The Octopus: A novel

by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Originally published by Random House in 1969, Nog became a universally revered cult novel and a symbol of the countercultural movement.

In Rudolph Wurlitzer's signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere.

This edition of Nog features a new introduction from noted critic and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis).

Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, American, 20th Century, United States, Literary Fiction

162 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

The great-grandson of the man who founded the famous music company published his first novel, Nog in 1969. For most of the seventies Wurlitzer worked in Hollywood, writing screenplays. His 1971 play 2 Lane Blacktop was filmed by maverick producer Monte Hellman, starring Warren Oates with singer James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. In 1973 he wrote the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah's Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, starring Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

A kind of drug-haze western, Nog follows a man with only a few closely-guarded and regularly re-constructed memories as he wanders 60s California and the south-west with little purpose or direction. While we're privy to his inner-most thoughts, they don't ammount to much, mostly a kind of aphasic babble on his own existence, linked to seemingly completely arbitrary courses of action. A lot of what is unique in the prose and construction here turns up again in Wurlitzer's next two novels, but whereas those each construct a compelling context for his prose idiosyncrasies, this has neither the urgent intensity of Quake, nor the terminal minimalism of Flats. Though this is the novel that was touted by Pynchon and left the deepest cult mark, it feels more like a test run of tools that would only become meaningful later. Sure, there's meaning here too, I'm sure, and the introduction makes some interesting observations on deconstructed 60s identity, but with so erratic a lead character and narrator, I don't feel involved enough to try to do much more unraveling.

[Chris Via]

Video review, along with Flats, Quake, and The Drop Edge of Yonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyIyN...

[Chris Shaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although lacking plot and a strong sense of cohesiveness, Nog is the kind of story that manages to do what very few books I have ever read are able to do. While reading you are at once confused and clear sighted, yet this is the effect the book is supposed to have--an effect that eventually becomes hallucinatory and painfully real.

I think what Wurlitzer is doing here is trying to capture the anxieties, the existential hangups, and the general atmosphere of what is was like to be alive in the late 60's and early 70's. Obviously it wasn't like this for everyone, but there is a general feeling of people trying to "live in the now." This is especially true of the first third of the book where we find Nog taking temporary residence in a communal beach house. The narrator may be an extreme case, but he is representative of an entire generation of people seeking, just as the beats had, the pure experience.

In Nog's case, as much as he wants to attain the zen like state, his memories are simply too powerful, spurred on by the most incidental things, and before he(or you as the reader) knows it, he's in another time and place. There's something all too familiar about that blending of experience and memory...like being inside your own head.

A wild LSD trip? Not exactly. It actually reads like a story of a zen monk struggling with his past, trying to live as "presently" as possible. However he's a monk with some nagging memories, and what bizarre memories they are...the octopus is one hell of a striking image.

There's a blurb on the jacket that reads: "the novel of bullshit is dead." There is no bullshit here. What at first seems superfluous, gimmicky, or even besides the point is all part of a real experience. You just have to give yourself up to it.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The shadow of Samuel Beckett flits across this sui generis tour of the 1960s U.S. communes and counterculture. Rudy Wurlitzer's debut novel is a subtly hilarious and existentially bleak road trip where identities dissolve and reform quicker than the passing landscapes. As Eric Davis puts it in his fine intro, Nog traces "the long journey from nowhere to no-one."

Favorite line: "That's enough description."

[Tait · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had to choose two novels as character studies of the '60s counterculture, one would be Kotzwinkle's The Fan Man, a playful romp through drug-addeld New York. The second and much darker of the two would be Wurlitzer's Nog. Set across the beaches, backwoods, crashpads, and communes of California, this tentative story follows the moment to moment desperations of a Manson-like wanderer, who either stole his identity or is trying to not remember it and his previous crimes as he bums around the scene, inevitably getting into some heavy trouble.

Many reviews claim this novel is a challenging stream-of-conscious, but that's not actually the case, as the style does not follow Nog's internal thoughts as much as his obsessive awareness of the need for and impossibility of external actions, similar in style to Beckett's prose. In fact, this novel reads like a contemporary adaptation of Beckett's Murphy, what with the character's obsessive list making, inability to keep moving, etc (even down to some of Beckett's key lines). But Wurlitzer pulls this off, in a manner that is actually much more readable, though still very tragi-comic and certainly a cult classic.

[Goatboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wurlitzer’s writing elides your grasp for meaning or connection. Words appear, words you know and that have previously provided information, but in Wurlitzer’s sentences this information always slides away. It is a poetic style this writing. A style that parallels the thinking of his main character who works to avoid all connections and meaning built on memory and thought. It is as if his main character - who is not Nog and yet sometimes has Nog living within him - resides on the very edge of awareness. An awareness without memory to hold him down or planning to limit his experience. An awareness steadfastly (although that implies a desire much more intent than the character himself would ever own up to) living in the shifting now of experience. People and scenes and situations come and go around him without any sticking power or greater context. A room, an ankle, an octopus. But that is OK for a person with light coming out of a small hole in his chest. Or maybe that was someone else? A person trying to be Nog but not Nog. Some writing seems easy, if you only put the work in and had enough ideas. Wurlitzer’s writing seems something else. A style so stripped down and distilled, colorful yet intensely minimal, perfectly faceted in each instant and yet flowing softly as a breeze you aren’t quite sure you just felt…

I could try to coax meaning out of Nog's plot but that seems a disservice to its nature.
Much better to let its mood continue to wash over me as it slowly recedes from memory...

[Javier Avilés · Rating 4 out of 5]

La edición de Underwood con traducción de Rubén Martín Giraldez

La verdad es que me siento muy identificado con la forma de escribir de Wurlitzer, muy cercano a sus métodos. Si tengo que ser sincero hay mucho de Wurlitzer en mis novelas, aunque nunca lo había leído. Al igual que ocurrió con La hora del lobo de Bergman, debo reconocer la influencia fantasma de Nog en Constatación brutal del presente.
¿Cómo es posible que me influyan obras que no he leído ni visto?
Volviendo a Nog (y teniendo en cuenta las anteriores consideraciones) recomiendo mucho la lectura de esta rareza.

La reseña en el blog:
Nog, de Rudolph Wurlitzer

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

wtf did I just read???

I should have liked this. This totally should have been my cup of tea. I normally dig on books that are nonstandard, nonsensical, and a little bit trippy, but this thing was too hot of a mess, even for me!

Our narrator, an apparent recluse who rarely leaves his house or interacts with others, seems to be capable of holding on to three, yes just three, memories. One of which is of man named Nog who made an octopus out of plastic of paris and latex rubber and drove it around in the back of his pickup in a bathysphere, charging people like it was a sideshow attraction. Allegedly, when Nog tired of the gimmick, he sold both the truck and its octopus to our guy, who believes he has lost both the truck and its inhabitant. Only, as we begin reading this crazy ass novel, our guy admits he is losing his grasp on the memory of Nog and finds himself reinventing it while in search of a new memory to replace it. So who the fuck really knows. And it is at this moment that our guy suddenly becomes obsessed with a woman walking past his window collecting seashells. And away we go...

Is our narrator suffering from some kind of cognitive defect or mental illness? Quite possibly. Is he badly fucked up on drugs and hallucinating? Sure, he could be. There certainly appears to be a lot of sex and drugs and weird shit taking place. And honestly, I'm not even sure any of it IS actually taking place.

While it wasn't a difficult read, it was difficult to know wtf was going on, and just read like one big long ridiculous demented trip. If it's on your to-read list, don't go rushing to get your hands on it. You're really not missing much.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel that attempts to operate by subtraction, quasi-buddhist, a bit like the documented bit of the life of Simon Lynxx. Nog is Nog but Nog seeks to be rid of Nog. Have a hard time knowing how much is Nog’s doing vs. how much is being done to Nog. Is he, like Gautam, on a path he chose? Or has the path chosen him, like an early onset dementia? At any rate, I enjoyed the uncertainties, and found the Beckett comparison apt, for we've even at one point got Nog in bed together with the seldom but regularly opened door, opened only to admit a hand conveying a dish of let’s say unseemly but life-sustaining food. But where Beckett stays put, Wurlitzer moves on, even if it’s just to deposit the mattress in the hallway outside. I won’t do it this moment but this is a book to be re-read.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Очень стильный роман ни о чем. Пинчон слукавил, сказав о нем лишь то, что это те стороны (их явно больше одной), куда б мы могли двинуться в литературе (но явно не двинулись). Может, оно и неплохо. Особой контркультурности в нем тоже не слишком много.

[Jack Stonecipher]

Has some neat ideas with individual scenes but the overall pacing is terrible imo

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...a small boy writes 'David Salte Hates the Slug' on the sand with a large knotted stick. It has never been enough for me to have a stick and some sand to draw in."

Some people's lives are conscious attempts to stave off death, packing as much as they can into each moment, every second a profound social media share-worthy event - performative and amazing. Some people lives are goal based progressions of attainment and possession, a litany of notches of scholarship, land ownership, and establishing a firm lineage.

Then there are people who will understand NOG. Where life is a series of adventures and mysteries, never deeply investigated or revealed. A stream of unconscious inattention - handfuls of pills swallowed, bodies sexed, colorless food consumed, and the constant confusion of waking up in places one does not remember falling asleep at. Neither a dream nor nightmare, life is a baffling haze where memories are stories and landscapes are suspect. Faces are blurs of color and names are only relevant to the recognition of whispering voices. These people do not live in a drugged state that can be cured or shaken off, this is a way of life, a misfiring of sensation and a failure to process the maze of expected, consensus reality. Illness or brilliance, we struggle on. Struggle on, neither weary not valiant.

"Seems whenever I get somewhere with a chair and clean white walls, I get ordered out."

[Charlie Zoops · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nog is a story of a man coming in terms with his hallucinogenic consciousness roaming between uncertainty and devotion. Charged by a self-chasing pursuit, the narrative strives to de-construct the identity of characters while progressively ridding memories of their evidence. By taking on the aesthetics of a neglected western American landscape, the vivid acts of moving his body through this terrain becomes more of a process than a purpose. In an era of ambiguity and indifference, a nomad finds alternative means to justifying rationales of reality by legitimizing convictions through the invention of an artificial god, and reactively assuming impulsive rituals which will themselves to the immediacy of the present moment, rather than attaching hopes to unforeseen projections of future or a system of facts.

These anarchic journeys maintain the reader with a sense of curiosity to the characters consistent animal-like psyche, and his collapse into the moral and methodological conflicts of being a human in a time of configuration and responsibility.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a story of such creepy events, it's eerie and maybe even refreshing how deadpan the narrator is. This could have been told in overblown, psychedelic style, but stripping away that artifice pares the story down to essentials of action and inaction, and resists making particular meanings out of events or images. That's also what kept me from being completely engaged, though: as much as I liked the wide-open landscape the story drifts through, and the way every character is as hard-edged and grim as cowboys in a western, the deadpan voice keeps the story from feeling like much is at stake - even the big dramatic blowout, if it counts as one, happens at such a narrative distance that it never feels dangerous. So as much as I was compelled by Nog's inert drive to prevent himself from having any real memories or attachments, I guess I would have liked to see that desire challenged more overtly or dramatically along the way.

[Meagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I probably came into this book with unrealistically high expectations. I love Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Liked Two Lane Blacktop a whole darn lot, though Vanishing Point is my favorite existential automotive 70s movie. And I'd heard that this book was mindblowingly amazing. But, except for a few brief flickers, I couldn't really hook into the main character at all. Which is I guess the point. But it was hard to relate to a character with no center. Or a character with a center but no edges.

Also, not to be all feministy about it or anything, but practically every time a woman appeared in this book, she was instantly jumping on this guy's dick. Pardon my French. And I know it was the free love era. But come on.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whoa. Truly nutso in so many ways. But really, what Pynchon says is true. Ain't no bullcrap here. Just pure hallucination. But more of the honest kind than the "whoa, far out man" kind. It's like the gritty, hyper-real (non-baudrillard) mystery novels that have become so popular recently but instead of distilling anger, child molestation and waterways in Boston, it's like the things that the psyche fears the most. Including being locked in a pantry with lots of potatoes.

[J.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept getting caught in it, like a net of mesmerizing beauty.

[Manny Torres · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most perfect rambling novel ever. More surreal than the beats and the reason why it reads better than Pynchon is that you can tell Wurlitzer got laid more.

[Jay Gertzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was this man, see, who wants new sensations to erase the memories he has. He buys an octopus from a man named Nog.

It wasn't a real octopus, but it looked like one. He was a great fabricator, Nog was. Made some dough by exhibiting the Octopus at side-shows in the West. But he would not lie when anyone asked if the thing was real. He was what Griel Marcus would call an “old, weird American.” He would never “remake” himself to fulfill an “American dream” no matter how much easier it would have been to manufacture and “identity” people could “trust.”

The man who narrates the novel travels around the Western U S for most of the story. He needs memories, like I said, so after the Octopus pulls in his tentacles and fades out, the narrator replaces it with visions of Nog, who lurks around every rock, providing lots of possible memories. The narrator is empty of them. He wants to live free. He is open to whatever happens as he wanders, existence in the present being the only reality.

There is no essence or absolute in sight, except maybe the 18 cans of food he carries, and sometimes builds wall with so he can sleep behind them . Nog at some point merges with, or becomes, the narrator. Usually, if a man meets his double, he can lose his own identity. That doesn’t seem to bother the narrator. He has no identity. He meets a fellow wanderer and his girlfriend; they are compatible, especially the young woman. They accept him as a fellow free spirit, one of them. Impossible. If he doesn't have a self, how can he be one of any group?

IMO, the key episode is when Nog (for I guess it is he now) meets and helps Bench, an injured hunter “with an unorganized face” who complains about his son who he wants to be a professional placekicker. Bench is like Willy Lowman (“I got to give that boy something”). Then Nog becomes part of Bench’s plan to kill people who have taken over a nearby ghost town (a few buildings and outlying teepees, like in the Western classic Butcher's Crossing). In the saloon, the squatters pass around a pipe and are dressed in bright, unmanly clothes. “You got to fight back…. I know what it took to discover and hold this country…If a man doesn’t defend his claims he’s hardly a man…. This piece of country and this town is ours.”

Bench confuses Nog with his son at this point. It’s time for the snap from center. He promises Nog he will carry him out of the stadium when it’s over and buy him a steak dinner. They embrace. Nog has fallen into a rock-sold Western memory, as cruelly self-reliant and judgmental as it gets. Nog isn’t really in the game. The phrase “I can’t go on. I’ll go on” comes to his mind. He sails around Cape Horn, and flies to New York. Nog is gon[e] [spelled backward.] I wonder what he'll make of Times Square, the wild East in 1968. There were a lot of resistance to manufactured identities there, and everything solid melted into air. Maybe Nog would be at home there, and so would the missing octopus.

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novela muy peculiar: «Nog» (1969), de Rudolph Wurlitzer, editada por Underwood Editorial y traducida por Rubén Martín. Cuando lo terminé y cerré la contratapa, no estaba segura de si alguien me había echado algo de droja en el colacao que me endulzaba la madrugada. Pero no podía ser, aunque la hora cuadraba, no lo hacía ni el lugar ni la compañía (mi perro) así que tenía que ser cosa del libro, fijo. La duda estaba entre eso o una abducción: Wurlitzer me había teletransportado a otro lugar y había estado experimentado conmigo a lo largo de 190 páginas.
Un narrador que te desubica y consigue ponerte del revés a la vez que a los personajes. Juega con el lector, como la mente juega con cada uno de nosotros: dando saltos de un sitio a otro, de una época a otra. Y en medio de esa red de acontecimientos y sensaciones se perfila un camino vertiginoso de huídas, olvidos, hambre, drogas, sexo y personajes bastante locos.
La forma en que está escrita puede parecer algo caótica debido a los continuos cambios de tiempo verbal, de situaciones, puntos de vista y escenas. Estamos acostumbrados a leer novelas lineales donde el pensamiento es único (nadie se despista y está centrado en la trama del libro), pero esto no se ajusta a la realidad. Nog es mucho más fidedigno e intenta plasmar los quiebros y superposición de los pensamientos, las interrupciones mentales, los supuestos y las sensaciones que embargan (o embargaron) a los personajes.
Si para poder disfrutar de una novela necesitas que exista una trama clara y unos personajes concretos, si no soportas la psicodelia, dejarte llevar y sentirse perdido: olvídate, este no es tu libro. Esta es una lectura valiente y original, escritura auténtica, literatura de la que se escribe con garra y a la que debes permitir que te zarandee como ella quiera.


«Lo único que se pega a la carne de uno son los exteriores. En cuanto a los acontecimientos, van y vienen…»


Reseña completa en https://denmeunpapelillo.net/nog-rudo...

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would recommend this book to everyone who knows they think way different than everyone else. And to people that can understand that one thing can BE different than what it IS. It's difficult to read and most the time you're thinking in your head "What the hell is this guy ON?".
My favorite character is the crazy old man Nog meets in the beginning. He's a very brief character and all you know about him is that he's a crazy old war veteran. Idk why I like him so much, but I do.
My least favorite character is the guy that takes Nog pretty much hostage and uses him to get royal like hospitality from this hippy villiage. His name its lockett, and he makes me mad through out the entire parts of the book that he's in. He's controlling, manipulative, and MEAN.
I think the author wrote this book to indirectly show how humanity lives in the present and hangs on to the past. It was definitely a philosophical read and rudolph probably wrote it for his own pleasure.
The part of the book that hooked me is how jumbled and confused the thoughs and feelings were. This guy was obviously on some sort of acid trip, but i relate to him well. My thought process is precise, but jumbled. if that makes sense.
What kept me reading was how this stuff was going to even end. I didn't see how such a ridiculously insane trip could end well, and I was halfway right.
The ending was good, but sadly dissapointing because I thought it should have been better.
I wasn't able to predict the ending, but it was lame.
If this book was made into a movie, it wouldn't matter who the characters were because only people with creative mindsets or people who do drugs would watch it and enjoy it enough to care about the acting skills.
Johnny Depp would be a good Nog, but he's good at everything.
This book made me confused, frustrated, euphoric, upset, sympathetic, and tired. lol.
I don't remember most of the great lines out of the book. =/

[Rand]

A quick data search through the current books added to my goodreads account yields the following:
[Wurlitzer, Rudolph] (obviously)
Fannie + Freddie The Sentimentality of Post-9 11 Pornography
Beaver Street A History of Modern Pornography
Direct Action An Ethnography
Donoghue, Emma: The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits Stories & Kissing the Witch Old Tales in New Skins
Fiction International 22 Pornography and Censorship
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

Given that those titles are a cromulent summary of what this novel is all about, Nog can stop reading Rand now.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rudy Wurlitzer is often compared to Samuel Beckett, and the comparison is unmistakably apt. If his second novel, Flats, seemed consciously to pay homage to Beckett's plays, his first novel is more indebted to the actual novels (especially Molloy). Wurlitzer, like Becket (the novelist), is here focused on consciousness. Bent, damaged, imperiled consciousness; consciousness too frantic and weakened to make much headway w/ what it confronts in the world unfurling before it, often at great speed (especially noteworthy here is a stunning passage in which the bewildered narrator is ferried in a racing automobile). It is hard not to think of the way Molloy's mind races and he traverses the hilly landscape with his wretched, fastidious gait. Wurlitzer is especially notable as a novelist of the American counterculture because he was tuned in earlier than most to the epochal dread and psychospiritual dis-ease percolating in the collective unconscious of the flower children and drop-outs. His third novel, Quake, is all-out apocalyptic, and stands as one of my favorite American novels of the 20th century. The literary games Wurlitzer is up to here also have some notable French antecedents. It is hard to read Nog without thinking of Raymond Queneau and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This is ultimately a novel about madness. However, the catch is that what might at first seem like a singular and pretty rarefied set of symptomatologies is in fact a collective unwellness etched not only in the people, but within the landscape and the very aether.

[Oriana]

Oooh, this sounds terrif.

From the Powells.com review: Reading Nog is akin to reading other counterculture books of the era, particularly the works of Richard Brautigan . Both writers have (or in Brautigan's case had) a gift for finding the mundane rapturous and for exploring the human condition in the simplest terms possible, free from highbrow language, but rich with nuance. Also the two writers have a gift for composing a world that is at once recognizable, yet somehow estranged from reality. Wurlitzer burnishes the details of everyday life that are often overlooked, giving them a heightened sense of importance and impact.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Pynchon had this to say about Nog in 1969:

"Wow, this is some book, I mean it's more than a beautiful and heavy trip, it's also very important in an evolutionary way, showing us directions we could be moving in--hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to arrive, to take hold. Rudolph Wurlitzer is really, really good, and I hope he manages to come down again soon, long enough anyhow to guide us on another one like Nog."

[alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wurlitzer really nogged my head up.

This novel places the reader so authentically within an unscrewed mind that putting it down actually left me feeling disoriented at times.

The psychedelic cover and massive Pynchon nod (nog?) thereon caught my attention, but I was actually surprised how compelling I found this one.

It loses a star for misogynistic aspects that would've turned me away entirely were it a lesser work.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

They don't call it a "headventure" on the cover for nothing. A far out, insider's experiential take on late 60's drug culture like no other. Where the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test documents psychedelic culture from the outside, Nog testifies from inside the brain while on a large dose.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once you get the rhythm down, this book fucking reads itself.

[[ashes]]

There isn't much to say. One day I started reading this book and on another I finished it. What happened in-between those days is a memory lost. What happened is not up to me to decide.

[John Matthews · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I didn’t enjoy this dark and disorienting book, I’m glad it exists.

It’s not because Rudolph Wurlitzer can’t write well that I didn’t enjoy it. There are passages in this book that contain coherent and sustained dialog that prove he can write proficiently. For most of the book however, he chooses not to, probably because Nog is not designed to be pleasurable or fully comprehensible.

Here is a world seen through opaque glass, heard as if from a passing car, and felt through what is probably a drug haze. There are strange juxtapositions of observations, events and speech throughout, and the result is vertigo-inducing. I didn’t so much read this book as fall from one sentence to the next in an endless tumble.

We follow a character named . . . well, we’re not sure. He might be “Nog” but then again, that might be a name he stole or someone he invented. Everyone who encounters him finds him psychologically slippery. What we know for sure in this book is next to nothing. There are fragments, contradictions, memories true or false—we’re never quite sure what’s hallucination and what’s real. Our viewing lens is smeared with Vaseline and the glimpses of the periphery aren’t reassuring.

Nog may be a drug-addled hippie who can’t get straight long enough to make a single coherent decision or act. At one notably human moment, a woman Nog is involved with becomes frustrated that he’s incapable of the slightest responsible act (like taking a turn driving a camper van). Pills are taken and dispensed with no deliberation, fanfare or joy.

Wurlitzer’s abstractions are so extreme at times it’s like looking at a Rorschach inkblot and not being able to come up with a slightly recognizable image. We are immersed moment to moment into a fragmented consciousness that jerks and shudders like a machine about to run out of gas. There is no plot, no hero, villain or roadmap, moral or otherwise. At one point, I worried that Nog was going to spend the next hundred pages living in a hallway. When he finally moved down to the kitchen pantry, I was profoundly relieved.

Perhaps Nog is a representation of the drifter lifestyle of the hippie, one that ultimately turns tedious. That’s understandable. Even vast ideas for remaking the culture can get tiresome if you haven’t bathed or eaten properly in weeks and have no idea where you’ll spend the night. Following characters who drift without purpose has the same effect.

The book’s most profound message may be that we are all just temporary ghosts with a fluid consciousness we struggle to understand and control. Are the few memories Nog holds onto real? Do they belong to him or to someone else?

It occurs to me that memories are chemically-triggered recreations of events and experiences that belong to someone else—someone we were in the past. So how real, exactly are memories then? And what is wrong if we selectively choose certain ones to keep and others to discard?

If a bad memory haunts you, suppressing it and hitching up to a new identity may just be survival.

Nog seems like he’s just trying to survive.

In that sense, he’s just like us.

That’s why I’m glad this book exists.