| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780375706035 | | Publisher: Random House Inc | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 33940459 | | Item#: B35UFM | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.25L x 0.5T | | Pages: 192 |
|
|
|
| | | | "Good morning, it's January and it's 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here in the dark. I'm in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an armchair pulled up to the fireplace..." (from the first line) Emmett spends his days in front of the fire thinking yet he travels great lengths.
Annotation:
In Nicholson Baker's novel, Emmett gets up every morning for 33 mornings--one for each match with which he lights the fire in the fireplace--and drinks his coffee, eats his breakfast, and writes his daily chapter about his life. In the course of his ruminations, what comes through is his appreciation for the mundane and the forgotten, and his sadness at the ephemeral beauty of the world.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"[A]marvel of ship-in-a-bottle miniaturism that no one else could have written, or would have thought to write....How anything so wonderful as life--and anything so terrible as death--could evolve from such humble stuff as paper towels is the question preoccupying Baker's narrator....The great, tidal rhythms that usually govern literary storytelling -- ambition and frustration, love and loss, innocence and experience--are replaced here by something more arbitrary, more digital. When time is up in this novel, time is up--ready or not. Which is how it works in life, of course. A structure that may at first seem rather cute, like a technical dare that Baker gave himself when he was feeling restless one afternoon, comes off instead, once the book is on its way, as a melancholy stroke of hyperrealism....His tight-focus set pieces, though astonishing, are really a calculated misdirection; with his hidden hand he's writing about love, the energy beam that, diffracted through the brain and the convex lenses of the eyes, creates the rainbow of objects called the world." - Walter Kirn 02/02/2003Times Literary Supplement
"Baker's work represents not so much an inquest into why things are beautiful, as an observation that they are. The moral of his lynx-eyed, gorgeously wordy chronicles is that if we just learn to look carefully, life becomes more interesting and funnier--and thus more bearable. Perhaps the best way to think of Baker is not as a novelist, but as an archivist....We live in a disposable culture. The response of zeitgeisty North American writers such as Douglas Coupland or Bret Easton Ellis has been to meet a disposable culture with a disposable style....Nicholson Baker's response, by contrast, has been to slow down, to be attentive, to observe, and to annotate." - Robert MacFarlane 01/31/2003 Bookforum
"Baker possesses a refreshing sense of wonder about the world. His passion for life's overlooked details reminds us not to take anything for granted. This is advice the world sorely needs....Writers like Baker remind us how vital and important these things are. But his filter needs to be finer: Much of the daily life he chooses to explore is just plain banal and doesn't impart any deeper understanding." - Myla Goldberg Spring 2003 New York Review of Books
"A BOX OF MATCHES is about going nowhere, a route that Nicholson Baker travels better than anybody....The imagination is a wilderness of infinite possibility for him, and all his books are located there in the way that Updike's are located in the suburbs. What's new in this book, I think, and what makes it particularly poignant, is a sense that this vast territory of the imagination, this primeval forest of odd facts and observations, is ultimately as ephemeral as the flame of a match....Emmett...contemplates his children, his time with them, with an awed sentimentality that it so earnest it breathes gravitas into the entire book....Emmett recounts each day with the urgent, unfiltered loquacity of modern children and bores, yet he is neither." - Cathleen Schine 05/01/2003 |
| Author Bio| Nicholson Baker | | Nicholson Baker attended Haverford College, studied bassoon at the Eastman School of Music, and worked as an office temp before he became a novelist and essayist. His novel VOX, which takes the form of a conversation between two anonymous partners on a phone-sex chat line, was thrust to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist in 1998 when Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's office investigated whether the book was given by Monica Lewinsky to President Bill Clinton. Baker has become a passionate advocate for the conservation of original archival materials (particularly newspapers) by libraries, and has created the American Newspaper Repository as a storage site. |
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter One Chapter 1
Good morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here in the dark. I’m in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn’t much in the way of open flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn’t fully caught yet. So what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of fire-meat. When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale. Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in a dark and remote planet. The planet’s crust is beginning to break up, allowing an underground sea of lava to ooze out. Continents are tipping and foundering like melting icebergs, and I must fly in on my highly maneuverable rocket and save the coloni Click to read more... Chapter One Chapter 1
Good morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here in the dark. I’m in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn’t much in the way of open flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn’t fully caught yet. So what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of fire-meat. When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale. Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in a dark and remote planet. The planet’s crust is beginning to break up, allowing an underground sea of lava to ooze out. Continents are tipping and foundering like melting icebergs, and I must fly in on my highly maneuverable rocket and save the colonists who are trapped there.
Last night my sleep was threatened by a toe-hole in my sock. I had known of the hole when I put the sock on in the morning–it was a white tube sock–but a hole seldom bothers me during the daytime. I can and do wear socks all day that have a monstrous rear-tear through which the entire heel projects like a dinner roll. But at night the edges of the hole come alive. I was reading my book of Robert Service poems last night around nine-thirty, when the hole’s edge began tickling and pestering the skin of the two toes that projected through. I tried to retract the toes and use them to catch some of the edge of the sock’s fabric, pulling it over the opening like a too-small blanket that has slid off the bed, but that didn’t work–it seldom does. I knew that later on, after midnight, I would wake up and feel the coolness of the sheet on those two exposed toes, which would trouble me, even though that same coolness wouldn’t trouble me if the entire foot was exposed. I would become wakeful as a result of the toe-hole, and I didn’t want that, because I was starting a new regime of getting up at four in the morning.
Fortunately last night I had an alternative. I’d brought a clean white tube sock to bed with me to use as a mask over my eyes, in case Claire was going to read late. I have to have darkness to go to sleep. I have one of my grandfather’s eye masks, made of thick black silk probably in the thirties, but it smells like my grandfather, or at least it smells like the inside of his bedside table. The good thing about draping a sock over your eyes is that it is temporary. The sock slips off your head when you move, but by then you’ve gone to sleep and it has served its purpose.
So when the hole in the sock on my foot became intolerable, I reached down and pulled it off in a clean, strong motion and flipped it across the room in the direction of the trash can–although I have to say there is something almost painfully incongruous in the sight of an article of underclothing that one has worn and warmed with one’s own body for many days and years, lying bunched in the trash. And then onto my naked foot I pulled the fresh sock that I’d had on my face. It felt so good: oh, man, it felt good, really good. I moved my newly sheathed foot back into the far region of the sheets and pulled the heavy blankets around me and I took my hand and curved it and draped it over my eyes where the sock had been, the way a cat does with its paw. Eventually Claire got into bed. I heard her bedside light click on and I heard the pages of her book shuffle, and then she twisted around so we could kiss good-night. “You’ve got your hand over your eyes,” she said. I murmured. Then she turned and shifted her warmly pajamaed bottom towards me and I steered through the night with my hand on her hip, and the next thing I knew it was four a.m. and time to get up and make a fire.
Excerpted from A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
|
|
|
