The Name of the World Paperback - 2001
by Denis Johnson
In this elegant and incisively observed book, Johnson, author of "Jesus' Son", tells the story of a soul-dead academic who makes unexpected contact with ahost of characters in his small university town. 40,000print.
First line
Since my early teens I've associated everything to do with college, the "academic life," with certain images borne toward me, I suppose, from the TV screen, in particular from the films of the 1930s they used to broadcast relentlessly when I was a boy, and especially from a single scene: Fresh-faced young people come in from an autumn night to stand around the fireplace in the home of a beloved professor.
From the rear cover
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.
Details
- Title The Name of the World
- Author Denis Johnson
- Binding Paperback
- Edition [ Edition: Repri
- Pages 144
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Harper Perennial, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Date May 1, 2001
- ISBN 9780060929657 / 0060929650
- Weight 0.29 lbs (0.13 kg)
- Dimensions 8.04 x 5.42 x 0.38 in (20.42 x 13.77 x 0.97 cm)
-
Themes
- Cultural Region: Midwest
- Demographic Orientation: Small Town
- Topical: Death/Dying
- Library of Congress subjects Middle West, Psychological fiction
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Media reviews
Citations
- New York Times, 05/20/2001, Page 44
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