nowhere Man." The only thing I can guess is that the transitions in time are not working for me and I find myself consistently working to gain my bearings and figure who's head I am in now, and that mixed with jumping back and forth in time and place might just be a bit too much shifting for my taste. I am not saying that all these shifts doom a piece, but a writer better have their you-know-what together before attempting, and maybe in the hands of someone else I might be more captivated.
One thing I have to say about Hermon is that he does write beautiful prose, the way he twists the sentences into something that makes you say, "Holly crap that is some intense description!" and while I loved reading the sentences it does not lead me to being interested in the book as a whole. I just couldn't get into the story line, plain and simple. In my opinion, you may have won a few battles, Hermon, but not the war.
Below is a link to an interview Hemon did with The Guardian. I was a little comforted to read the excerpt below, but I think I've decided I don't like the book so much (I think it's key not to think of it as a novel):
"Nowhere Man, which narrates Pronek's history from several angles, "was something between a book of short stories and a novel". Hemon feels there is too much categorisation in talk about writing. "To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes," he said."
At Joseph's comment, I do find myself (trying to) placing my work in sections. However, not as successfully creative as Hemon does. He changes point of view within different sections but is still able to have it all flow. That is going to take some time on my part to perfect. I appreciated his style and enjoyed reading through the novel. It made it read faster as you have to piece everything together.
To Chris' comment, I appreciated Hemon's use of narrating the story as well! I love how at times, he didn't even use quotations to keep dialogue flowing. We were put in to the mindset of the narrator and really given the chance to view characters from different points of view. Loved that!
Apparently my previous post didn't post--sorry!--so I'm going to be quick about this one, and hope it goes through... from Bell's essay: "Modular design is an attractiive way to show relationships between events or people or motifs or themes which are not generated by sequences of cause and effect and so are somehow atemporal, perhaps even timeless." I want to know what people thought about the idea of/lack of "cause and effect" in NOWHERE MAN, and how these different sections resonated in the narrative, especially given the way time was managed. Also, how did its modular design impact your relationship to the narrator(s) and to Pronek himself? To me, the novel succeeds due in part to its nonlinearity, which helps me, as a reader, forego my need for cause and effect as a narrative strategy to understand Pronek. By the end of the novel, the story becomes less and less about Pronek as an individual, and more as Pronek as a metaphor/symbol for the pain of immigration and burden of memory. Of course, the novel is about writing itself, the possibility/impossibility of the semi-autobiographical fiction. Again, I can't help but feel that the modular design of the book gives substantial weight to these ideas. Curious to know what you all think.
As for "Salt Lake"-- creepy, disturbing, with occasional moments that felt like horror fiction (which I appreciated). But I do wonder about the writing-- effective at times but did I sense the writer at work too much? "...all those nail hung clothes." That was a moment when I felt the writer at work, so much that I was distracted by the image, which pulled me out of the narrative rather than integrating itself into the moment.
With the Allen story, I'm hoping we can discuss humor. I think once we see Allen's name attached to a Shouts & Murmers piece, we're expecting a humorous story, and in this way, there's a lot of pressure on the narrative from sentences one. Also, not sure why we get the "I" at the end--does Allen need to review his POV cheat sheet?
Ditto on the creep factor re "Salt Lake," and was it just me, but did anyone else find themselves going into hysterics at the word "nub" and her special "inside scent." Ick ick ickydoo.
That was part one of my brilliant commentary. Part two wants to know if what is being withheld from the reader is not just as, if not more important, than what we're actually being told in this story. That is to say, I found the dark, foreboding, psychologically complex vibe of the entire piece having more to do with what my imagination was supplying as opposed to, say, what was actually being told to us by the third person narration. I'm not sure I found the piece entirely gratifying, as the withholding on the author's part seems a bit too intentional, and at times, the set-up entirely too contrived. And while that might tension and mystery and surreality to this quixotic story, I'm not sure there are depths to be plumbed, or if I even fathom them completely.
As for the chapter breaks, what did they supply structurally? They seemed superfluous and didn't add anything extra in terms content, or action, in fact, they only added to diffuse the tension for me. I didn't quite understand their place in such a short chronological story.
Whoops -- I should have mentioned, the Weil story comes from an online journal called "Five Chapters," where each day of the week another part of the story is revealed. So a story per week, a day at a time. Kind of gimmicky, but whatever. Malena Watrous has a story on there.
All right, here's my take on modular design v. disjunctive (re: Erin's question above). The disjunctive writing style can take a bunch of random things, place them together, and they may or may not have a visible link. Maybe they just evoke a feeling, and evoke that feeling in a greater way with each part that is added. In modular design however, the link(s) are deliberate and probably more visible since they are intentional. That is, the author of a disjunctive piece may not have a set way of programming it, but the author of a modular design piece (for example, Nowhere Man) does. Also, according to Bell, modular design is typically seen only in longer works (again, Nowhere Man), however as we saw in our Nonfiction craft course last semester, disjunctive can really be any length.
As for "Salt Lake"......holy crap that story was disturbing. I found it very creepy. The meaning of the story felt too muddled, too buried, too orchestrated, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to draw from that story. However, I felt the breaks (Part One to Part Two, and so on) heightened the suspense/tension. But I still never want to read this story again.
Hey, guys. Remember when I used to always be the first to post on the blog and everyone would make fun of me? Back in the day? I remember that.
ReplyDeleteI'll post something more worthwhile later, but for now, I just want to say Hot DAMN, I really loved Nowhere Man. How the narrator is somehow both omniscient and an actual person? Like suddenly IN THE ROOM with them? WTF? Crazy.
And as for Woody Allen, I mean . . . I got the same feeling from reading this lobster story as I did while suffering through the outrageously schlocky schlockfest called "Whatever Works." Like Really, Woody Allen? Really? You think you can write short stories and publish them in The New Yorker just because you're Woody Allen? You think you can make terrible, awful movies like "Whatever Works" because you're Woody Allen? Well, I guess you can. I really guess you can. Sigh. It takes a courageous man to sling mud at someone on an internet forum, I know.
It. Is. Radiohead.
I was intrigued by some of the formal (formatting?) elements of Nowhere Man—particularly the use of justified text-blocks, rather than traditional paragraphs with indented first lines, especially in the beginning. These seem to be acting as mini-section breaks, always appearing after a double space, and I was wondering if people thought this choice might have something to do with the fragmentation of the narrators and characters and so forth beyond the simple sub-division of the various chapters and parts of the book. Similarly, is the formatting of a piece of prose something that people are conscious of in their own work, and, if so, do you experiment with changing or subverting the sort of “standard” format?
ReplyDeleteI was also struck by the formatting choices of this novel, and agree with Joseph that perhaps it contributes to the fragmented nature of the novel's format as a whole. Another choice that seemed strange was in part 6, where there were headings (almost like chapter titles--The Dolphins, etc.), although it seemed like time moved linearly in this section...so were the headings necessary? This section almost felt like a small novella, which I really liked. The role of the narrator was great throughout this novel, too, and I love the last part where the author briefly becomes a character (Alex Hemmon). I am still trying to figure out how the narrator is working--is the narrator a character? A more ethereal presence that occasionally breaks into the action of the story? At times this novel feels like it's parodying biography as well, but a biography of a man that hardly exists, a man without an identity. I'm thinking the fractured nature of the narrative resembles Pronek's fractured identity...so the form is working with theme. So many layers. This was a great novel!
ReplyDeleteI just this instant finished /Nowhere Man/ so I am still trying to work out exactly what that last section is doing (aside from tying together many of the references and characters). For me the novel really took off in "Soldiers are Coming" (163-221). Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for a love story. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for chronology. I mean, my other favorite sections were "Fatherland" [love story! chronology!] and "Translated by Jozef Pronek" [chronology! Friendship [which is a kind of love story]! epistolary!]. Could that really be all I want in a story?
ReplyDeleteNo. Maybe. I don't know. I'm reminded of how Smiley said in her essay on the novel that "the time sequence can be abused however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency, at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the reader will keep track of beginning, middle, and end on her own" (17). I'm not sure I can really do that with this novel... Parts of it, yes. Individual section, for sure. The whole thing? Not so much.
OK, so back to "The Soldiers are Coming." While I was initially confused by the first-person narration that opens the section ("So I kissed Pronek's forehead for good luck and sent him up") and then disappears into third person, I thought it worked so well when the first person came back (200, 221) and was revealed to be Pronek's double, the personification of Pronek's thought "that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons." It's beautiful how the whole section works to show the contrast between Pronek’s past and his present, between how Pronek speaks and what he thinks, what he wants and what he gets, how he perceives himself and how others perceive him.....
What I kept wondering about as I read this novel were the ideas that Bell discusses, that "all these shifts and rearrangements are held back from the brink of total anarchy by observing certain basic principles of order, symmetry, and balance" (214) and that modular design has "less to do with motion (the story as a process) and more to do with overall shapeliness (the story as a fixed geometric form)" (215). So what principles of order, symmetry, and balance are at work in /Nowhere Man/? Is it just that every section revolves around Pronek in some way? Is it the dates at the beginning of each section (which I really didn't find all that helpful)?
For Skye and all the non-fictioners in the class, how is modular design different from the disjunctive form? Or is it the same thing? Or is it the old, a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square thing?
And for once, Paul and I agree: Lobsters? Woody Allen? Blech. They're both icky. By icky I mean that I am horrified by lobsters in general and the logic of this story in particular. What Hemon does so well with POV in "The Soldiers are Coming", Allen completely botches. Why do we begin with an omniscient narrator who then becomes first person? Who is this narrator? What is Allen's point in having the omniscient narrator enter the story and become first person? (Personally I don't think he has one, other than thinking he's being funny or clever or cute somehow).
End rant.
I am definitely conscious of formatting in my work and have only recently began experimenting with it. For instance, I've been doing away with traditional dialogue/quotation marks. To me, it makes my dialogue feel more narrative and more connected to the reader/narrators flow of thought.
ReplyDeleteErin, I'm not sure that the modular design is any different than the disjunctive form. They feel the same to me and the Bell article seemed to explain the disjunctive form more thoroughly.
My two cents.
As promised, I gave the Wallen story another go. For the record, I like Woody Allen, just not during "Whatever Works," and not during this story. Anyway, I don't have a problem with the narrator in the story. I think the first person narr. coming into the story actually clarifies a lot of things for me. The whole time I'm thinking WTF? How does this lobster know he's in a tank on 3rd Ave? And how does this other lobster know about all these other people who've come back as hamsters and whatelse. AND HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT TWO LOBSTERS CAN ROCK A TANK ONTO THE GROUND? Answer, they can't! None of this is possible, even given a world where Jews come back as lobsters. Like I'll buy the setup, but I don't buy the particulars for a second. Is this a failing on my part? So but then when the narrator asserts himself as first person, the reader goes, Oh. Okay. This is a tail. A tale. I get it. It's like a little fable. Okay. That explains a lot. Does it excuse all the that-can't-possibly-be that exists in the first 97% of the story? I'd say No, no it doesn't. The drama of/in the story is not who the narrator is or whether it's supposed to be believable or just a tale/tail. So I still say Big Fail, Woody. My question, I guess, is What's Allen's point? Is he just trying to be funny? If so, how or where and why is he successful? I really wish he'd shed a little light on the whole, like some new light I mean, on the whole Madoff thing, because the portrait he paints here is the same one we've all heard a million times. Madoff the crook. Ponzi scheme. Rapatata. Shrugs. I just really didn't think this "story" was successful.
ReplyDeleteAs for Nowhere Man, re my comment about the impossibility of the narrator, I feel like that's the kind of thing you can get away with if you're a good enough writer. The reader just goes, "Whatever. This guy knows what he's doing. I'll go with it." That's my reaction to it (and other novels I've liked), anyway. Was anyone put off by the fact that this narrator was like, so nebulous and often impossible? Is it just a matter of how good the writing is or isn't? Are there things even Nabakov can't pull off? Even Faulkner?
So, I'm finding myself 'narrating' myself as I'm going about my day - in third person - irreverently and bleakly - a sure sign Nowhere Man has gotten under my skin. Which is my question, how does Hemon do that? On the 'surface,' considering the fact that we don't even know who some of these narrators are (I'm not done yet, so maybe we find out?) and as in 'Yesterday' the narrator seems to only barely tolerate Pronek, AND considering the ironic and bleak tone, somehow I find myself totally drawn in. Maybe, it's because, as Erin points out, this novel, for all it's professed 'coolness' is actually about the passions of love. I, too, am a sucker for a good love story...At any rate, I agree with the review on the back that Hemon 'cannot write a boring sentence.' I applaud his fearlessness with his narrator-inventiveness: "someone else will have to talk about that part of his life," "allow me to introduce myself: I am Victor Plavchuk," as well as his piercingly beautiful descriptions of falling in love: "It was as he was fumbling for the word literature that I befriended him," "Then it was Lvov, and we disembarked from the train together, stepping into a nipping eager air. We inhaled deeply, simultaneously, as if holding hands. What country, friends, was this?" "Would I were a rock - I stood there trembling with throbs of want, watching Jozef, with the sun behind his back. I replay this scene like a tape...trying to pin down the moment when our comradeship sliped into desire - the transition is evanescent, like the moment when the sun's rays change their angle, the light becomes a hairbreadth softer..."
ReplyDeleteI thought the first person narrator in the Soldiers Coming was annoying. It only comes up twice and I wonder what Hermon is gaining from doing this, would it be better if the whole section was in that voice? Worse? Also I don't know what I'm supposed to get from the last section, Nowhere Man. Could it could have existed without the long parts about the Russian captain? I thought it really detracted from looking at the other pieces of the novel and my attempt to string them together.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Nowhere Man, despite it's shameless negligence of so much of what we studied in craft this semester. It boldly defies conventions of narration and voice, and seems a fitting conclusion to the class. I have to say, during the read I oscillating bipolarly between love and hate for the reading, and now, after reading the end, I'm nowhere closer to making up my mind. I'm extremely interested in the last chapter. It almost seems to suggest that Jozef Pronek's life is all a story, or a dream, as elements from Captain Pick's carousing reference characters and motifs from Jozef's life. Or is Captain Pick the fiction? It vaguely reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up, fingering the audience around her bed, "You were there, and you were there..." There is a line on Page 41 that caught my eye: "The hard part in writing a narrative of someone's life is choosing from he abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events...one denies the real substance of life..." I find it interesting that in the end, Joseph Pronek is a pseudonym Pick used to swindle "...a few seducible French mademoiselles and greedy English ladies," (231). A microevent in his life, rendered so utterly meaningless, along with all the other microevents we recognize from the rest of the novel. I have to believe these two concepts are related. Are we meant to believe that Jozef's life was constructed from element's in Pick's, and if so, what does this say about the narrator? Is this all a dream the narrator in the last section had while studying Pick? The last line, after all, is, "So I get up." Or did Jozef use his own life to fabricate the tale of Captain Pick? This might suggest that the narrator in the last chapter is Pronek himself. It seems like there's a puzzle in here, but I'm not sure that Hemon even has the answer, and I can't decide if I love that or despise it. Is the book just a metafictional trip? Is it a long-winded poem about the creation of life? Is Hemon comparing the writing process to Intelligent Design? Is he saying writers are like God? Is the narrator God, or Hemon, or a coalescence that is neither or both?
ReplyDeleteOh man, I'm forty pages from finishing "Nowhere Man," so I don't want to read too much of your comments when I think it might be giving parts of the end away! But I'm trying to hit my blog deadline (especially since I've been absentmindedly neglecting it in past weeks; I recently discovered hot cocoa!--and have been going to town)!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't stand the opening section--the way everything seems to be indirectly told, all the white space keeping me oft-kilter; it was hard for me to sink in. I really dug the 2nd section about Pronek's childhood, felt grounded for once (begone white space, whack indirect storytelling, and questions like "Who the fuck is this first person narrator?"!) even though I didn't really know where the novel was going, other than hovering around Blind Josef Pronek (I still crack up, when I read in the book that he referred himself as that). Hemon's voice, his cleverness, the beautiful way he described some things, and "lonesome dwarves" is what propelled me through. With war and death as a background (which conjured life's inevitable end, the fleetingness of everything, including these characters), I guess that was enough to carry me. I understand what Pauly D. is sayin' when he talked about the narrator and said "that's the kind of thing you can get away with if you're a good enough writer."
I'm still not sure what to make of this book. I too wonder--like Erin--what holds this book together, besides stories that hover around Pronek and Hemon's bad-ass prose. I'm not sure how much I like this book and wonder if people are struggling with that question, too, especially with this strange novel.
Paul, you mentioned how as you were reading Woody Allen's piece, you felt that it was trying to pass off its ridiculousness by setting itself up as a fable, and you said that didn't excuse things. I'm inclined to agree with you; I think that if a story is going to purport itself as a fable and use that to justify the elements of the fantastic or the unbelievable within it, it has to be up front with the reader. You can't just say with 3% remaining, "Oh, by the way, it's all an allegory! Or a fairy tale! Or something! I don't know!" It's like telling a joke, forgetting that it was supposed to be funny, and thinking that throwing the punchline in at the last second will win you points for absurdity. Mice try, amirite?
ReplyDeleteAs for Nowhere Man, I'm with Ian. I found myself bouncing back forth between being in awe of the book and grinding my teeth at some of its idiosyncrasies. The formatting threw me off at first, but I got used to it. I find that's often the case when I'm reading; departures from conventional formatting drive me nuts, but if the writing excels, I quickly forget all about them and just roll with it. I found myself doing that, so I guess that says pretty much everything about my final opinion on the book.
I am with you Juan, and Erin as well it seems. I am not sure I am in love with this book. In fact, I find myself just trying to get through it instead of actually sitting down and enjoying it, and to me that is not a good sign.
ReplyDeleteI wondered if this disconnect I was having had to do with character jumps, although I have read books before where the narration has jumped from character to character and I have been ok. The truth is, I am not sure what is bothering me so much about this book and keeping me from feeling truly connect to the voices in "Nowhere Man." The only thing I can guess is that the transitions in time are not working for me and I find myself consistently working to gain my bearings and figure who's head I am in now, and that mixed with jumping back and forth in time and place might just be a bit too much shifting for my taste. I am not saying that all these shifts doom a piece, but a writer better have their you-know-what together before attempting, and maybe in the hands of someone else I might be more captivated.
One thing I have to say about Hermon is that he does write beautiful prose, the way he twists the sentences into something that makes you say, "Holly crap that is some intense description!" and while I loved reading the sentences it does not lead me to being interested in the book as a whole. I just couldn't get into the story line, plain and simple. In my opinion, you may have won a few battles, Hermon, but not the war.
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ReplyDeleteBelow is a link to an interview Hemon did with The Guardian. I was a little comforted to read the excerpt below, but I think I've decided I don't like the book so much (I think it's key not to think of it as a novel):
ReplyDelete"Nowhere Man, which narrates Pronek's history from several angles, "was something between a book of short stories and a novel". Hemon feels there is too much categorisation in talk about writing. "To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes," he said."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/30/fiction4
At Joseph's comment, I do find myself (trying to) placing my work in sections. However, not as successfully creative as Hemon does. He changes point of view within different sections but is still able to have it all flow. That is going to take some time on my part to perfect. I appreciated his style and enjoyed reading through the novel. It made it read faster as you have to piece everything together.
ReplyDeleteTo Chris' comment, I appreciated Hemon's use of narrating the story as well! I love how at times, he didn't even use quotations to keep dialogue flowing. We were put in to the mindset of the narrator and really given the chance to view characters from different points of view. Loved that!
Apparently my previous post didn't post--sorry!--so I'm going to be quick about this one, and hope it goes through... from Bell's essay: "Modular design is an attractiive way to show relationships between events or people or motifs or themes which are not generated by sequences of cause and effect and so are somehow atemporal, perhaps even timeless." I want to know what people thought about the idea of/lack of "cause and effect" in NOWHERE MAN, and how these different sections resonated in the narrative, especially given the way time was managed. Also, how did its modular design impact your relationship to the narrator(s) and to Pronek himself? To me, the novel succeeds due in part to its nonlinearity, which helps me, as a reader, forego my need for cause and effect as a narrative strategy to understand Pronek. By the end of the novel, the story becomes less and less about Pronek as an individual, and more as Pronek as a metaphor/symbol for the pain of immigration and burden of memory. Of course, the novel is about writing itself, the possibility/impossibility of the semi-autobiographical fiction. Again, I can't help but feel that the modular design of the book gives substantial weight to these ideas. Curious to know what you all think.
ReplyDeleteAs for "Salt Lake"-- creepy, disturbing, with occasional moments that felt like horror fiction (which I appreciated). But I do wonder about the writing-- effective at times but did I sense the writer at work too much? "...all those nail hung clothes." That was a moment when I felt the writer at work, so much that I was distracted by the image, which pulled me out of the narrative rather than integrating itself into the moment.
With the Allen story, I'm hoping we can discuss humor. I think once we see Allen's name attached to a Shouts & Murmers piece, we're expecting a humorous story, and in this way, there's a lot of pressure on the narrative from sentences one. Also, not sure why we get the "I" at the end--does Allen need to review his POV cheat sheet?
Ditto on the creep factor re "Salt Lake," and was it just me, but did anyone else find themselves going into hysterics at the word "nub" and her special "inside scent." Ick ick ickydoo.
ReplyDeleteThat was part one of my brilliant commentary. Part two wants to know if what is being withheld from the reader is not just as, if not more important, than what we're actually being told in this story. That is to say, I found the dark, foreboding, psychologically complex vibe of the entire piece having more to do with what my imagination was supplying as opposed to, say, what was actually being told to us by the third person narration. I'm not sure I found the piece entirely gratifying, as the withholding on the author's part seems a bit too intentional, and at times, the set-up entirely too contrived. And while that might tension and mystery and surreality to this quixotic story, I'm not sure there are depths to be plumbed, or if I even fathom them completely.
As for the chapter breaks, what did they supply structurally? They seemed superfluous and didn't add anything extra in terms content, or action, in fact, they only added to diffuse the tension for me. I didn't quite understand their place in such a short chronological story.
Whoops -- I should have mentioned, the Weil story comes from an online journal called "Five Chapters," where each day of the week another part of the story is revealed. So a story per week, a day at a time. Kind of gimmicky, but whatever. Malena Watrous has a story on there.
ReplyDeleteAll right, here's my take on modular design v. disjunctive (re: Erin's question above). The disjunctive writing style can take a bunch of random things, place them together, and they may or may not have a visible link. Maybe they just evoke a feeling, and evoke that feeling in a greater way with each part that is added. In modular design however, the link(s) are deliberate and probably more visible since they are intentional. That is, the author of a disjunctive piece may not have a set way of programming it, but the author of a modular design piece (for example, Nowhere Man) does. Also, according to Bell, modular design is typically seen only in longer works (again, Nowhere Man), however as we saw in our Nonfiction craft course last semester, disjunctive can really be any length.
ReplyDeleteAs for "Salt Lake"......holy crap that story was disturbing. I found it very creepy. The meaning of the story felt too muddled, too buried, too orchestrated, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to draw from that story. However, I felt the breaks (Part One to Part Two, and so on) heightened the suspense/tension. But I still never want to read this story again.