A collection of pamplets that may be read in any order. A very creative and stimulating structure. Well worth reading. ( )

B. S. Johnson's famous (or almost famous) book in a box. However one wants to look at that it's an unique idea and also at least IMHO attractive--but what's it all mean? --because in the end it all comes down to what can be made of the contents--his written words.

Johnson's idea was to give his reader as much freedom in which to read this work as possible. It's 27 loose leaf chapters with the exception of the marked first and last chapters to be read in whatever order the reader sees fit. All the separate parts forming part of the whole can be inserted anywhere--all form fitting parts of the puzzle of the story.

So what's it all about? Set in England in the late 50's--early 60's--an aspiring young novelist sometime journalist makes a trip by train from his home in London to a Midlands city to cover a football (soccer) match for a London paper. The city was the home of a former friend who had died of cancer at a relatively young age. Arriving in the city everything reminds him of the past, not only the friendship that ended too soon, but despite his being 'happily' married his own failed love affair which continues to haunt him many years later. He wanders around the city revisiting old haunts, where he and his friend and their respective girlfriends used to go, brooding on the nature of life and death, stopping in here and there--just walking and looking around--all while waiting for the football game to begin.

It is a very somber work, depending almost totally on the journalist/novelist's internal monologue for its direction. There are some very understated touches on the periphery of his self-centeredness as the city (in some way a character in its own right) intrudes itself momentarily here and there back into his awareness. The writer coping with a somewhat familiar/somewhat alien urban enviroment--at the same time trying to sort out his past into some kind of coherence. In some respects it reminds me of Joyce's Ulysses only blacker and without the humor--it's bleakness of tone and urban landscape and main character portrayal also reminded me very much of Camus' Stranger.

Anyway I liked it a lot--but it's not something that's a lot of laughs. So this is a cautionary review. If you're looking for something happy and uplifting you'd best look somewhere else. As for the novelist determined to claim new territory for the novel--who sees creation and/or the creative spark of pushing himself beyond what has already been done and what is already known you have to give Johnson props. He was not stale or stagnant. He was determined to be different and unique and at least for me that is good enough reason to continue to read his work when the opportunity arises. ( )

I was excited when I saw that this book, something of a "lost work" from the '60s, was going to be re-published. This experimental novel has an open form--the 27 different sections are printed in the form of little pamphlets, with the first and last being marked as such. The other 25 may be shuffled and read in any order. The plot: The protagonist (essentially B.S. Johnson), a sports writer, visits a town where his late friend Tony used to live. He flashes back to many different memories of the times he spent with his friend.

The good: The structure and style work very well. The stream-of-consciousness prose captures the randomness of his wandering mind, as does the non-linear structure of the different sections. What's always most interesting to me about open form music is also interesting to me here: the way that one's mind struggles to put events in a linear order. I don't know about other folks, but my brain does not do non-linear; it must construct a linear narrative.

The bad: Unfortunately, style and structure are not the only elements of a book. There's also the material. You know, what makes a book a book. And this material wavers between uninteresting and unlikeable. The biggest problem is that B.S. Johnson is the type of guy who renders even his closest friends in 2-D, as shadows that fall behind the looming figure of himself. The type of guy who evidently still nurses the wounds from when a girlfriend cheated on him many years ago, never explicitly stating it as such, just calling it over and over "the betrayal." Good grief. Beyond this, I can't reconcile the extremely conventional, boring narrative with the structural conceits. I think I have to side with the folks who contend that his structural tinkering is just a gimmick to hide the fact that his material is weak.

The major failing of the novel, for me: it's not about Tony. It's about B.S. Johnson. And if I was going to spend a day in someone else's head, it sure as heck wouldn't be Johnson's.

(4 stars for style, 2 stars for material=3 stars) ( )

B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates is a remarkable book. The novel is broken into 27 pamphlet-sized sections contained within a box. Except for the first and last sections, the remaining 25 sections are intended to be read in random order.

The Unfortunates tells the story of a sportswriter who travels to a town to report on a soccer match only to discover he’s been to the town several times before to visit an old school friend who has since died of cancer. Some of the separate sections of the book are recollections of the dead friend and other poignant memories of the past. Other sections describe the day of the soccer match. The switching back and forth from the present to the past happens at random, depending on the order in which the reader reads the sections. This randomness creates a disjointed reading experience that almost perfectly mimics how memories intrude into present consciousness. I doubt I’ve ever encountered a book structure or organizational scheme that has conveyed so much meaning.

In addition to the structure, the prose is a commentary on the mysterious workings of memory: “”I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.” The overall mood is one of sadness, but Johnson inserts some levity by playing with language (“These men on their way to football, they are the same in any city, … on their way to any match, their raincoats, their favours, in some cases, the real fan does not need to show his favour by favours, but by his fervour, and so on.”). The mood is also lightened by the narrator’s obvious enjoyment of day to day pleasures (“The cheese [rolls] had raw onion in them, anyway, a new taste, I enjoyed it, the crispness and the soft dough and clinging cheese. Ah.”).

Without question, this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in many years. I highly recommend it.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License (short reviews, real opinions): litlicense.blogspot.com. ( )

This book is worth the effort to find and read. BS Johnson's tale and the unique way it is told (which means no two versions are the same) is wonderful. ( )