If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

This book is about life cycles, optimism, continuity and regeneration. The plot is divided into two parts.

The first part is the first person narration from the main protagonist and is written in single sentence hanging paragraphs.

The second division is narrated in the third-person from the omnipotent author and is about the inter-related short stories of the inhabitants of a street during one day. This second part is denoted by full paragraphs.

The two parts move around the central theme of the inhabitants and merge and flow around each other. The author uses his words as a camera, focusing and un-focusing into each individual story to give a related picture of life in the street as a whole.

The text goes into great detail of the every day routines of the inhabitants, their activities on the day in question, and their life histories. The language has a rhythm that has a poetic feel. The author breaks a lot of grammar and punctuation rules and this doesn't seem to matter. There are no quotation marks, speech runs into descriptive text, sentences end unfinished, and the meaning flows into the next sentence.

The overall impression I got was although the book was prose, it seemed like a long poem and sometimes the words became quite beautiful. At the end all the strands of the short stories threaded together and fitted together like a jig-saw puzzle. These strands at first seemed random, disparate and a little foggy; but at the end their importance and relevance became precise. The novel seemed to start out as unstructured and puzzling, but the meaning became much clearer at the end.

At the end I got a warm, optimistic and positive feeling. I had to sit back and take it all in and process it. I think that this is an impressive novel.