If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

I had to read this book in incredibly small doses because every time I picked it up my heart would start clenching and clenching and it would feel too big for my chest. There are small truths that McGregor feeds me that makes me see and panic and want to throw the knowledge that I know out back into the unknown and to gather it up greedily and store it in me.

I've read reviews where people don't like the scatteredness of the book, where they don't like the fact that there are too many people, too many stories, too many things to read about. But this is what it is: a fact. There are so many people, stories, things around us and we don't notice. Here, McGregor is laying them in front of us saying look and take notice and we can't not take show more notice anymore and it makes us uncomfortable and maybe, it is from this discomfort that spawns dislike. It is true that these people - nameless, most of them - is less memorable than, say, the protagonist, and their presence is ephemeral, and I don't know them as much as I'd like to. But, I recognize them, I recognize what they are going through, and somehow, I think it's enough. show less

I found this book on the "staff picks" shelf at the library; I was intrigued by the title, and it looked well-read, so I snagged it. I loved it, found it poignant and lyrical and astonishingly beautiful. It has virtually no plot, lots of nameless characters, almost no punctuation, a bit of poetic formatting and a few other "literary" quirks that would often put me right off. (In fact a fair number of reviewers here have said, in effect, "Oh, please. A little less cleverness, mate.") For some reason in this case, I fell right into the seeming hodgepodge of character vignettes and back-and-forth action without minding the overtly prize-worthy style at all. The action all takes place on one day in one urban neighborhood in a city that has show more no name either, but there are references to the back-stories of many of the characters. Eventually we see the remarkable bits peeking out of the ordinary and oft-repeated events of their lives.
Review written in June 2012 show less

Two story lines: the doings of residents of a street over the course of one day, with hints that something is going happen that will affect all of them; and a young woman, three years later, a looming crisis, a new person in her life, and her problems with her dysfunctional parents. We gradually learn about the avenue denizens, all of whose stories could be their own novel. Maybe that's part of the point. One of the characters I found most poignant says “…if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?”

It's an interesting structure that created great tension, both what's going to happen to this girl and what happened that day? We know it isn't something good. I don't usually care about language and rarely show more am touched by poetic descriptions, but I liked the way he talked about the city and its sounds.

I liked it a lot although I really disliked the girl at the center of the story. The twist I thought was coming... well, I was wrong about that, and I was kind of disappointed with the ending only because it seemed pretty unlikely. But there was an inevitability about it that I respect. show less

"Chi l'ascolta lo sa.
La città canta.
Se stai in silenzio ai piedi d'un giardino, in mezzo alla strada, sul tetto d'una casa.
Di notte la sua voce si fa più nitida e giunge fino in fondo al cuore attraversando la superficie delle cose.
È un canto quasi sempre senza parole, ma un canto nondimeno, e chi lo ascolta sa bene di cosa parli.
Prova a distinguere ciascuna nota e lo sentirai risuonare ancor di più."

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una città si risveglia… è l’ultimo giorno d’agosto.
in una strada, ogni persona è un numero - il civico in cui vive.
è così che li conosciamo… dietro ogni numero un universo, una storia a sé.
è così che li seguiamo in questa tiepida e pigra giornata di fine estate.
e tra piccole faccende e momenti show more banali, eccoli... quei fuggevoli attimi in cui si rivela la bellezza lieve della vita, che riescono ad emergere a volte - basta saper guardare – e che, come istantanee, si imprimeranno nella memoria… anche nei drammatici istanti che precedono l’ineluttabile tragedia.
e tutto diventa silenzio.

poi…
la vita continua.

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"Figlia mia, dice l'uomo con un tono di voce in cui è racchiuso tutto l'amore di cui è capace, figlia mia, cerca sempre di guardare con tutti e due gli occhi, ascolta sempre con tutte e due le orecchie. Questo è un grande mondo e ci sono molte, molte cose che potrebbero sfuggirti se non vi presti attenzione. In ogni momento succedono cose meravigliose proprio davanti a noi, ma i nostri occhi assomigliano al sole quando è velato dalle nuvole, e allora le nostre vite diventano scialbe e desolate, perché non riusciamo a vedere la realtà per quello che è davvero.
Se nessuno parla mai di cose meravigliose, come possono avvenire cose meravigliose?" show less

One of my reading resolutions this year was to review every book that I read… this has been fun, rewarding, made me think about and find merit in each book I disliked, fully explore the reasons for loving the ones that astonished me. Once in a while, I’ve found that I’ve closed a book thinking ‘no review I can write can possibly explain what is so wonderful about this book’, and truly struggled to articulate the things that made it sing to me, as one of the children in this book fails to tell his mother about the moment of a skateboard turning in an arc under an older boy’s feet, flashing it’s illustrated under-side, before landing neatly and rolling on.

But the character with the scarred hands, who says to his daughter if show more nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable? has the perfect argument for attempting to do this book some sort of justice. The author has provoked the reader with detailed observation of an unwinding morning, by shining light on the ordinary until it glows, building suspense out of un-punctuated conversation, character out of straying cricket-balls and sketch pads, and sadness out of absent characters. I might not have his writing chops, but I can try and say that this book is special, that the writing is beautiful, even poetic but also hard-working, that nothing is wasted and everything is, indeed, remarkable.

A street, in summer, slowly awakens and unfolds. A catastrophe awaits the residents, as they go about their day, the details and moments of their lives are examined as they move towards it, as the author tempts the reader with shadowy possibilities, and distracts us with the perfectly ordinary, by turns. The present-day narrator, caught up in the stir of her newly discovered pregnancy, remembers back to it, to the boy from number eighteen, to whom she is now connected through his brother, who took off, running, as though he knew exactly what to do.

McGregor tackles this story more like an artist creating an image by filling in the negative space, than a conventional novelist. He tells us everything we do not need to know, revisiting groups and houses, over and over, until we realise that these people, these moments, are the story, no more or less than the moment that the book is building towards. There’s a hint of Something Happened by Joseph Heller in the structure, except that I don’t remember that book making me hold my breath over a telephone conversation, or a clay figure, or a couple stealing a moment to have sex as the house empties of its extended family.

I had the suspicion from time to time that we wouldn’t be let in on the lynch-pin event, but McGregor is not cheap, and, anyway, one important message here is pay attention to everything that happens. He doesn't stop, and the implacable beauty with which he continues to describe the day is both jarring and appropriate at the same time. He is, however, clever enough to leave one vital question unanswered, that ‘what happens next?’ that every good book leaves instils in every invested reader. show less

McGregor's prose is elegant and lyrical. I would award If Nobody Speaks . . . 5 stars except that I am a bit suspicious of the ending. This is a novel of mirror images and parallels: There are three sets of male twins as well as two pairs of damaged hands. The novel tracks back and forth among “snapshots” of the comings and goings, both external and internal, of various residents on one street of a neighborhood in an unnamed English city and a first person account three years later by one of the young women who was a resident on that same street on what turns out to have been a fateful day. Although the jump cuts back and forth are at first confusing (characters are identified by street addresses and by idiosyncrasies of dress, show more physique and behavior), they are rich with closely observed physical and emotional detail. Indeed, the act of observation is itself a character in the novel: residents look or lean out of their windows to observe the goings on of their neighbors; and finally, it is an act of observation that precipitates the "remarkable event" alluded to throughout the novel. As readers, we also become observers, examining these characters as if viewing them under a microscope or through a telescope, and yet, we either don’t or can’t see everything about them; mysteries persist, even after all has supposedly been revealed. Our vision, although more comprehensive than that of any of the characters, remains imperfect. Perhaps even the author doesn’t or can’t know the whole story. What we get are glimpses, snapshots as it were, that, like the boy in #18, we collect in a jumble, a kind of anthropological and/or archaeological trove of miscellany that seems to point to something significant, but the importance of which may depend solely on our having looked in a certain direction at a particular moment, on having paid attention. All of which is beautifully written by McGregor. My only quibble has to do with the inclusion of what could be interpreted as a supernatural event at the end of the novel. On the other hand, one could (as I am wont to do) read the ending as not a supernatural mystery, but rather a mystery of coincidence, of accident, one allowed for by probability. "And there is an interruption in the way of things, a pause, something faint like the quivering flutter of a moth’s rain-sodden wings, something unexpected. Something remarkable . . . . And as these streets are traveled, in the time it takes for a hand to be clasped and unclasped, Shahid Mohammad Nawaz wakes gently, lifted through a gap in the way of things." (272,274)Hmmm. show less

I feel like I've been aware of this book for years but never bothered enough to read the thing, until I learned that the street in the book is based in Bradford where the author used to live. I could definitely imagine the houses, which sound like Manningham.

The repetitive narrative, where none of the main characters are named but referred to by house numbers and identifying traits ('the girl with the short hair and square glasses'), gets annoying fast, but I did get to know the characters, whether I wanted to or not! The 'present day' story belongs to a young woman who has just discovered she is pregnant, and is thinking back to 1997, when she was a student living on a street where a terrible accident occurred. And the 'past' chapters show more certainly reek of the 90s!

The pacing is very slow, after the opening chapters hinting at the accident, but that's the whole point of the book, I suppose. The ending is shocking, although I was glad that past events cleared up my suspicions about one of the peripheral characters!

Slow but evocative, worth a read. show less