El nombre del mundo recoge tanto algunos de los pasajes más ridículamente absurdos que he leído en lo que va de año como interesantes y profundas reflexiones sobre el proceso de duelo y la pérdida de propósito vital. Dicho en otras palabras, en este libro Denis Johnson es capaz de lo mejor y de lo peor. Lo mejor: la premisa, que nos mete en la piel de un profesor universitario que trata de superar el fallecimiento de su mujer y su hija en un accidente de tráfico; el estilo, acoplado casi siempre de manera perfecta al discurso intelectual y meditativo del protagonista; el final, bastante acertado y coherente con la clásica estructura del monomito donde el objetivo a alcanzar es una completa y purificadora renovación interior. Lo peor: la inconsistencia de la trama, un interminable soliloquio sin ningún tipo de subdivisión temática que salta de un sitio a otro con la optimista pretensión de que el lector no pierda el hilo en ningún momento; y, por otra parte, los desvaríos lynchianos que de vez en cuando salpican la narración, una serie de esperpénticos acontecimientos de carácter experimental que involucran diálogos disparatados, fantasías sexuales dignas de peritaje psicológico y una performance conceptual en la que una estudiante se depila el coño ante decenas de atentos espectadores. Vamos, que no hay por dónde coger muy bien este libro a menos que yo me haya perdido algo de una relevancia crucial. En cualquier caso, seguiré probando otras novelas del autor con la firme esperanza de que El nombre del mundo sea una anecdótica excepción y no una muestra representativa de lo que me va a seguir ofreciendo Denis Johnson en el futuro.

Short. It has enough going on to propel me quickly through it. At this time all my reads, all my reviews are about or in oblique reference to Correction.

Another review thought Flower Cannon was a shallow hippy chick typical of what modern male writers are fond of creating as their substitute Eve or a full portrait of a woman. Also, they thought that Johnson doesn't write female characters very well. Flower may be guilty as charged but Johnson if necessary can write females. Witness the woman in Tree of Smoke.

But in general he writes books about men. This led me to think about pornography or as women call it erotica. Men like it one way, women another. In fact there seems to a lot more of the female variety on GRs than the male. This is a long way from Johnson and even further from Correction

I liked the Name. It was beautiful and touching. I don't much care for emotionally dead characters. I can't get into Murakami for that reason or Bernhard. I'm sure Johnson is used to the comment that we're all just waiting for another Jesus Son. That corrects the comment that preceded it.

Sexta novela de un autor norteamericanísimo nacido en Alemania casi al término de la Segunda Guerra Mundial: 1949.

Esta obra se adentra en ese Medio Oeste norteamericano donde la sobriedad y el dasasosiego del mundo universitario son mostrados dentro de una economía de lenguaje preciosa y una fotografía del panorama y el paisaje americano.

Es de reconocerse la traducción lograda que realiza Rodrigo Fresán para la edición española de Mondadori. Otro autor recomendado en esa lista de Letras Libres por Fresán.

The story was two stars, the writing four. It was lighter than most of Johnson's work that I've read, but still dealt with death. I feel like many people could read this and find it to be about different things. To me it was about redirection in one's life, what happens when what you'd planned on, happily, and thrown yourself into, is no longer there. It's a restart button that takes a long time to push. It is a 128-page short story, beautifully written.

Interesting first-person narration of a short novel with no chapter breaks. I liked the style a lot. The first 80 pages were good, and the following 50 pages were incoherent and rushed. The narrator's story in the first part of the book was interesting, but the shift to his interaction with "Flower Cannon" struck me as self-indulgent and pretentious. It sort of felt like Johnson got sick of the novel after page 80 and just wanted to finish it. It looks like I need to read Tree of Smoke for Johnson's best treatment of the novel.

The only reason this book is not on my Abandoned book shelf is that it was only 120 pages long and easy to hold when I read it while on the treadmill. Reading "The Name of the World" made me realize how dependent I have become on PLOT. The faint plot here is: what is to become of a bereaved widower as he completes his four-year teaching assignment at a non-descript (of course) Midwestern college. Even the book's black humor is only a very pale grey. When the main character, Michael Reed, stumbles upon a church where the gender-segregated congregation whole-heartedly sings, he finds himself released from the need to believe in God. That to me is very pale shade of grey humor. For a man who does not care whether he lives or not, his new career at the end of the story is appropriate. Reading about such a numb character was numbing.

This book was published in 2001. A short story by the author appears in a recent edition of "The New Yorker." I'm going to invest another 20 minutes or so with Denis Johnson to see if his writing has changed or if my opinion of his style has.

Okay, so The Name of the World is basically a classic hero's journey -- call to action, resistance to call, aid from the supernatural (in this case Flower Cannon), resurrection and rebirth. It's set in an unnamed Midwestern town, at an unnamed Midwestern university, and the protagonist, Mike Reed, is one of those do-nothing professors at the end of his appointment: a white, middle-class man of privilege with the luxury of wallowing in his own grief over his family's death. Flower Cannon is an art student whom he follows around, and who does all sorts of bizarre and highly sexualized "pieces" even though she herself admits she has no talent.

It's boring. I didn't care about Mike. I didn't care about Flower. I didn't care about anything this book circled around and because I didn't care, I also wasn't bowled over by the ending other than to wish Mike didn't live through it (instead, he ends up a journalist covering wars in the Middle East). The moments where the story veered into fantastic metaphor (Flower is supposed to embody the supernatural) just felt like the narrative jumping the shark. I couldn't go there because I simply didn't care enough.

I find that a lot of the PEN/Faulkner books (this was a finalist) are interesting if you look at them as craft exercises, but dead boring as actual books you might spend time reading. This novella is 129 pages long and is remarkable in the control the author exerts over the form--there are no chapters, no page breaks. It's headlong, and yet it doesn't actually read like something that needs breaks, which is in itself impressive. I just wish the actual story /characters had been as well done or as interesting to me. Maybe if I was a privileged old white prof I would get it.

For a book that has only 123 pages, I was able to get to around page 50 before throwing in the towel. I've liked what I've read from Denis over the years, but I just didn't find anything worth continuing with in these short pages. A man loses his family, but the emotion was lacking in the writing and in regards to writing style? It was extremely bland. The characters themselves were annoying and that's enough for me to lose interest. If this had a mind-blowing ending, then I'll just have to miss it.

I have mixed feelings on this novella.

True to form, Denis Johnson offers up slightly skewed characters making a life in unremarkable, middle American towns. The people and places remind me of abandoned family photos, images where the perspect, the lighting, the whole essence of the experience feels sad and washed out.

Michael Reed is a middle-aged history instructor at an unnamed, nondescript mid-west college. Having ambled a path from high school teacher, to D.C aide to a politician, he is now in the end days of his adjunct contract. He’s going through the motions, attending faculty gathering and dinners with department heads, with no real ambition or interest.

The story unfolds in almost a dream-like state. Time is passing for Michael Reed and he is managing a shifting identity, becoming a man without a family, his wife and daughter died years earlier in a car accident, and no longer a longer the man who lost his family.

He encounters a beautiful, free-spirited student. He crosses paths with her, finding her in various states of bareness and undress - bare shoulders at a dinner party, stripping at a casino, shaving as part of performance art - and when he encounters her in these intimate yet public moments he is drawn to her in a not-quite-sexually but certainly not chaste way.

He learns her name, Flower Canon, and then she shares the story of her name with him. Her story feels so dark, so heavy it was hard to shake.

But this is Michael Reed’s story. He continues his journey, leaving the campus, the college town, letting go of grief and fear and venturing out into the world.

I really enjoy Denis Johnson’s languid writing style and the way he finds humanity in flawed, dull work-a-day people is beautiful. With this novel, though, the story did not quite gel for me, it was a bit too hazy. What I struggled with was most was feeling so ill at ease after reading the few paragraphs of Flower Cannon’s story.

Pointless

There may be significance to this book but I suspect only for the author. As a fictionalised memoir, it lacks development. As a novel, it has neither plot nor character. It is as flat as the mid-western plains on which it takes place.

A middle aged, bereaved husband and father finds some sort of psychic oblivion as a part time university lecturer. The post is apparently a sinecure which allows the author to get in a few digs about government-funded higher education. There are no lectures to give so he simply ruminates - for four years - about his loss. He hates his life and muses “Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.” He’d better because the reader is not going to waste the time.

Then, in quick succession, he gets fired, develops an obsessive but abortive relationship with a wild child student who could have been molested at age four, attacks a group of celebrating teenagers, and absconds in a stolen car to Alaska, thus fulfilling his own prophecy earlier in the day: “I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.” Yep, sure, and... ? Is this a mature man or an errant 16 year old?

The level of emotion is something the reader has to take on faith since he shows none. He appears to act out of impulse not feeling. What feelings he has are... well trivial and misplaced. Driving an automobile for the first time since his family had been killed in an accident while driving with a friend, he feels guilt. “I can’t think of any more significant betrayal in my life, that is, any clearer contradicton of a former self, than owning this car after four years’ mourning two victims of a car crash.” What! Guilt about not saying goodbye, or the fight during breakfast, or the hours of overtime at work, one might understand. But driving a car? Hardly.

It could be of course that Johnson’s novel is meant as a send-up for the culture in which it is placed, a sentimental but unfeeling culture which doesn’t know a priority from an eggshell, a culture whose individuals are manipulated by circumstances to do bizarre things. If Name of the World is in fact sarcasm masquerading as slice of life rapportage, or some sort of Jungian allegory which completely escapes me, I can only apologise to the author. Otherwise, it is indeed pointless.

I don't say amazing lightly about novels. Yep, I cried when I finished this. Had a lot to do with what I was going through at the time. The protagonist faced an uncertain and frightening future, having made some kind of oblique sense of his past. It seems he was inclined to chase happiness in an attraction to a woman... then relented.

I'll be reading this again soon, when I get it back from a friend. Have lent it out twice already.

Promising start but waited on the story to pick up some speed.