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The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not so many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for man.
– Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
A book left on a café table, a waiter chasing after the customer to return it – so begins a series of riffs on the relationship between reader and writer, taking in biographies, shoplifting, launch parties, queues for the toilet at literary festivals, cover designs, endings, re-reading, dog-walking and bonfires.
– Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
A book left on a café table, a waiter chasing after the customer to return it – so begins a series of riffs on the relationship between reader and writer, taking in biographies, shoplifting, launch parties, queues for the toilet at literary festivals, cover designs, endings, re-reading, dog-walking and bonfires.
43 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
About the author
Jack Robinson
8 books5 followersJack Robinson is a pen-name of Charles Boyle, editor of CB editions.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 21, 2022
Eric meets the narrator when he hands over the book he left behind in the cafe where Eric works as a waiter, wanting to be a writer. The book is the subject of the novel - TS Nyman XXX
We form relationships to books. And we form relationships with people who read the same books. But it's near impossible to explain it. We can't really ask the author why we like their book. Authors exist outside the book and your relationship to the book. So it's fruitless going there. Yet we do anyway.
That relationship is crafted by a machinery of publisher, agent, publicist, bookshop, festivals. An image of a writer who goes on long walks, works in a lovely room, has a big scruffy dog emerges.
If we go too far in pursuing that relationship, we are angered at what we discover, fakes, and scammers. The narrator goes to burlesque style performance ofXXX by a Nyman impersonator. He is so angry, he forces a conversation after the performance and demands the books signed by the performer with the authors name. A unique object is created out of the book. But it is a fake of a fake, the French translation. Not the author's words. The anger is deep, the experience sordid.
The writing is sparse, lucid, like all books should be. The subject elusive, like all our endeavours end up. It is brief, very brief, you want to call it something other than a novella even. A prose poem, long form. It doesn't matter. You can't define everything.
We form relationships to books. And we form relationships with people who read the same books. But it's near impossible to explain it. We can't really ask the author why we like their book. Authors exist outside the book and your relationship to the book. So it's fruitless going there. Yet we do anyway.
That relationship is crafted by a machinery of publisher, agent, publicist, bookshop, festivals. An image of a writer who goes on long walks, works in a lovely room, has a big scruffy dog emerges.
If we go too far in pursuing that relationship, we are angered at what we discover, fakes, and scammers. The narrator goes to burlesque style performance ofXXX by a Nyman impersonator. He is so angry, he forces a conversation after the performance and demands the books signed by the performer with the authors name. A unique object is created out of the book. But it is a fake of a fake, the French translation. Not the author's words. The anger is deep, the experience sordid.
The writing is sparse, lucid, like all books should be. The subject elusive, like all our endeavours end up. It is brief, very brief, you want to call it something other than a novella even. A prose poem, long form. It doesn't matter. You can't define everything.
November 19, 2017
For someone who hasn’t even started, where to begin?
...
You could start with the one that someone whose opinions you don’t respect thinks is terrible, or the one someone you do respect says is good, but that’s not a proven method either. For a first date, going for the one with the fewest number of pages might be best.
Of course there’s always the risk that you’ll like it, which is a little scary, because then you’ll want to read the others, and what you’re basically doing here is signing away a percentage of the rest of your life to this writer.
Which is exactly what happened to me with Jack Robinson - and indeed I suspect most who read one of his books will then want to read them all. The good news is that his books are short and he has only written 5, so the % of your life signed away is tiny, and the even better news is that it will be more than worth it.
Jack Robinson is one of a number of pen names of Charles Boyle, who runs the publisher CB Editions, or perhaps one could better describe it as one of his authorial alter egos. In Boyle's words:
And I am very glad he does insist: I have previously read:
An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.- my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Robinson - my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Recessional - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and
Days and Nights In W12 - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and this completes my reading, and rather fittingly is a book all about the relationship between a reader and a writer's complete works.
Inspired by a true story when CB Boyle was reunited by a waiter with a book he left in a restaurant, it begins (NB a longer sample can be found here http://www.cbeditions.com/userfiles/f... )
Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for the coffee? My mind was a blank. It was the waiter, I decided, and I hadn’t paid. I stopped and turned and he almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, he handed me the book I’d left on the table. Had I read XXX, he asked, by the same author. No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. He seemed a little eager. He was younger than me, in the way that she is older. You should, he said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still her best.
On the next page we find who 'she' is (fictitious obviously):
T. S. Nyman. She’s a blue writer, I knew that from the opening paragraph of XXX, which was the first Nyman I came across. [...] There are pink writers, obviously, and there are grey writers and brown writers and red writers, even some yellow ones, and most of them can shift around a little on the spectrum but each does have a base colour and Nyman is one of the blues but also a little coy, peeping from behind those initials.
The story is told in 39 single paragraph chapters, with a modal length of half a page, and covering just 43 pages in total.
Eric, the waiter, and the first-person narrator (himself an alter ego of Jack Robinson) are both fans of the T.S. Nyman and the story records their thoughts on her work, particularly XXX. XXX is presented as many things in the novel - not all mutually compatible ("the last thing I’d claim for this book is consistency", admitted Robinson is another of his books). I noted that at different times in the brief story XXX is:
the book the author is about to launch; her first book with a mainstream publisher; her comeback book after a long unexplained hiatus; the one the author subsequently disowned and erased from her oeuvre; her most explicit title but her least explicit text; an as yet unwritten novel, read by a character in another of her books; the book that gives us a glimpse of the book, YYY, that she really wants to write; her one book the narrator couldn’t finish; the one with the cop-out ending; the one with the twist; the one he first read; the one he read at a crucial moment in his life; the one most commonly donated to 2nd hand shops; the one Obama purchased during a photo-op and Cameron announced as his holiday reading; the one made into a movie; the one that was actually ghost-written by someone else.
And we also get their experiences as fans and their personal interactions with her, some of which in Eric's case verge on stalking:
Reader, I married her – Eric getting a little carried away. After XXX he did write to her, care of her publisher. A kind of thank-you letter, he says, very polite. Two or three letters, he adds, when I ask if that was the only one. Not more than half a dozen. He never got a reply. He wasn't expecting one.
We also get brief accounts, again not all mutually compatible and all of which ring horribly true, of:
- the jealousy when your favourite undiscovered author goes mainstream (now she’s got all these new readers, she didn’t need me anymore);
- the anticipated disappointment of seeing your favourite author in person at a book reading (you want them to be both humble and authoritative, fallible and infallible). And the greater actual disappointment when the reading of her book turns out to be done by someone else.
- the awkward wait for the first question at a reading - and the second obtuse one that baffles even the author.
And also thoughts on being what I refer to as a completist, someone who seeks and reads every book by an author. The narrator decides on a compromise of reading every other book, trying to convince himself:
but really, you don’t have to read all of them. You don’t have to read any of them, come to that.
Except where it is Jack Robinson you really have to read them all.
And my advice for what it's worth: start with An Overcoat, and finish with this one. My 5 stars are for 5 magnificent books when read as a whole.
...
You could start with the one that someone whose opinions you don’t respect thinks is terrible, or the one someone you do respect says is good, but that’s not a proven method either. For a first date, going for the one with the fewest number of pages might be best.
Of course there’s always the risk that you’ll like it, which is a little scary, because then you’ll want to read the others, and what you’re basically doing here is signing away a percentage of the rest of your life to this writer.
Which is exactly what happened to me with Jack Robinson - and indeed I suspect most who read one of his books will then want to read them all. The good news is that his books are short and he has only written 5, so the % of your life signed away is tiny, and the even better news is that it will be more than worth it.
Jack Robinson is one of a number of pen names of Charles Boyle, who runs the publisher CB Editions, or perhaps one could better describe it as one of his authorial alter egos. In Boyle's words:
Jack-of-all-trades? Hardly. He’s no poet. He’s not a non-fiction writer because he likes making things up, but nor is he a novelist: he has a short attention span, he lacks stamina, he can’t sustain a plot and he’s not that interested in how characters develop. He writes short books, generally made up of fragments, in which fiction and fact bounce off each other. He likes table tennis, without being much good at it. He’s a bit frivolous, frankly. I don’t think he’s married. He can be forgetful (as I can: I’d forgotten, until the review of by the same author reminded me, that I once described CBe as ‘a small machine for reading aloud to strangers’). He’s not good at joining things up (he can just about do joined-up handwriting). He has a problem with endings. (A review remarks on how many of the paragraphs – ‘It’s hard to describe these sequent pages as “episodes”’ – don’t so much end as simply stop: ‘Robinson’s paragraphs run for as long as their thoughts do, and then stop running’.) He’s stubborn: knowing that he’s not a ‘natural’ novelist/poet/journalist, he still insists on writinghttp://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2016...
And I am very glad he does insist: I have previously read:
An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.- my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Robinson - my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Recessional - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and
Days and Nights In W12 - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
and this completes my reading, and rather fittingly is a book all about the relationship between a reader and a writer's complete works.
Inspired by a true story when CB Boyle was reunited by a waiter with a book he left in a restaurant, it begins (NB a longer sample can be found here http://www.cbeditions.com/userfiles/f... )
Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for the coffee? My mind was a blank. It was the waiter, I decided, and I hadn’t paid. I stopped and turned and he almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, he handed me the book I’d left on the table. Had I read XXX, he asked, by the same author. No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. He seemed a little eager. He was younger than me, in the way that she is older. You should, he said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still her best.
On the next page we find who 'she' is (fictitious obviously):
T. S. Nyman. She’s a blue writer, I knew that from the opening paragraph of XXX, which was the first Nyman I came across. [...] There are pink writers, obviously, and there are grey writers and brown writers and red writers, even some yellow ones, and most of them can shift around a little on the spectrum but each does have a base colour and Nyman is one of the blues but also a little coy, peeping from behind those initials.
The story is told in 39 single paragraph chapters, with a modal length of half a page, and covering just 43 pages in total.
Eric, the waiter, and the first-person narrator (himself an alter ego of Jack Robinson) are both fans of the T.S. Nyman and the story records their thoughts on her work, particularly XXX. XXX is presented as many things in the novel - not all mutually compatible ("the last thing I’d claim for this book is consistency", admitted Robinson is another of his books). I noted that at different times in the brief story XXX is:
the book the author is about to launch; her first book with a mainstream publisher; her comeback book after a long unexplained hiatus; the one the author subsequently disowned and erased from her oeuvre; her most explicit title but her least explicit text; an as yet unwritten novel, read by a character in another of her books; the book that gives us a glimpse of the book, YYY, that she really wants to write; her one book the narrator couldn’t finish; the one with the cop-out ending; the one with the twist; the one he first read; the one he read at a crucial moment in his life; the one most commonly donated to 2nd hand shops; the one Obama purchased during a photo-op and Cameron announced as his holiday reading; the one made into a movie; the one that was actually ghost-written by someone else.
And we also get their experiences as fans and their personal interactions with her, some of which in Eric's case verge on stalking:
Reader, I married her – Eric getting a little carried away. After XXX he did write to her, care of her publisher. A kind of thank-you letter, he says, very polite. Two or three letters, he adds, when I ask if that was the only one. Not more than half a dozen. He never got a reply. He wasn't expecting one.
We also get brief accounts, again not all mutually compatible and all of which ring horribly true, of:
- the jealousy when your favourite undiscovered author goes mainstream (now she’s got all these new readers, she didn’t need me anymore);
- the anticipated disappointment of seeing your favourite author in person at a book reading (you want them to be both humble and authoritative, fallible and infallible). And the greater actual disappointment when the reading of her book turns out to be done by someone else.
- the awkward wait for the first question at a reading - and the second obtuse one that baffles even the author.
And also thoughts on being what I refer to as a completist, someone who seeks and reads every book by an author. The narrator decides on a compromise of reading every other book, trying to convince himself:
but really, you don’t have to read all of them. You don’t have to read any of them, come to that.
Except where it is Jack Robinson you really have to read them all.
And my advice for what it's worth: start with An Overcoat, and finish with this one. My 5 stars are for 5 magnificent books when read as a whole.
April 11, 2018
A charming, sui generis little romp, which will appeal to anyone who, like myself is an avid (obsessive?) reader. Since there are already two lengthy reviews of this by my chums Paul & Neil, I will defer to their loquacious & insightful reviews, and just say I enjoyed it immensely.
November 21, 2017
Anyone who loves reading and who has made any kind of effort to read all the books written by one individual will enjoy this book, I think. And, if you don’t, it is only 43 pages long and most of those pages are not full. For me, it represented, appropriately, the final Jack Robinson book - it is both the last one I read and the last one he has written (so far). Given the subject matter, I think it is appropriate to complete your reading of his books with this one.
The story begins when the narrator is chased as he leaves a restaurant by a waiter who wants to return to him a book he has left behind. The narrator and the waiter discover a shared love of this author’s work and the rest of the book is a series of thoughts about what it means to read the full works of one author. The (fictitious) author is T. S. Nyman and her books are always referred to as XXX. This generic title covers a whole host of different books from Nyman from her new book about to be released to her comeback book after a long break to her yet-to-be-written next book to ...
Interestingly, the book I read just prior to this was Orfeo by Richard Powers. This includes a repeating motif of music students listening to a single note and learning to hear the harmonics (other notes) that lie within that single note. Here, one of the chapters reads:
And then there are the books she hasn’t written, the ones that got away … I look at the list of titles and sometimes I think they’re all just decoys, and that behind XXX there’s a YYY, which is the real book, the book she was trying to write, the book that was in her head when she sat down at the desk but which didn’t make it to the page. So I read between the lines, trying to catch a glimpse, which slows everything down. And then back another step, so that behind each YYY there’s a ZZZ, and I start feeling dizzy.
As a reader, it is fascinating to come across little vignettes that touch a nerve. What about that author you’ve been reading that no one has heard of and who suddenly gets picked up by a major publisher and everyone is reading her/him - what happens to your "special relationship"? What about the slightly nervous feeling when you head to a book reading and will be seeing one of your favourite authors in the flesh - will they be a disappointment?
And then, circling back to the idea of reading all books by an author, how do you decide which ones to read and in which order - the narrator explores various options, none of which seem satisfactory, and ends by saying "Maybe get you your mum or your dad to choose. Many arranged marriages do work."
Of course, as the narrator says "but really, you don’t have to read all of them. You don’t have to read any of them, come to that."
That said, my advice with regards to Jack Robinson’s books is that you do read all of them. None are long so it is not a huge time commitment, but I do not think it is time you will consider wasted however long it takes.
The story begins when the narrator is chased as he leaves a restaurant by a waiter who wants to return to him a book he has left behind. The narrator and the waiter discover a shared love of this author’s work and the rest of the book is a series of thoughts about what it means to read the full works of one author. The (fictitious) author is T. S. Nyman and her books are always referred to as XXX. This generic title covers a whole host of different books from Nyman from her new book about to be released to her comeback book after a long break to her yet-to-be-written next book to ...
Interestingly, the book I read just prior to this was Orfeo by Richard Powers. This includes a repeating motif of music students listening to a single note and learning to hear the harmonics (other notes) that lie within that single note. Here, one of the chapters reads:
And then there are the books she hasn’t written, the ones that got away … I look at the list of titles and sometimes I think they’re all just decoys, and that behind XXX there’s a YYY, which is the real book, the book she was trying to write, the book that was in her head when she sat down at the desk but which didn’t make it to the page. So I read between the lines, trying to catch a glimpse, which slows everything down. And then back another step, so that behind each YYY there’s a ZZZ, and I start feeling dizzy.
As a reader, it is fascinating to come across little vignettes that touch a nerve. What about that author you’ve been reading that no one has heard of and who suddenly gets picked up by a major publisher and everyone is reading her/him - what happens to your "special relationship"? What about the slightly nervous feeling when you head to a book reading and will be seeing one of your favourite authors in the flesh - will they be a disappointment?
And then, circling back to the idea of reading all books by an author, how do you decide which ones to read and in which order - the narrator explores various options, none of which seem satisfactory, and ends by saying "Maybe get you your mum or your dad to choose. Many arranged marriages do work."
Of course, as the narrator says "but really, you don’t have to read all of them. You don’t have to read any of them, come to that."
That said, my advice with regards to Jack Robinson’s books is that you do read all of them. None are long so it is not a huge time commitment, but I do not think it is time you will consider wasted however long it takes.
October 28, 2021
43 small pages of joy for the bibliophile.
July 30, 2021
This was published in 2016, a very short (40-something page) story about the author's friendship with a waiter/writer named Eric who tracks the author down after the author leaves his book, XXX by T.S. Nyman, at the cafe where Eric works. Ninety-five percent of the lines I read a few days ago in Charles Boyle's The Other Jack, published recently in mid-2021, except in the recent version Eric is a woman named Robyn and XXX by Nyman is Recessional by Jack Robinson. On page 37 of this little book, there's something about how behind every book like XXX there lurks YYY, the real book, the book the author wanted to write, and behind that one there may even be a ZZZ, although the prospect of it induces dizziness. I feel a little duped and a little giddy that this little Jack Robinson book from five years ago was essentially the basis for "The Other Jack," but ultimately I come away from the experience sort of bemused, thinking I've never quite read anything like this pair before. The only thing I can think of is a story by Bolano extended and honed into a short novel?
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews