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If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

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Jon McGregor. Αισθάνεσαι ότι παρακολουθείς ταινία ή ένα slideshow φωτογραφιών που, όμως, μόνο το κείμενο και το ύφος του συγγραφέα μπορεί να μεταδώσει τόσα συναισθήματα. And every minutiae shines under Mcgregor’s omniscient magic wand instrumenting a succession of recurrent themes, pattern of symbols and repeated sentences that evoke a mollifying chant and bemuse in almost supernatural revelation. I don’t know how many characters there are in this (I didn’t count), but they are all neighbours on a street in England. They are going about their business, looking out of doors and windows and occasionally into each other’s. Nobody is actually spying, well, with a few exceptions. In delicate, intricately observed close-up, this novel makes us privy to the private lives of residents of a quiet street over the course of a single day. McGregor’s writing style is poetic; beautifully and meticulously structured. The story of a single day slowly unfolds through a series of little vignettes that slowly connect together, like projections on gauze. The narrative develops like a series of Polaroid snapshots, each slowly becoming clear to the reader, as you piece together the events of a seemingly unremarkable day. The multiple narration where the same event is seen through the filter of different eyes creates a series of repeating echoes with a cinematic sweep of motifs and images.

McGregor has said that this novel began partly as a book about the reaction to the death of Diana. In some ways, it is similar to his Booker 2017 listed novel Reservoir 13 in that it shows life going on despite the "remarkable things" happening around the people. To be clear, the book does not talk about the death of Diana - that is not one of the "remarkable things". We watch and observe the people living their separate lives. Ordinary neighbors on a street. Then something happens. Look at the title. One may ask what is so remarkable about these people and their lives. My response would be that it is in the ordinary that the remarkable is to be found. I like this message. This is a poetic novel about a typical summer day with a decidedly atypical climax in the life of a dense urban street in an unnamed English city. As the scene switches, or rather twitches, from an elderly couple - a long shared history at variance with the old man's new secret - to a woman hanging out her washing or the young man in number 12 "leaning out of the window, stripped to the waist. He is smoking a cigarette, holding it away to one side and making sure he blows all the smoke out into the air", the narrative never amounts to more than a series of not very interesting images, a voyeur's survey of people at rest, in strife, in thought and at play. Without realizing I mouth the words as I read, chanting a somnambulistic prayer, a murmured choir, a pulse on its tremble of its next beat. Consciousness spreading, sharpening, honed to a cabalistic point. Is it possible for one to continue living the life one knew. The sealed casing of Kafka”s axe broken open wide.I thought I would re-read “if nobody speaks of remarkable things” as it had been a few years since I last read it. I remember being very impressed by Jon McGregor when I initially read the book (I was going through a phase of reading debut novels at the time). In this non-conventional book the author talks about the everyday lives of the citizens of a certain neighborhood in the UK. He writes the phrases in such a way that everything these un-named characters do seems remarkable. Every single trivial action they do is written in such a poetic way as to seem remarkable. They don't have names (they are only identified by the number of the apartment they stay in or by certain features) and this anonymity seems to indicate that this story could apply to any neighborhood, to any side of our very busy cities. I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what's wrong.

A first-person narrative, that of a young woman, recalls a late-summer day in 1997, a day on which a tragedy shook her sleepy street in that northern city. Alternating with these chapters is the slow accumulation of that day in each of the houses in that street, leading to the event that is revealed only in the final chapter. He left Bradford for Sheffield, then Nottingham, taking a series of shift-jobs to support his writing, and wrote his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), in Nottingham, while living on a narrowboat. His novel has received much press attention, as he was the youngest contender and only first novelist on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. The novel is set on an unnamed inner-city street on 'the last day of summer', and tells two parallel stories: one of the residents on the street on that day, ending in tragedy; one set a year later, telling of a former resident's attempts to unravel the facts of the tragedy. The Sunday Times named it a ' … triumphant prose-poem of ordinariness …', celebrating ' … the miraculousness of the everyday.' It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and to be shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best First Book) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Jon McGregor has garnered a reputation for a quiet but lyrical narrative style, and for seeking out the surprises, the delights, and the beauty and sometimes the less pleasant in the heart of the everyday world that surrounds us. Just as McGregor demands some effort on the reader’s part to grapple with this nameless cast and fragmented narrative, so he plays with the expectations he himself has created. Even as the novel approaches its promised conclusion, the revelation of the book’s defining event appears to be no longer on steady ground. In a subtle shift of focus, the reader is left questioning whether the event which takes place in full view of the street, which we already know has an impact on the people who witnessed it, is more significant than something which happens afterwards, quietly and unobserved, but as a direct result. In keeping with the novel’s claim that ‘if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?’, the reader is left to conclude that what happens behind closed doors can be just as momentous and life-changing as what takes place in the public domain. 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.There is the story of an unnamed women in her early 20s and her mother and father, and the young man who dwelt in flat number 18, Michael, and his brother. That is probably the main part of the novel. I was bored at times. For example, there is that guy cleaning a shoe, and we return to him again and again and he is still cleaning that shoe. I was annoyed at how information is teasingly revealed. I felt I was part of a game I didn’t want to play. I want to get close to characters. That does not happen here; we observe, we watch, we are on the outside. There is little dialog. That the woman speaking three years later is pregnant with twins is simply dropped in thin air, but what lies ahead for her is indeed dependent on what happened that day. A group of people in an apartment complex are supposed to witness an event which will be seared into their memories. It may not have altered the psyche of the UK or the city in which this novel takes place, but it is momentous. After all, as one of the apartment dwellers, a man with horribly burned hands, tells his daughter, “…if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”

pause ή rewind, χωρίς πάγωμα οθόνης ή ζουμάρισμα, που τις καταχωνιάζουμε μέσα μας τόσο απλά όσο κρύβουμε με κουρτίνες το καθιστικό από τους περαστικούς, σπουδαίες στιγμές που συμβαίνουν μπροστά στα μάτια μας, αλλά τα μάτια μας καμιά φορά έχουν σύννεφα και η ζωή γίνεται άχρωμη γιατί δεν τις βλέπουμε όπως είναι. Κι αν δεν μιλάμε για αυτές τις σπουδαίες στιγμές, αυτά τα σπουδαία πράγματα, τότε τι τα λέμε σπουδαία; I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what McGregor is aiming for - how he wants to create 360 o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone. I enjoyed a lot of the language, even the funny speech with no quotation marks and a lot of incomplete sentences (trying to mirror the way we do actually talk a lot of the time: we don’t always finish sentences, we change our minds halfway through, we say things like i just and then stop because we aren’t sure how to say the next bit). But it did feel a bit over-the-top at times, like everything was turned up to 11 all the way through. The sparking point was the whole Diana thing," he says. "It was thinking about the contrast between the reaction to her death and the reaction to everyone else's deaths. I knew a woman whose granddad had died on the same day as Diana did, and she was very upset about how everyone was talking about Diana but nobody wanted to hear about her granddad."He gave us a picture of his approach: “The starting point for the book was a community who don’t see themselves as a community, living in the same street, living interwoven lives - and yet they don’t know each other, or each other’s names. They simply refer to themselves as ‘the boy at no18’, or ‘the man with burned hands’. And we do that in our lives, on our commute: ‘the man in blue suit’, ‘the woman wearing the red hat’, and that’s the extent of our knowledge and yet these people are part of our lives. We see them every day and I wanted to reflect that, and I didn’t want to privilege the reader over the characters and give the reader any more information than the character had.” 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.” He was born in Bermuda in 1976, where his father, a vicar, had a posting as a curate. The third of four siblings, most of McGregor's childhood was spent in Norwich (he is still a keen Norwich City supporter and can now afford to go and see the games). 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". This is a mystery. Something terrible has happened. We know this at the start. We watch as the day progresses and the event finally occurs. That day is August 31, 1997. We watch what happens on that day, watch what the residents of numbers 18 and 20 and 11 and 17 and 19 and 22 and 21 and 13 and 20 do. We spend five minutes here, a glance there, flitting from one person to another. This is a puzzle. There is suspense and the reader works to sort out who is who. And of course, we are guessing from the start what we think has happened. This thread is told by an omniscient narrator.

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