Johnson at some way below his best.
Despite its scanty page count it struggled to hold my attention.

After my first reading of this novella, I gave The Name of the World two stars, which seems absurd and ridiculous and self-condemning now that I've read it a third time and think it as good as Jesus' Son if not better. This is not a story of grief, as many reviewers suggest; but a story of how grief becomes grotesque when it starts to exist solely on the strength of its own momentum. This book is a gem, revelatory, offering the best of Johnson's transcendent prose.

Wanted to read Train Dreams but couldn't find it so I read this instead. Not sure I'll bother now - too bored by most of this to even pretend like I understood the point he was trying to make. Possibly that god is dead but that's fine but wait he isn't and maybe it's not but at least Greece is nice. Possibly I'd find more to like here if my wife and daughter were extant/ex-extant. But I did like the conversation with Flower Cannon that took place towards the end; if Train Dreams is more of that and less of the Sad Professor then I might yet give it a go.

wish I could sing like Otis Redding and write like Denis Johnson

The following has nothing to do with the content of the book.

Well, I was sorting my books today and found that I read this book back in 2001. And I could NOT remember ANY of the plot, and still I could NOT remember anything even after I googled the plot. That is weird enough, it is amazing that how can a story be so neglect-able? I feel sorry for this book and my time spent back in 2001 as it left nothing. However there are still many books to read and sorry that I will not give it another try.

El nombre del mundo del escritor estadounidense Denis Johnson, relata la experiencia íntima del narrador y protagonista Michael Reed, profesor universitario del Medio Oeste estadounidense, posterior al fallecimiento de su esposa e hija. Cuatro años después, la pérdida se vive en calidad de compromiso; la tragedia enquistada irremediablemente en una existencia que muestra casi una total indiferencia a la vida, sino fuera por el encuentro con una extraña estudiante que se cruza en su camino.

Johnson, mediante un extenso racconto sin capítulos de 143 páginas, con un ritmo pausado, introspectivo y meditativo, nos permite asomarnos a las páginas de Reed. Errante, indiferente y en búsqueda de sensaciones que le permitan sobrevivir al tedioso entorno universitario, el protagonista cuenta los insólitos encuentros que mantiene directa e indirectamente con Flower Cannon, estudiante y artista de performances eróticos, personaje que permite al protagonista acercarse, quizás, a la epifanía que busca en su vida, rodeada de fantasmas y cargas personales que lo mantienen suspendido en un presente sin futuro.

Un libro, que pese a la brevedad, se extiende largamente acerca de la experiencia vagabunda y rumiante del personaje en relación a los temas que tibiamente le interesan.

Personalmente no conecté con la historia. Salta entre tema y tema, con personajes que nada me evocan y nada me dejan. Una lectura de un intervalo de vida de un personaje olvidable, en términos particulares.

Dangit this is a tough one to review.

On the one hand, this is Denis Johnson at his best-- he's a Word Master and every word he uses in The Name of the World is exactly the right one. Beautiful and haunting and complicated in its simplicity. And because it's such a brief story, it doesn't suffer from some of the bogged-down-ness of his other novels. I'm very tempted to give it 4 stars. But...

On the other hand, I have no interest in reading this book again. It feels like a one-time experience. To do it again would be...unnecessary. And when we're talking about writing as sparse as Johnson's, "unnecessary" is not an option.

Also, I understand the complaints about the character Flower Cannon. I agree that she is presented as basically a caricature, but it bothered me less than it might have due to the POV in which the story was told. The narrator is a damaged person who, like all of us, sees (and, in this case, describes) only what he wants to see. I believe it would be a very different tale if told by Flower.

Still, if someone is new to Denis Johnson, they should start with Jesus' Son. Hands down, still the best.

I came to this book as part of my publication order (re-)read of all Johnson’s poetry and novels. This is novel number seven (yes, I am counting Jesus’ Son as a novel) and is one of the novels I am reading for the first time in this little project. It’s a strange beast, it has to be said.

Our narrator is Michael Reed, a college professor who hardly ever teaches and whose life has been on hold in the years since his wife and daughter were taken from him in a car crash. This is, at least in part, the story of Michael Reed’s search for meaning.

One of the things Reed does frequently is visit the art museum to look at one specific piece. It’s an artwork consisting of a series of concentric hand-drawn squares. Because they are hand-drawn, no square is perfectly aligned with the one inside it and…

“Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.”

This is, in fact, a good summary of what reading the book feels like because, by the time you get to the end, it feels like any semblance of order is rapidly disappearing, although it is hard to put your finger on exactly when it starts to be a bit weird.

And when the book does actually finish, it feels more like you are in the middle of something even if that “something” is not what most of the preceding pages have been about. For most of the book, Reed has episodic encounters with a variety of different people on or near his campus, most notably the amazingly named Flower Cannon. But in the last few pages we head away and, in fact, all over the place!

I’m really not quite sure what I made of the whole experience. The book is actually very short and it probably deserves a re-read at some point. It doesn’t have the same level of poetry as I tend to expect in Johnson’s writing, although there is a scattering of quite amazing sentences.

At one point, a character called Seth is criticising novels written by one of the other characters and we read:

”Or, okay, I’ll say the characters are morally uninstructive - “
“Hey, come on, Seth. They're fictional. Do you really hope to get your moral lessons from people who don't exist?”

I guess those of us who read a lot of fiction would answer yes to that question (and possibly argue that that’s the point of fiction). And we’d agree with the character who says My habit when I’ve been humiliated is to go out and buy a book.

A slightly confused 3-star rating for now, but one for which I will at some point set aside a day for a re-read.

I might be missing something, but the first 2/3 of the book was really scattered and boring. Every character we were introduced to didn't really end up adding to the story except one. The last third was better, but it wasn't anything special. It is basically a story about a man in his 50s who lived a normal life and now needs to find what to do next. He's trying to connect with people to find something that calls to him. Then he does.

No chapters. No pauses. 130 pages. Bigger than average print. Main character's stream of conscious of his life. I'm sorry though, but it is am uninteresting life. 2 out of 5.

Boring and artful. I am as interested in a good character piece as anyone else, but this was just not even a character piece. It was a dreamy-landscape of semi-sensical ramblings by a hard to like main character. It was pretty, but it was also pretty dull.

However, Johnson does have some great insight and wonderful ramblings (such as his description of his deep relationship with the security guard at the art museum...with whom he has never actually spoken): "Exile, detachment, paralysis, fear--all the qualities people projected onto my flat white surface--they really played no part in anything that happened after the accident that took my wife and daughter. Everything occurred despite its complete impossibility." Yes, everything is perception and our interactions with people are tainted by their expectations of our mental states. And yet, sometimes these perceptions are wrong. And, of course, sometimes they are not, but we perceive that they are.

Johnson also gets in a few political digs (the best of which has also been quoted by others): "There's a perfect stillness at the center of Washington....Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing's happening. It's all essential, but it's all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise."

One of the biggest and most annoying pieces for me was the confusion over time. This is a book without chapters or breaks; the main character rambles from past to present to future all rather seamlessly. It is clearly "modern", but I am always rather curious about exactly what year the author is pretending to present. At one point (just after he is fired); Mike goes to New York (and this is in the "current" time of the story because he says it is near the end of the academic year and he is at the point where he is cleaning out his office) for a conference. He mentions that the Berlin Wall had come down 16 weeks before, which I put as either marking the beginning of the process (1990) or the end of the process (1992). Later that summer he has his moment at the school with Flower and she tells him about her family and she mentions that "Every July Fourth until '93"...putting this clearly many years post '93 (I would say 2000 at the earliest given her tone and rough age in the story she is telling). So Johnson gives us Spring of early 90s followed by summer of early 2000s...rather annoying.

Overall it is short and there are a few good moments, but I was left feeling more that Johnson was trying hard to produce "ART" (yes, in capital letters AND quotations marks) than that he was producing anything with real value. Maybe it is simply a difference in opinion over the value of literature: I have always believed that real art is that which speaks to the audience; I require my art to be relevant or interesting or spellbinding and Johnson (or Mike, anyway): "realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda--is that the word I want?--not include me. I don't want its aims put in doubt by an attempt to appeal to me, by any awareness of me at all." I guess I'm just not all that impressed with an author who fails to take his reader into account.

"De naam van de wereld" gaat in essentie over niets. Het hoofdpersonage stelt zich de vraag hoe hij moet omgaan met een schijnbaar zinloze wereld, hoe hij moet verderleven, na een onmenselijk groot verlies. Je moet gewoon doorgaan, stap voor stap, lijkt de schrijver te willen zeggen. Het universum laat ons toe om de illusie te koesteren, dat het ertoe doet, dat contact zoeken met anderen mogelijk is, dat je een zinvol leven kunt leiden. Zelfs als blijkt dat de betekenis van alles rondom ons zintuiglijk niet achterhaald kan worden, dan nog kunnen we toch overleven. Dat klinkt misschien donker en nihilistisch, maar Denis Johnson schrijft zo heerlijk rechtuit en humoristisch, dat je dit boek niet kunt neerleggen en dat je de poëzie van het leven ergens toch denkt te kunnen zien. Je houdt er in elk geval geen kater aan over.

Ik weet niet zo goed wat ik van dit boek moet vinden. Wel mooi geschreven en daardoor fijn om te lezen (ik heb het in het Engels gelezen), maar het verhaal vond ik, zeker de 2e helft, ongeloofwaardig. Het begin is aardig, over een man die zich beweegt in een academisch milieu (op een of andere manier houd ik daar altijd heel erg van, net als bij Onder Professoren, diverse boeken van David Lodge en nog een paar meer waar ik even niet op kom). Hij heeft zijn vrouw en dochter verloren en is alleenstaand. Hij dwaalt maar een beetje rond in het leven, zo lijkt het, zonder een passie voor wat hij doet. Maar dan wordt hij soort van verliefd op een student. Alhoewel, het is meer een obsessie dan een echte verliefdheid. Op een of andere manier vind ik dit zo cliché, dat ik er totaal op afknap (en dus ook op het boek). Zij is kunstzinnig, apart, losgeslagen, veel jonger dan hij. En toch ook geïnteresseerd in hem, waarbij ze hem aan het einde het verhaal van haar naam vertelt. Superraar. En dan is er nog een soort van epiloog waarbij de ik-persoon bijna slaags raakt met een stel studenten. Het is dat het zo'n dun boek was, maar aan het einde had ik niet zoveel plezier meer in het lezen. Maar te zien aan de ratings hier op Goodreads vinden heel veel mensen het een mooi boek. Good for them, maar ik ga niet nog een keer iets van deze schrijver lezen :-)