Nowhere

by Thomas Berger

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Novels, Fiction, Mystery, Humor

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist, probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man, which was adapted into a film by Arthur Penn. Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.

Berger's use of humor and his often biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, though he rejected that classification.

Reviews

[Pamela]

This is distressing--very distressing. A Berger novel that was boring, wordy, and, as far as I could tell, pointless. I made it through over a third of it and finally had to pack it in. Unbelievable that this is the same Berger who wrote Sneaky People and Little Big Man and The Feud. If everyone is entitled to an off day, Berger had his with this.

(And yes, I have read Kafta's The Trial so I understand what he was aiming for--I just didn't care at all about the road he was taking to get there.)

[Aaron Martz]

This funny but slight comedy is Berger's take on Kafka's The Trial. It stars Russel Wren, the private investigator from Berger's earlier and more funny Who Is Teddy Villanova?, and has him being sent by a CIA-like organization to infiltrate the small country of San Sebastian to report on the movements of a rebel faction called The Sebastiani Liberation Front. Once in San Sebastian, he is confronted by a country that operates solely on credit, whose children spend all day at the movies as their sole form of education, whose public library houses only fictional encyclopedias revised at the whims of a select group of old men living upstairs, whose government has sections called The Ministry of Clams, The Ministry of Allergies, and The Ministry of Ironies likewise operated by out of touch old men, and whose King is a glutton ignorant of his own country. It's a short, amusing comedy, not up to par with Berger's other major works, but nonetheless a scathing indictment of runaway bureaucracy and outmoded forms of government.

[Heronimo Gieronymus]

Of the open-air markets
only a stall selling potatoes
was open for business

the birds had disappeared
along with the fake fish
and fishwives

the pillory was gone from the square
and a number of workmen were erecting
a scaffold that looked ominously
as if it might well become a gallows.

…

A cul-de-sac that greatly resembled
the old Street of Words

was now signposted as
Truth Lane

at the moment

the pavement in front of the writers’ pink building

was being scrubbed:

Spang, Boggs, and poor sybaritic Riesling
provoking whom I now regretted.

…

But meanwhile I sensed
from the bleak light that penetrated my front windows
that dawn had come to Manhattan

always the best part of the day

If you are awake to see it
for the simple reason
that so few others are.

[Bill FromPA]

Previous: The Feud
Next: Being Invisible

[Andrakuf]

Cóż książka, która rzekomo ma być parodią klasycznego dreszczowca szpiegowskiego a tu ani dreszczy ani szpiega nie widzę. Istnieje oczywiście cień szansy, że po prostu jestem za głupi, żeby dostrzec drugie dno tejże powieści, ale pierwsze dno widzę lepiej niż dobrze.

[Corey]

A droll, absurdist comedy.

[Jason Edwards]

Although I’m not a young man I only recently became privy to the essential meaning of “absurdity,” to wit: that it is absurd to think anything has any meaning. Always, before, I figured absurdity for simple silliness. But now that I am a bit older than I once was (aren’t we all) I am starting to see that there is, actually, no such thing as simple silliness. If silliness isn’t supremely complicated, it’s not silly, it’s banal. Banal in the sense that, like everything else, it’s just meaningless.

Thus Nowhere, Berger’s sequel to Who is Teddy Villanova. Not much of a sequel, really: we have the same character and same writing style, but that’s about it. There’s not really any kind of continuation of the prequel novel. In this sense, Nowhere stands on its own. I am telling you this in case you want to read it but don’t know if you need to read Villanova first. You don’t (although I would highly recommend you do read Villanova at some point; it is excellent).

Nowhere is an absurd novel. And it is silly. And it is, if I may, seriously silly. This is not the silliness of random chaos, tangential wanderings, musings, whimsy. This is the well-crafted silliness of a writer dedicated to world building and, by needs, world destruction.

Throughout my reading of Nowhere I found myself trying to unveil the parody, the satire, trying to decipher the hidden subject of his ridicule. But Berger thwarts all of these efforts, and continuously brings the reader back to absurdity. And in the end, he breaks a major rule of writing,
and does so, I think, to put the final nail in the coffin of “meaning.”

I mean, it’s right there in the title; I guess I didn’t take him at his word until the end.

[Christopher Sutch]

I don't consider this to be one of Berger's better efforts. While the philosophical considerations of the shortcomings of the tradition of utopian fiction(s) is remarkable, it makes for pretty tedious reading (and this is a fairly short work for Berger). It definitely does not work as a novel, which it supposedly is. I was particularly disappointed because I so thoroughly enjoyed Berger's pastiche of the detective/thriller novel featuring the same protagonist as this novel, _Who Is Teddy Villanova?_. Sadly this book has about 1/10th the wit and life that that earlier work had.

[William Walker]

Fantastic dystopian novel from the always entertaining and incredibly intelligent Berger. Have a dictionary by your side. And be ready to laugh at this Swiftian tale where writers are kept in an enclosed library that no one visits and all the blondes are discriminated against until they stage a revolution that goes nowhere. Neighbors and Houseguest by Berger are even better.