2024 the best name of the world review


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The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him.

Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war."

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (April 14, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060929650
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060929657
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.04 x 5.42 x 0.38 inches
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Flashes of brilliance
Review: One of the few modern writers to impress me.

Reviewer: peter wild
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The Bone Details
Review: This is very much novel as abstract painting (and Johnson is very much novelist as abstract painter), in that (as with Don DeLillo's last book, The Body Artist) here is a novel that attempts to get to grips with the passage of a human being through the many varied and difficult stages of grieving. This is serious. It requires thought and patience.Michael Reed is a college professor whose wife and child were killed in an automobile accident four year's previously. Over the course of a single summer, he develops an attachment with a student, loses his job and is forced to examine again the way he deals with - and his own place in - the world. Johnson's writing is both stark and beautiful (there is something terrible about a mind that has abnegated responsibility due to a conflict too great to be resolved), and the details accrete like so much hard bone: the novel is episodic, but each episode remains in your mind like freed and bleached shoulder blades erected in a pile.The Name of the World inhabits similar territory to The Sweet Hereafter (both Russell Bank's book and Atom Egoyan's film) and the aforementioned Body Artist (although The Name of the World succeeds - transporting you to a world where Joy Division's Atmosphere is the only soundtrack - where The Body Artist fails: yes, both deal in chilly abstraction, but Johnson's book attempts to achieve a kind of adult resolution, where DeLillo withdraws further and still further from the abstractions he chooses to create).Johnson is the kind of writer you champion knowing he isn't to everybody's tastes (he is difficult, at times, and unyielding, but that just goes to make for writing that makes demands upon the reader, challenging you to interpret what it is you are faced by).

Reviewer: Kevin F. Tasker
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Mediocre by comparison with flashes of brilliance
Review: If you haven't experienced Johnson, stop reading this review right now and go find Jesus' Son. It is arguably his best work--a nuanced, bitter, darkly hilarious short story collection, rivaled only perhaps by his most recent book, Train Dreams, an eloquent journey through early nineteenth century America. Both of these books are sparse and essentially perfect. The Name of the World, however, is less than perfect, in fact it pales in comparison to Jesus' Son or Train Dreams. Absolutely and utterly pales. Perhaps it is best to judge the book objectively, on its own spirited merits. Even with this thought in mind, however, The Name of the World is still a bit of a failure. The plot is languid (even at 127 pages), cold, and the narrator is entirely detached, the result of his wife and daughter's death from a car accident some years earlier. The reader doesn't really get to know the wife or daughter. Nor, really, the narrator himself. He mumbles and moves, ghost-like, through a college campus, often digressing, often asking the reader if his doomed vision makes any kind of lasting sense. The book truly falters around the halfway point with the introduction of a poorly-drawn manic pixie dream girl who plays the cello and shaves her private parts as a kind of performance art that the narrator tangentially connects to his own misfortune. There is nothing really to endear the reader to this girl, other than her alleged uniqueness that doesn't exactly translate as anything too deep or affecting or, well, original. In fact, the entire novel--save a few gritty and beautiful passages which recall the bleak majesty of Jesus' Son--is more or less unoriginal. It reads like it was written by an undergraduate honing his craft, not by the master of form and expression Johnson proved himself to be with the aforementioned collection. To readers of that book, this one will feel like a crippling disappointment. There are lines that sting and that ought to be savored, surely, particularly the last paragraph, and some sensory descriptions of farmland that Johnson does so well, but on the whole, the author seems to be essentially sleepwalking.

Reviewer: Drew
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great book, great condition.
Review: Excellent condition.Grief as told anew through the singular lens of Johnson's prose.

Reviewer: Randy Rice
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Good!!
Review: The Name of the World is....Good!!

Reviewer: David Davies
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Excellent.....many thanks.

Reviewer: Eileen Shaw
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I'm not sure what it is that is missing from this book - passion perhaps, or the feeling that Johnson is reined in somehow by his protagonist, Mike Reed. It is a very adult, very world-weary book concerning a man who has never recovered from the death of his wife and daughter, four years ago, in a traffic accident. The most affecting moment in the book for me is when he is remembering the moment that they set off in an elderly neighbour's car and Mike leaned in at the window meaning to tell him to take the gravel track (the weather is icy and the neighbour is not a steady driver) into town, but in the end says something else, distracted by the neighbour. Reed is an academic, having worked in Washington for a Senator for several years previous to getting a track post as a History Professor. He doesn't get tenure, but isn't bothered. To be frank, nothing much bothers him since he lost his family. The scenes where he is at various meetings and get-togethers don't resonate with much beyond boredom. He is fascinated however by a painting by an African American slave, in one of the halls of the college and he makes time to stand looking at this (abstract) painting, observed by the (African American) security guard whose job it is to patrol the gallery. He is also fascinated by the skating pond used by the students and the patterns they make, all going round one way. These two abstract fascinations seem linked by the flaws in the patterns made, rather than anything else, but their significance is not overtly linked in his mind. Nothing much seems to happen until he becomes aware of a female student, a wild character called Flower who gives demonstrations of shaving her pudenda, plays the cello (not very well) and almost always wins the amateur stripping competitions held at a nearby roadhouse. She has a stash of envelopes that she keeps, in each of which is a sentence written by a friend or acquaintance, but she refuses to share these with him and he leaves. This is, fittingly, more or less where the book ends, in lack of (dreaded cliché) closure, rather than any kind of new beginning. The book has no revelations to offer, Flower is just a blip in Reed's unconnected life. Johnson's use of dialogue is faultless, though his writing contains little of the deeply felt energy I've experienced in all his other books, making the novel seem soggy, affectless and somehow compromised. I couldn't identify with the main character and there was little else to grasp in this wavering, unsatisfying novel. I very much wanted to like it, and I was always fully engaged by the skilful writing, waiting for the iron to strike. But, this time, for me, he missed the anvil every time.

THE END
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