The Unfortunates

by B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe (Introduction)

A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match.

B.S. Johnson’s famous ‘book in a box’, in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. The Unfortunates is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

B. S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic and film-maker.

Johnson was born into a working class family, was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university exam for King's College London.

After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional (though the latter became famous for the cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward), but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.

A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was released in 2000.

At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in Johnson's work.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘How can I place his order, his disintegration?’

Through fragments of a randomized collection of memories called up while wandering through a city, the reader explores the life, loves and losses of the narrator. As such a premise would remind many of Ulysses and Joyce’s incredible use of the stream-of-consciousness, B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) manages to create something unique and inventive with The Unfortunates. His story is separated into 27 packets which are intended to be read at random aside from the First and Last chapter, and allows for a creative artificial impression for the act of memory and thought. The random approach, which may initially be dismissed as cutesy and gimmicky, manages to go deeper and beyond the gimmick and explore the implied meanings we place upon order.

In the Hungarian translation of the book, which was published as a regularly bound novel, Johnson included a special introduction urging the reader to still experience the chapters at random, stressing that ‘perhaps the point...of the novel in it’s original format; the tangible metaphor for the way the mind works’. By randomly selecting the order, each reader is given an opportunity for a personal experience of the novel. The form itself is a larger explanation of form. In the context of the story, we experience his memories out of chronological order, much like how we experience our own sets of memories. In the context of the form, it examines how order affects our understanding and meaning. In my own personal reading, Johnson, the narrator is a potentially fictional version of the actual author, spent much of the present eating and referring to vague moments of him and his desceased friend Tony eating in the city. It wasn’t until the penultimate packet that I actually experienced the fleshed out memory. This gives an impression that this memory was somehow of extreme importance to Johnson, and was possibly suppressed in his mind until he could properly deal with it at the end. It is a statement on the way I have been conditioned to approach novels; I noticed that the final few packets had a subtle sense of greater intensity as I typically expect the final sections of a novel to be where themes tie together and where the climax of plot should be. Had the luck of the draw given an entire different plot point near the end, the food scene would likely have seemed less crucial and the different point would have been garnished with this implied intensity. While this is a short book, much of the information is rather repetitive, which allows it to not only to seem to fit together well regardless of order, but positions the reader to different vantage points on memories. Depending on which view of an event the reader experiences first – Johnson, when in one memory, will refer to events in later or earlier memories and then have another packet pertaining directly to the memory, provides a subtly different meaning to the narrative. Sometimes you have forshadowing, sometimes just a simple revisit of an earlier idea.

‘Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition,’ writes Johnson. He draws are attentions through the form to our impressions and imposed meanings, but also dismisses them all as meaningless. Perhaps our explanations on the form don’t matter at all, and the random order serves as an elaborate distraction when all he really wants to get across is the workings of the mind. ‘How the mind arranges itself, tries to sort things into order, is perturbed if things are not worted,’ he muses as he sorts threw the mental shoebox of strewn about memories. There is plenty of evidence to support that this is the real impression he wants to get across, as the style of writing is rambling with extensive use of commas, breaks to represent a drifting mind, and a constant second guessing and correcting that reminded me of the narrator in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.’

Rest assured, there is content to the book beyond the form and style, although the story is admittedly secondary. While that is the initial draw, be it gimmick or no, there is substance to be had from the story. This is a rather tragic book, exploring the themes of death, frailty and futility. The death of Tony is the major set of memories Johnson wrestles with, yet in digging up the past for Tony, a whole slew of other painful, and sometimes pleasant, memories are pulled to the surface. The death of Tony and the death of Johnson’s relationship with his college flame, Wendy, are eternally forged together in the imprints of his memory. While they occurred at the same time, it is the betrayal of life for Tony, and the betrayal of Wendy (while he constantly references ‘the betrayal’, he never clarifies if she actually slept around on him or if it was something else) that keep them inseparable. It seems these deaths helped to solidify his use of food as an escape as well, Tony’s life being eaten out of him by the world and cancer is countered by Johnson taking in life from the world though food. The frustrations felt, the sheer futility to stop the cancer left Johnson second-guess his life from then on out. The sportswriter scene depicts Johnson constantly questioning his choices of words and his own worth as a sportswriter, displaying his feeling of futility to actually be a good, authentic writer. He has watched his closest friend disintegrate, his relationships disintegrate, and now he notices all around him peeling paint, chipped banisters, and other aspects of crumbling architecture.

While this is a novel about the death of a friend, since Johnson puts the reader into his mind it is really a novel about Johnson. We learn more about him than we ever do Tony, and we are only able to know his own impressions on the events. In the introduction, Johnathan Coe observes that the majority of interaction with Tony shows them discussing Johnson, his book, his problems with Wendy, etc. Perhaps this is the strongest argument that the book is really about our implied impressions, unique to each reader, as the book is the unique impressions of events as seen by one person. ‘The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies’. The standard novel is perceived as a generalization of themes, symbols and ideas that all readers can light upon, but this novel insists on doing away with generalizations and entering into a solipsistic viewpoint on life around us, to fully appreciate what one individual feels, to be alone in a sea of perspectives. His anger towards Christianity in the book, seeing turning to God only in the final hours as a cop-out, is an expression of ‘generalization’; it is submitting to a general idea of existence and general set of goals, ideals and morals. He feels you should face death in your own narrow viewpoints, goals, ideals and morals. The terrifying thing is that no matter how we view life though, we still are all barreling towards death and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, ours and theirs. ‘It is difficult to think of these things without terror, the pity is easy to feel, easy to contain, but so useless’.

As this is often considered a work of post modernism, my opinions and imposed meanings are essentially meaningless. Besides, don’t take my word for it (take Mike’s word in his review though!), the idea is to form your own perspectives and meanings since that is how we experience life. Well, a decent metaphor for it at least. If all this is meaningless, and this book is nothing but gimmick, it is still worth investigating. Picking packets and random was a fun experience, and the box makes a nice addition to any bookshelf, as well as a great place to store your packets, notes, pens and stash your bookmarks. While the book is rather repetitive, it is still a good, quick read, and the structure is exciting. What I enjoyed most of all was how he placed you in his lecture halls and all over campus through his memories, places I really love to be. It brought back my own memories of sweating through exams, tragically failed college romances, late-night debates and laughter amongst classmates over booze or coffee. It is impressive as well that this book came out in 1967, yet still hasn’t received much attention despite publishers like McSweeny that clamor to deliver quirky structures such as this book. That really gives further meaning to Johnson's discussion of 'old solutions to modern problems'. So open up Johnson’s box.

3.75/5

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have two books in my library that are way different from the others format-wise. This is one of them. It’s by B. S. Johnson (first published in 1969). He was considered an experimental fiction writer in the 1960s. He committed suicide in 1973. I think he is one of those writers where he only became better known in the world of fiction after he died (I am also thinking of John Williams who wrote ‘Stoner’).

‘The Unfortunates’ is in an attractive box the size of a book. In the box are 29 loose-leaf stapled pages, each of the 29 sections in number of pages from only 1 (in which case it is not stapled) to most commonly 6 and to as many as 12 pages. 27 are bound together by a wrapper (see here for what it looks like: https://biblioklept.org/2021/06/02/b-...). You can re-arrange the sections in any way you want. Johnson only produces an order to the reading by recommending you read first the group of papers labeled as ‘First’ and read last the group of papers labeled as ‘Last’. The order of the sections in between is up to you. Unique, huh? I first read it in 1999 and gave it an ‘A’, I think in part because it was so novel (pardon the pun). Conceivably one could arrange the 27 inner sections in literally countless new ways…

But…I am not sure what that accomplished. According to Jonathan Coe who wrote a very fine Introduction in 1999, B. S. Johnson believed that:
• The straightforward Dickensian novel had had its day.
• Novelists, if they were to be honest, should confine themselves to one subject only: the simple facts of their own lives.

This book is a memoir of sorts – it is his recollection of a friend of his who had died of cancer. Johnson, a journalist at the time, had a lot of memories of him re-surface when he was assigned to report on a soccer match in the same town in which he came acquainted with the friend. They were both graduate students at the time and both eventually got their PhDs. Tony, his friend, was married while in graduate school and he and his wife June had a young son. The narrator who is nameless throughout (but I guess is B.S Johnson) had a girlfriend, Wendy, who throughout his novel he constantly refers to in either a positive light or a negative light (they eventually broke up, and he appears not to have gotten over her). Eventually the narrator gets married to Ginnie and they have a son. The book is memoirish in that he does tell us (albeit rarely) about the soccer match he is to report on one Saturday afternoon, but interspersed with that match is his recollections of his friend in no fixed order. That is vitally important – he recalls his friend and episodes of him with Tony in a non-linear fashion. And that is why he did not want to write the book in a linear fashion (linear fashion: I first met Tony 10 years ago, and here is what happened as I recall from the moment I first met him to the moment he died).

As Coe so eloquently puts it:
• So, what exactly was taking place on ‘the inside of his skull’ as Johnson went about the task of reporting his football match that Saturday afternoon? Memories of Tony were unfolding. Certainly, but not in a structured, linear way, and they were interrupted at random by the action on the pitch and his attempt to start writing his match report. It was this randomness, this lack of structure in the way we remember things and receive impressions, that Johnson wanted to record with absolute fidelity. But randomness, he realized, is ‘directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book: for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material’. His solution, as always, was simple and radical: the pages of ‘The Unfortunates’ should not be bound at all.
• …but even then, a longish, twelve-page section, for instance, would impose its own narrative sequence, and any attempt at conveying randomness would be suspended for a good span of reading time. ‘I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely,’ Johnson later admitted. ‘But I continue to believe that my solution was nearer, and even if it was only marginally nearer, then it was still a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind’s randomness than the imposed order of a bound book.’

I gotta admit, that is certainly food for thought. 🙂 🧐 But no matter how much one moves the 27 sections around, I still think one would get the same take-away messages from the novel/semi-memoir. That the narrator is recalling Tony’s life and death and his interactions with Tony, and as well, separate from his friend Tony, the narrator’s life too during that time period in a hodge-podge way of remembering (non-linear). So maybe it was a gimmick as Coe wonders…an excellent way of attracting publicity. I’m not sure he accomplished that. There was not a huge print run for this novel…I guess he already had made some enemies in the literary world with his different views.

And in fact, this book was selling for over 100 times the original cover price in the 1990s (original editions were scarce) so Picador re-issued it in 1999.

I am glad I re-read it, and am glad I have it in my library, but not sure I will be re-reading it any time soon to determine if reading it in a different order does something different to me. 😐 I will say that his remembering how Tony was during his battle with cancer, and the physical descriptions of Tony (his teeth ready to fall out, his salivary glands destroyed by the chemo so he constantly had to sip water, his fatigue even when talking, pain) was gripping and it was sobering.

Note:
The other books that I have that are way different from normal books are pamphlets that can be unfolded and they tell a short story – Travelman Short Stories. I have short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, William Trevor, Bram Stoker, and several more. I don’t know if they are available anymore…I don’t think so ☹: http://www.travelman.co.uk/

Reviews
• interesting! https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/bo...
• https://www.nysun.com/arts/shuffling-...

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty minutes ago, I had this review in the bag. I had taken thorough notes, had arranged them by topic, and had even highlighted passages to quote.

And then B. S. Johnson, the author of The Unfortunates, dropped this bomb on me in the second to last paragraph:

“The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.”

That really puts a cramp in any attempt at review, since to review is to generalize, don’t you think? And, hey, isn’t Johnson generalizing by saying that generalizations are lies?

So, give me a second. Let me take a few sips of my tea, look over my notes one more time, and take a deep breath. Allow me a minute to gather my thoughts and come back to this experimental and provocative text, because my head is beginning to hurt in that way it does after reading post-modernism.

Firstly, there is not enough room on this coffee shop table for the book, my computer, my notes, and the five highlighters it took to organize my thoughts into a rainbowed outline.

The act of reading this book is incredibly tactile. You hold the individual chapters in your hand to read, people passing stare at the thin pamphlets, the man next to me looks up every time I put one section to the left and pick up the next on the right. It’s an attention grabber with its box cover, its 1-12 page sections, and its gift-like presentation. I opened it for the first time and felt the need to take pictures of it like I did ten years ago when I got my first iPod.

This book is beautiful.

It consists of twenty-seven chapters that are separately bound. The first and last are marked and in place at the top and bottom of the pile of chapters, but the remaining twenty-five arrive in random order. In his note to the reader, Johnson encourages him to choose: read the chapters in the order in which they arrive or rearrange them before beginning. When I began reading I was sitting across from The Canadian in a bookstore. She was struggling with formatting her novel, and I was struggling with a novel that defied formatting.

“How do you think I should read it?” I asked.

“What?” She looked up. She looked frantic and frustrated.

“The sections. Do you think I should read them as they came to me, or do you think I should mix them up?”

“Oh.” She rested her chin in her hand and seemed for the first time in hours to be distracted from her task. “I would read it in the order I received it.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to think that I received the book in the order I was supposed to read it.”

This is why I love her.

In the first chapter Johnson arrives in Nottingham to report on a football game. He thinks he is traveling to a town that he has never been to before but, setting food on solid ground, is aware that he has spent a good deal of time in this town. In fact, he spent most of that time with his friend and colleague, Tony, who died some time ago from cancer. And so begin the twenty-five randomly arranged chapters that alternate between the present and the past, between Johnson’s day in Nottingham and his memories of Tony.

(I should mention here that the “novel” is entirely autobiographical. Johnson was very vocal in his belief that fiction should be true. Any novel that wasn’t absolutely true, in his opinion, was a lie, and truth could not be conveyed with lies. “How can you convey truth in a vehicle of fiction?” he asked. “The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites, and it must logically be impossible.” Of course many (if not most) literary critics and creatives would disagree and argue that “truth” is too subtle to be achieved through the use of literal language and historical details. I think Tim O’Brien said it best: “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” In the end, Johnson’s insistence on absolute truth proved to be too restrictive: “Johnson’s theory, in effect a breathtaking insistence that all literature should reduce itself to the status of glorified memoir, eventually proved too much of a straightjacket: by the time of his last, posthumously published novel, See The Old Lady Decently, he was reaching further and further back into his family history, and the result has an air of strain and imprecision, weariness even” [from the introduction by Jonathan Coe].)

In the end I appreciated the order in which I received the book. Somewhat divinely, my arrangement of chapters ended with the final exchange between Tony and Johnson:

“…the last thing I said to him, all I had to give him, alone with him, with my coat on, about to go, the car waiting outside to run us to the station, staring down at him, facing those eyes, he staring back all the time now, it must have been a great effort for him, yes, and I said, it was all I had, what else could I do, I said, I’ll get it all down, mate. It’ll be very little, he said, after a while, slowly, still those eyes. That’s all anyone has done, very little, I said.”

So how does one review a book that makes the argument that it is the sole truth of its author and therefore cannot be questioned, criticized, or challenged? Should I play into Johnson’s philosophy or push against it? If you’ll allow me, I think I’ll do both.

The book, while literally about death, loss, and creativity, concerns itself predominantly with the accidental and persistent nature of memory. If the writing style suggests it (the run-on sentences, the spaces on the page where the speaker’s thought process is interrupted, and the lines that end mid-sentence), then the form enforces it. You can’t help but read it randomly, the memories coming without provocation, occurring as arbitrarily as the order in which you receive the book.

I should be honest: I had ulterior motives for this review after having read very little of the book. I wanted this review to be a discussion about truth and memory (selfishly: they’re my favorite literary themes [aside, of course, from sex]). I wanted this review to hotly contest Johnson’s perception of memory with a slew of quotes from van der Kolk and Freud. I wanted this review to be a literary smack down.

After taking a class on narratives derived from traumatic memory, I felt my chest puff out and my know-it-all-ness preparing to reject Johnson’s version of how memory is experienced. After having only read the introduction, I found myself shouting angrily at the text, “But memory isn’t random! It is triggered by something in the present, a smell, a taste, a lost memento rediscovered in the attic.” Like Proust considering a tea-soaked madeleine, memory occurs when something in the present triggers something in the past. It is not random. It is not accidental.

But then I remembered something. I remembered the night last summer that I spent with The Poet and the fragmented words I wrote the morning after. I drove back to Bread Loaf after leaving him on the side of Route 7 and sat in my twin bed trying desperately to get everything down that I could remember. Maybe, I thought, if I could remember everything from the night before, I could make sense of what had happened. I would know why he kissed me in the middle of the lake, and why he fed me bites of his breakfast sandwich, and why exactly he had begun to pull away on the couch as we listened to the sound of Lake Champlain moving like a tongue against the rocks.

Isn’t this what we feel, fundamentally, when we write? We write to make sense of the world. We use the imprecise art of words to describe what cannot otherwise be described.

What I wrote in my bed that day was entirely accidental. The memories came to me randomly. They repeated themselves. They were out of order. Remembering the silence that fell over us at the register while we paid for our lunch (a sandwich that we split) was interrupted by remembering how he had sat facing me on the bed in the morning and rubbed his big toe against mine as if to comfort me with as little contact as possible.

In that moment of remembering my own remembering, my pretense dropped. My know-it-all-ness turned to the humble concession that what has been written and theorized about memory is not necessarily true for everyone. Maybe most memory is triggered by the present, but in the horrible aftermath of his friend’s death, Johnson strove to memorialize his friend and to convey the process of his own remembering. The danger of generalization that Johnson warns against in his last lines then is that it leaves no room for the unique (bordering on solipsistic) and enigmatic qualities of human experience.

Just now something wonderful happened. As I was holding the chapters loosely in my hand, trying to leaf through the pages to find the last line of a section I loved, the entire text fell onto the floor. The first chapter slid across the granite tile. Four others flipped upside down. A thin chunk of chapters stayed together, but the rest turned backwards and spun out of the order in which I had read them. As I bent down to gather them up I realized that the book, both palpably and intellectually, resists analysis. This difficulty in criticizing a work that is actively negating and deflecting criticism, it seems, is exactly what Johnson wanted.

[Rita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yesterday I had a privilege few have. I had this book read to me, all around Nottingham, as close to the venues described in the book as possible. 27 people in character as Bryan were reading different chapters in different places. The feeling of having to track them down following a map and go inside pubs, cafes, the City Council, Broadway cinema, a private house, a parked car, a hotel, etc., they all added to the story making this an incredible experience. Thank you to Excavate and their community theatre group for their amazing effort and for proving that storytelling is for adults as well.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for gimmicky books, so when I saw this "book-in-a-box" no one had to twist my arm to get me to purchase it, and I'm glad I did. Unlike some of the other gimmicky books I've read (House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts), you don't get the impression that B.S. Johnson was patting himself on the back for being clever as he wrote this. If the introduction is to be believed, he actually probably was patting himself on the back as he wrote it, but you wouldn't know it to read it. The chapters of the book are unbound, and meant to be shuffled and (with the exception of the first and last chapters) read in a random order, in an attempt to translate the non-linear nature of memories into a written format. It sounds gimmicky, and it is, but it's a gimmick that works really well, especially given the stream-of-conciousness writing style and the nature of the story, which is a collection of B.S. Johnson's memories of a friend of his who had died of cancer. Not a terribly uplifting subject, obviously, but it's handled with aplomb-- it's sad, but not in a maudlin fashion. This is easily one of the best books I've read this year, second only to "If on a winter's night a traveller".

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the edition I got from the library came bound in a single volume, I was able to cleverly skip around the chapters as intended, which did increase the fun quotient, if not making much difference in how one experiences the work. Aside from just the avant-garde nature of his novels, I really enjoy Johnson's use of language, and this makes me want to investigate those of his works I haven't yet read.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Unfortunates is B S Johnson’s “infamous” book-in-a-box, and taking it down from the shelf here’s what you get: at first glance, a standard hardback with turquoise cover, title on the front and spine, back-cover blurb and barcode just as you’d expect—except that the whole thing is a small box. Open it out flat, and filling the right-hand tray is a stack of page-bundles which, in a normal hardback, would be bound together of course; but here they’re loose, held by a pink paper band. Facing them in the left-hand tray are your instructions: “NOTE. This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.” It’s beautifully produced, a lovely thing to have.
    Its inner lining also has several quotations, including this one from Laurence Sterne: “It is a history, Sir…of what passes in a man’s own mind”, and that’s what this book is too: what passes through the narrator’s mind, particularly memories of a close friend whose life was cut tragically short by cancer, as he revisits the same city years later. Everywhere he goes—a particular pub, a street-market, a fish-and-chip shop, the main railway station—he remembers details, incidents and snatches of conversation until, in the end, he’s almost overwhelmed.
    We still tend to think of memory as accurate and orderly, when it’s becoming plain it isn’t like that at all; the brain edits, infers and rearranges. There’s clearly a lot else going on too, the way memories intrude into consciousness throughout the day, often intelligibly but also randomly and for no apparent reason. The Unfortunates was Johnson’s attempt at a realistic memoir, neither tidied up for the reader nor done to some literary formula of how it’s “supposed” to be done; these are his own memories of an actual former friend, precisely as they came to him. And it works: what emerges from the twenty-five interchangeable sections is a touching picture, not only of his lost friend and of a whole time and place now gone forever, but of the author himself.
    Honesty was always Johnson’s watchword as a writer; to attempt, at least, to be as realistic in his writing, as truthful, as he could manage; and this random book in its lovely box—“infamous” to many, “post-modern” and “eccentric”—is arguably the most true to life of all his novels.

[Libros Prohibidos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiográfica y experimental, Los desafortunados tiene una estructura imposible sin orden (ni físico ni literal) que hace que apenas pueda ser considerada como novela. Johnson consigue de este modo hacer llegar sus sentimientos al lector de la forma más honesta y pura que es posible recordar en toda la historia de la literatura. Reseña completa:
http://www.libros-prohibidos.com/b-s-...

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that comes in a book-shaped box! Twenty-seven sections, one labelled ‘first’, one ‘last’ and the reader is free to choose the order in which they read the interceding 25 sections. This isn’t a device for the sake of being tricksy, but the author wants to replicate the random and unreliable nature that our memories work.

A writer and journalist is sent to cover a soccer match in a Midlands town. As he steps off the train two hours ahead of kick-off, a host of memories rush into his head as this is a town chockfull of resonance for him. He met one of his best friends who was at University here when he had travelled up for a collaboration on student newspapers. His friend died of cancer at just 29 and the book is a series of chopped up recollections of the triangular friendship together with the man’s wife, the narrator’s own love life, the disease and the nature of writing itself.

As he makes his meandering progress to the football stadium, via café, butchers and pub, he recalls time spent with his friends in various towns. Sometimes the architecture eludes him as he can’t pinpoint which pub or café, or sometimes the architecture itself has changed with progress. Equally he struggles to pinpoint whether the man’s wife, or whichever of his own female consorts was present in some recollected event or not. As much as memory floods in on an emotional level, in its caprice some of the details are denied him and they of course can inflect his emotional response to the memory. It’s interesting that one section is him finally sat in the press box, desultorily composing his report as the match proceeds, limited by both the clichéd language of sports reporting which he’d like to burst out from, plus the word limit of his column inches which pretty much predetermines what he can write even before the match kicks off and play takes what direction it will. On the inside of the box his final match report is printed, and reads very bland and lacking all the linguistic flourishes demonstrated throughout the rest of the book.

There were a couple of places where I didn’t feel the narrative conceit was consistent. It was fortunate that the penultimate section I read happened to be him in the press box of the ground. What would have happened if I’d happened to read that after the ‘first chapter’, the timing would have been way off. This did happen when an early section I read had him on the final part of his walk up to the ground, when later I read sections where he stopped off to buy some meat at a butchers. Just seemed to me that the author could have got around these timing problems easily enough but just hadn’t noticed or tried.

And what of the overall effect of the narrative conceit? My path through is in all likelihood going to be different from any other reader, since their section choices will be different from mine. I think it worked well for both the horrendous rise and fall of hope as the path of the friend’s cancer is traced and also that of memory’s fragmentedness too. As Johnson has his protagonist comment, “yes how the mind arranges itself, tries to sort for things into orders, is perturbed if things are not sorted, are not in the right order, nags away...” This is by far the most interesting parts of the narrative as he struggles over whether it was his first visit to their house, or whether he drove as his friend had not yet passed his driving test, whether that was the occasion when he’d bought a certain book on architecture and so on. And then in the light of his friend’s premature death, does any of it matter anyway? “My mind passes dully over the familiar ground of my prejudices, so much of thought is repetition, is dullness, is sameness”.

Definitely an interesting read, if not a gripping one, since the subject matter is both mundane (in the sense of what is being recalled) and grim in respect of the disease. If you’re interested in literary experimentation, or trying to get to grips with a more realistic mimesis of how the human mind works, I’d say read this novel. if however you are after an entertaining read for entertainment’s sakes, then possibly not. It certainly sparked my creative imagination and helped me resolve a project of my own that had become stalled. The idea of a reader navigating their own path through a narrative (and not a quest or treasure-finding one) is deliciously enticing.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer’s memories of his friend, Tony, recalled in vignettes and following years of friendship all separated into chapters that can be read in any order.

“The difficulty is to understand without generalization….In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.”

The memories are at times hazy, with the writer trying desperately to pin down a date, a location or other details. This reexamination of his friendship seems an attempt to come to terms with Tony’s death and how much this man meant to him. And like the memories that are hard to pin down, the strength of the writer’s affection for his old friend and the loss he feels years later are just as hard to quantify.

“Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me, only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us.”

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

211212: first impression: this in an interesting structure devised to express the time of mourning a friend, a woman, a past, and in its deliberate renditions of vignettes of memories, in its conversational narration, certainly captures evocative recall- but, unfortunately, this is a work that leads me to think more than leads me to feel...

on reflection: to think is not a bad thing, in fact, i like to think. perhaps i will reflect and thus increase my rating, however this is a big perhaps. i may read another of his works or lit crit on this one, but much as i like experimental writing, i am not as immediately engaged as when i first read Jealousy & In the Labyrinthh by Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, i am not as immediately repelled as with Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett...

i think: of other experimental works, such as The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which makes much of brief meditation, or the short work by Alice Munro, such as any of her Selected Stories, 1968-1994, which makes novelistic complexity and dense multiplicity in so very few words. this seems almost in reverse- making a novel into a short story- for there is deliberately no topography, maze, pattern of any sort, unless it in the designed randomness of the twenty-five chapters after first and before last...

i think: is this story truly independent of some narrative direction? is this randomness more than gimmick and showing something we readers could not discover in any other form? i think of work like The Celebration by Ivan Angelo, where the story must be created by the reader out of a mass of documents, or anything by José Saramago, such as The Elephant's Journey, where you the reader are called upon to punctuate and in this simple responsibility find yourself collaborating on the work...

i think: does this form simply alienate the reader? bore her? frustrate her? or through this banal plot argue for the reality that we readers as we persons in ordinary life, only discover or manifest or invent meaning of any banal plot after the fact? that things happen and who knows where they lead, only sensed as important or revelatory through memory? that indeed life makes sense backwards but we must live it forwards...?

i think: if i read it again- after the shuffling- will i find a new story or meaning? or have i got the idea and is once enough? is this proof that we can never create truly abstract or conceptual literature because there is only the medium of words so the writing is always already the concept...?

i think: do i have a naive or instrumental idea of fiction- in my case, perhaps unfortunately, only prose- believing that before anything else it should be a pleasure and not a chore to read? and/or i just have not read the right books...? argue with this idea, i will listen, but my own pleasure always already comes first...

i think: yes this book in a box certainly raises many questions, but in this case questions that are a pleasure to contemplate. to fully appreciate this novel is to recalibrate what usual readers value in lit- this is prestige literature- this is not plot, not setting, not theme or characters, independent of how it is told, the ceaseless conversation within the narrator's head, the monologue that is not edited or organized, that has perhaps found its correct form in randomness...

perhaps.

i think: if this is only any such novel in first-person thought, i much prefer How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman

[Addison Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to evaluate a novel like this. There's a lot to like about it - the prose, the voice, the conclusion, the tactile feel of the chapters, etc. I enjoyed the experience overall. The trick of the chapter booklets - unbound, randomly assorted - is a perfect complement to the themes of the novel (memory's insubstantiality, disconnection, dissipation) and lends an unusual immediacy to the read. It really does feel like Johnson is talking to you, and that's an exciting feeling.

That said, I can't help thinking that the device and the content step on each other's feet. It's undoubtedly true that the book would lose something without the device. Its notoriety, for a start. Maybe even its raison d'être. But it's difficult to see the advantage of reading in one chapter that the protagonist is eating lunch and refraining from ordering a glass of wine he'd promised himself, only to find him in the next chapter going to lunch and promising himself a glass of wine. This was one outcome of my shuffle and it seemed to drive home the inherent weakness of the device. The memories that are the subject of the novel are revealed through a frame that involves the protagonist doing (and narrating) specific things that occur in relation to one another. It makes sense for the memories to occur in random order, but as far as I can see there is no good justification for jumbling the frame elements around. The disclaimer advises us: "If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading." But I found myself unwilling to shuffle the cards into another random order and begin reading again. Instead I just wanted to put the frame narrative into a logical order so that I wasn't flummoxed by the idiosyncrasies of the device.

I'll have to think more about this. Despite its many merits, the book isn't interesting or endearing enough to make me want to read it again right away, and it's hard to imagine that I'll notice tremendous differences (apart from a more logical lunch regime) if I try again in a few months or years. In that sense, I didn't - and am unlikely to - experience the 'experimental' side of the novel in a satisfactory fashion, as reading the novel for the first time is much the same as reading any novel for the first time (apart from the feel of the chapter booklets). The most successful aspect for me was that it left me with an urge to rearrange the memories - not randomly, but as I would prefer to see them. And perhaps, given the novel's concluding paragraphs, this was Johnson's real intention.

Whatever the case, The Unfortunates is "good because it is itself" - not because it's a completely successful experiment.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

been reading bangers lately and this is no exception. unfortunately im on so much medication and can't really think clearly so you will have to accept the fragments i put into my notes app, here they are:
- same plane (inescapable) but diametric opposite to septology (the ruthless? order of that book)
- the relationship to linearity re: sickness
- when it's happening: ORDER (to the friend who did not save my life, bob flanagan's careful notes in the pain journal - possibly bc the failure of the body is only interesting to the person whom it is failing?) grief scrambles time
- but this one; after illness, technically, turns into haunting. tortuous memory, things jumping up unbidden, and not in any particular order. at the mercy of it
- portrait of ross in LA by félix gonzález-torres

— "Can any death be meaningful? Or meaningless?
Are these terms one can use about death?
I don't know, I just feel the pain, the pain."

AND ☝🏽 shoutout to my friend jenny for mailing this to me. real love is a 14 hour flight to the other side of the world idk what to tell you guys

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay this was a book I should have read a long time ago, and I finally read. the content is 4 stars the structure is 3 stars.

lets talk form first. I respect the avant garde thing of splitting up the book. However, content wise:

the book has two pieces memory and present. The memories are these cool intermixed first fiancée/wife and his friend dying and the association of the two, also memories of his first 2 novels. In comparison with present day Ginnie, being a reporter and his son.

this all works really well, except that the form messes up the present day content that has an obvious order. The memories are great mixed up, however the present memories need to be structured.

My solution make a book that is in order and memories that are then inserted into the book.

[Wiebke (1book1review) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book intrigued me more by it's design and commentary on memory than by it's content.
I had my trouble getting along with the writing and since it deals with death of cancer, losing and remembering a friend my mind kept wandering to the memories I have of friends that dies of cancer. So be aware that this could be a side effect.
Other than that it is a beautiful story of a friendship and the mundane life we have, where nothing much happens but a collection of visits and conversations.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is experimental fiction from the 1960s, and it's the most unusual book I've ever read. It comes in 27 separate sections, unbound, in a box, like boxed sets of greeting cards sometimes do. The first and last sections are labelled so you know where to start and finish, but in between, you read the sections in random order.
It's not just cleverness for the sake of it. It's a representation of a man's mind when he is distracted from his work by grief. It's not difficult to read, it's like eavesdropping on a conversation. I think it's brilliant, but it's also an adventure to read it. See
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
PS It's been out of print for ages, but links for where to buy it are on the blog.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

No doubt one of the best novels I've ever read. It's beautiful, I highly recommend. The nature of its construction: pamphlets that the reader is encouraged to rearrange in any order: mirror memories and how they trigger and form in the mind. This novel made me cry - something which fiction ever rarely does to me. But then again, this can hardly be considered "fiction"...

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samuel Beckett meets Ron Manager.

Isn't it, wasn't it... marvellous.

[Mariano Hortal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/los-desafor...

Los desafortunados de B.S Johnson. Fragilidad de la memoria, desintegración de la persona

Dice Jonathan Coe en la imprescindible introducción a Los desafortunados:
“[…] a mediados de los cincuenta, ya estudiante maduro, llegó al King’s College de Londres. Fue allí, durante una zambullida, por lo demás rutinaria, en el canon occidental, donde descubrió las obras de Sterne, Joyce y Beckett, a quienes adoptó enseguida como héroes y mentores. A partir de entonces tendría lealtades inamovibles: desde su punto de vista, la tarea principal de la novela era interrogarse a sí misma, llamar la atención sobre sus artificios; el escritor que la considerase mero vehículo para contar historiales lineales se estaba engañando. Johnson insistía en que Joyce había clausurado la época de la novela dickensiana, directa. “Por muy buenos que sean los escritores que lo intenten –escribió poco antes de morir-, hoy es imposible que esa novela funcione, y escribirla es anacrónico, inválido, irrelevante y perverso.”
Esa sentencia final condensa a la perfección la personalidad de B. S. Johnson, un escritor que sufrió especialmente su necesidad de innovar lo establecido, de experimentar más allá de los lugares comunes; quizá Los desafortunados se trate del mejor ejemplo de esta búsqueda constante de la ruptura:
“Pero Los desafortunados es otra cosa. En este libro, los dos compromisos fundamentales –innovación formal y verdad rigurosa- se alían en una obra literaria extraña, poderosa y cautivadora.”
Desafortunados
En efecto, los veintisiete pliegos en una caja componen una de esos momentos inolvidables, una experiencia diferente, ya que solo hay un orden establecido, el del primer pliego y el del último, Coe lo explica a la perfección y ahonda en las consecuencias de esta elección:
“Pero cualquiera que sea el recipiente que use el lector para echar suertes, acabará con un orden azaroso propio correspondiente a las veinticinco partes del libro entre la “Primera” y la “Última”. Luego (tras un adecuado paréntesis para reponerse si uno está exhausto) ha de leer la “Primera parte”; luego remitirse a los símbolos para identificar la parte siguiente y leerla. Y así sucesivamente, hasta haber identificado y leído la parte vigésimo quinta, tras lo cual el lector podrá suspirar de alivio y leer la “Última” parte.
Desde luego que este procedimiento entraña cierta cantidad de trabajo clerical y administrativo por parte del lector. Pero no es una cantidad excesiva, a buen seguro, y por otra parte el lector perezoso puede proceder de modo normal, aceptando el orden del encuadernador. Que prefiera no divertirse del modo aquí propuesto es, claro está, inalienable derecho suyo; pero en tal caso se perderá una experiencia nada ordinaria (si es que tiene precedentes); y quizá el meollo del asunto. Lo que también es su derecho inalienable.
Lo que inevitablemente escapará a los lectores húngaros es la sensación física de fragilidad y desintegración que transmite la novela en el formato original; la metáfora tangible de la manera fortuita en que, como he dicho, funciona la mente.
Desintegración y fragilidad: estos son los temas de Los desafortunados, y el tono es de una melancolía agitada e interrogadora. La prosa de Johnson –tanto aquí como en su novela previa, Trawl (Palangre)- debe mucho a la de Beckett, en particular al Beckett de El innombrable: esas largas frases como bucles, sólo puntuadas con comas, que apilan un período sobre otro, una precisión sobre otra, pero transportan al lector mediante un impulso emotivo que, en el caso de Johnson, proviene de la intensidad de la pena recordada.”
desafortunados2Johnson entendió que esta innovación formal reflejaba a la perfección el orden de nuestro pensamiento; muy lejos de esa linealidad que solemos pedir a películas o libros, este desorden mental nos transmite una fragilidad, la sensación de que todo no se sucede como esperamos, ni se piensa como es lógico; y está fragilidad lleva inevitablemente a una desintegración de la identidad de la persona, sobre todo cuando, como es el caso, el tema tratado lleva a esta fragilidad: el recuerdo del amigo muerto de cáncer y desencadenado por visitar la ciudad en la que vivía.
Posiblemente, mucha gente venga a este libro por las razones equivocadas: la envoltura (impecable por otra parte gracias a la dura labor de Rayo Verde y que hay que felicitar efusivamente); sin embargo la verdadera fuerza es la perfecta conjunción del artificio formal, novedoso ( yo mismo cambié el orden de los pliegos antes de empezar) con la fuerza cautivadora que subyace en la prosa de Johnson: un verdadero deleite que juega con la forma, seca, de frases largas, separadas por comas, muy “beckettiana” y con el fondo mediante continuos niveles de significación que permiten muchas interpretaciones y sentidos desde su primer pliego:
“Mis visitas aquí eran largas conversaciones sólo en parte interrumpidas para comer, qué generalización, vaya, él hablaba más que yo, mucho más, pero yo aprendía, seleccionaba y elegía oír lo que necesitaba, lo que más me sirviera, más me sirviera entonces, de sus discursos, sí, no es pomposa la palabra, discurso, una mente magnífica, la encarnación de una necesidad de comunicar, también, ¿cómo situar el orden de esa mente, su desintegración?”
En el que la desintegración ya aparece nombrada y se convierte en uno de los letimotivs dominantes, a partir de ahí mi experiencia me ha llevado a estos textos; a estos momentos íntimos en los que el británico es capaz de describir desde la variación de las pausas el progresivo deterioro por la enfermedad; nada hay común en lo que cuenta, y no le importa opinar sobre la inutilidad de la compasión:
“Por primera vez parecía realmente enfermo, había síntomas exteriores, físicos, se le veía diferente, no era él, estaba peor. La cara parecía seca, la piel como empolvada al descuido, en ciertas partes, de repente tenía menos pelo, había grandes copos de caspa de un gris amarillento y se le notaban un poco más los dientes, porque había perdido peso, seis kilos o más. La respiración, también, le había cambiado, hablaba haciendo grandes pausas, para suspirar hasta el límite de los pulmones, pausas antinaturales, asintácticas, que daban a las palabras énfasis y dramatismos extraños, un patetismo trivial, además de esas otras pausas para sorber un trago y humedecerse la boca, para ejercer manualmente la función de las glándulas salivales.
Es difícil pensar en estas cosas sin terror, la compasión es fácil de sentir, fácil de contener, pero tan inútil.”
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De hecho utiliza los lugares comunes para subvertirlos, como la típica incomprensión ante la muerte, sobre todo cuando “todo va sobre ruedas” (menos entendible que cuando todo está torcido) para contraponerla ante la palabra “podredumbre”, que se convierte en la condensación del dolor constante:
“Cuando todo le iba sobre ruedas, cuando acababa de lograr lo que siempre había querido, eso creo yo, la podredumbre, todo un proceso de podredumbre concentrado en dos años, menos de dos años, para qué, caray, ¿con qué fin?”
En este festín literario me asombra especialmente su tratamiento del recuerdo, especialmente su poca fiabilidad, tendemos a transformar lo que hemos vivido según las experiencias de un pasado que, posiblemente, ni siquiera hemos compartido; ese afán de intentar dotal de una santidad inviolable y sagrada a las personas que ya no están con nosotros:
“Por lo menos una vez fue a visitarnos a Angel, entonces ya estábamos casados, se había consolidado el matrimonio, muy feliz, lo que Tony llamaba la saga de mis mujeres había terminado muy bien, para mí, se alegraba por nosotros, nos trajo con retraso el regalo de boda, una batidora, una batidora de mano, buena, dijo, ellos tenían una igual, y era buena, sí, aunque no la usamos hasta que se estropeó la eléctrica, pero para ciertos usos, en cierto modo, era mejor que la eléctrica, es verdad, más práctica, cómo me esfuerzo por investir todo lo que proviniera de él de la mayor rectitud, la mayor santidad, casi, posible, cómo su muerte influye en cada recuerdo mío que tenga relación con él.”
El pasado, los recuerdos (la nostalgia de la que hablaba Julian Barnes en The sense of an ending) atentan contra nuestra percepción de la realidad; tergiversan nuestra propia vida, acometen la desintegración que nos introducía en el primer pliego, el recuerdo se convierte en un conductor de la sensiblería, nos llevan a ella en nuestro afán de convertir una mala experiencia en algo más romántico y sostenible, algo más entendible:
“Otra vez esta sensiblería, el pasado siempre propicia la sensiblería, es inevitable, todo lo que es suyo lo veo a la luz de lo que ocurrió después, su lenta desintegración, su muerte. Las olas del pasado demuelen las defensas de mi arenosa cordura, la pintura tiene que resguardarlo, aquietarlo, volverlo romántico, bonito.”
Fabuloso es el siguiente párrafo en el que, aprovecha el recuerdo de la degeneración de la enfermedad de su amigo para cambiar el narrador, cambiar de la primera persona de un narrador poco fiable a una segunda persona que nos acerca al momento, que nos da, de una manera audaz un momento para la ternura:
“Apenas en unas semanas, desde la última vez que lo habíamos visto, había cambiado brutalmente, era desolador, tenía el rostro consumido, había perdido blandura, rotundidad, vida, la piel había cobrado tal tensión que impresionaba, sí, reconocerlo, ahora, compararlo con el de antes. Con la delgadez los rasgos destacaban, cuando antes no se habían notado, los ojos protuberantes, impávidos, te miraban fijo, me deslizo en la segunda persona, un acto reflejo por defensa, se clavaban en ti más tiempo del que hubieras querido, del que querías, sí.”
En los términos que nos propone el autor nada es sencillo, ¿podemos hablar del sentido de la muerte? Lo que sí sentimos, sin embargo es el dolor:
“¿Puede tener sentido una muerte? ¿O ser absurda? ¿Es posible hablar de la muerte en estos términos? No lo sé, sólo siento el dolor, el dolor.”
El último pliego es un prodigio que nos lleva de la mano como verdaderos partícipes narrativos del dolor del protagonista; somos conscientes de la mentira de la generalización que tiende a hacer ley de nuestros sentimientos solipsistas:
“Lo difícil es entender sin generalizar, ver cada pedazo de verdad recibida, o generalización, como verdadera sólo si es verdadera para mí, otra vez el solipsismo, vuelvo a ello otra vez, y sin ningún motivo. En general, generalizar es mentir, contar mentiras.”
Lo único que importa es, en palabras de Johnson, lo que significa para mi vida esa muerte, el “nosotros” final, nos une al autor en su dolor, un viaje inolvidable, desgarrador, conmovedor en su aparente frialdad; dolor unido a belleza; vida, ni más ni menos.
“Ni cómo murió, ni de qué murió, ni mucho menos por qué murió tiene interés alguno, para mí, sólo el hecho de que murió, que está muerto, es importante: la pérdida para mí, para nosotros”
Los textos provienen de la traducción de Marcelo Cohen de Los desafortunados de B.S Johnson para la editorial Rayo Verde.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Het begon veelbelovend. Al was het maar om de opmerkelijke verschijningsvorm. Het boek is namelijk een doos, met daarin zesentwintig losse katernen. De katernen kunnen in een willekeurige volgorde worden gelezen, behalve het eerste en het laatste: 'Lezers die de willekeurige volgorde waarin ze de roman ontvangen liever niet aanvaarden, kunnen de katernen in elke andere willekeurige volgorde leggen voordat ze gaan lezen.' En zo geschiedde.

Weinig boeken zijn zo makkelijk samen te vatten als deze: een schrijver werkt om bij te schnabbelen als voetbalverslaggever voor een krant en wordt eropuit gestuurd om in een ogenschijnlijk onbekend stadje een wedstrijd te verslaan. De stad blijkt bij nader inzien toch niet zo onbekend, want de schrijver heeft er al vele sporen liggen. Wijlen zijn beste kameraad (het woord bij uitstek voor het soort vriendschap dat deze twee mannen onderhielden) woonde er met zijn vrouw, en dat brengt de schrijver terug naar het slopende einde van de aan kanker overleden vriend.

Wat volgt is een stroom aan herinneringen. Sporadisch afgewisseld met hoofdstukjes in het heden waarin de schrijver annex voetbalverslaggever door de stad dwaalt, eet, drinkt, een voetbalwedstrijd 'verslaat' en om redenen die niemand begrijpt heel graag een trolleybus wil nemen.

De stijl is sober en grauw met eindeloos veel komma's en bijzinnen. De staccato verteltrant vond ik in het begin sterk omdat dat inderdaad is hoe een hoofd werkt en samen met de schijnbare willekeur aan gedachten en de regelmatige weglating van woorden leek het me een realistische en stilistisch vernuftige weergave van de werkelijkheid. Daar komt bij dat het boek reflecteert op het schrijfproces, als het ware de gekunsteldheid van de roman blootlegt, en dat vind ik bewonderenswaardig. Zie de volgende 'zin'.

'... hij had een uitstekend hoofd voor zulke historische trivia, is dat het goede woord, nee, details ook niet, voor mij misschien trivia, voor hem belangrijk, of vermeldenswaard, als dat belangrijk is, wat ik betwijfel, voor mij, maar hij had een uitstekend hoofd voor zulke details, zijn hoofd zat er net zo vol mee als het Rijksarchief met documenten, kijk, een fraai beeld, misschien wat goedkoop, maar het was ook ongeveer even efficiënt, ordelijk, zijn hoofd, (...) terwijl het in hem heel regelmatig opborrelde, scherp geformuleerd, constant, met een hoge constante: kennis, geleerdheid, informatie, soms misschien traag, maar hoe gretig hij een gesprek aanging, bedenk een beeld, nee.'

Op den duur gaat het tegenstaan. Niet in de laatste plaats omdat de verteller een verbitterde, zelfingenomen man is die al zijn mededogen voor zichzelf heeft gereserveerd. Het personage deed me denken aan Ewout Meyster uit De hoogstapelaar van Wessel te Gussinklo, maar die vond ik op een bevreemdende manier ergens wel sympathiek, omdat die ten minste nog een strijd voerde en zich kon beroepen op de onbezonnenheid van de jeugd.

Deze meneer kan dat niet, die heeft zijn jeugd al ver achter zich gelaten en daarmee zijn fantasie en inbeeldingsvermogen, als hij die al heeft gehad ooit. De volgende zin was voor mij doorslaggevend: 'De ham, even het belangrijkste nu, vetvrij, openvouwen, vochtig wit en roze, ah, en dan happen, zoute genietingen.'

Als ham eten op een bankje het belangrijkste is, dan weet je dat je definitief hebt verloren van het leven.

Het voorwoord, geschreven door Jonathan Coe, spreekt boekdelen: 'Net zo belangrijk, maar voor de meeste lezers nog moeilijker te slikken, was zijn bewering dat een romanschrijver überhaupt geen fictie hoorde te schrijven. 'Wie een verhaal vertelt vertelt leugens', luidde Johnsons mantra, en hij stelde dat hij door zijn zorgvuldigheid en aandacht voor zaken als stijl en vorm meer was dan een schrijver van een autobiografie, terwijl de serieuze roman geen plaats kon zijn voor verzinsels, geen excuus om 'dingen uit je duim te zuigen''.

Een uitspraak die voortkomt uit een beperking, als je het mij vraagt. De stelligheid waarmee de bewering wordt geponeerd maakt bovendien dat het neigt naar een testimonium paupertatis.
Al met al lijkt de originaliteit van deze roman een kunstgreep die de aandacht af moet leiden van het feit dat dit een weinig tot de verbeelding sprekend verhaal is.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

People aren't supposed to write reviews of B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates in ham-handed homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my incomprehensible review. The next one I write is going to be coherent. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt about an unbound bunch of chapters, chosen randomly from a box.

Listen: B. S. Johnson's journalist hero has become unstuck in time. He ends one randomly-chosen chapter (rcc) picking through the debris of a recently-concluded soccer match he has covered for a newspaper, and starts the next rcc arriving in town in the same morning, anticipating the same match. He has seen his best friend die tragically young of cancer in one rcc, and then heartbreakingly healthy and anticipating a long and satisfying life in the next.

B. S. Johnson's hero is spastic in time. He has no control over which chapter the reader will choose next, but he doesn't seem to mind, as long as he's close to a pub. He is in a constant state of introspection, it seems, because he is obsessed with people and events he experienced years before. In spite of his rcc-generated temporal problems and a melancholy disposition, the hero manages to cover the soccer match as intended and file his story.

I recommend this make-your-own-Billy-Pilgrim story because, unlike most experimental fiction, reading this book is NOT like sitting in a very uncomfortable chair.

Poo-tee-weet?

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the famous novel-in-a-box of one of the great experimental writers in English of the 1960s... I have loved B.S. Johnson's work ever since I read Albert Angelo almost twenty years ago. He only wrote seven novels and so far I have managed to read six of them. I have been hindered by the fact that some of them are not that easy to get hold of (I was lucky when I found a copy of See the Old Lady Decently in my university library). Travelling People is the only one I am missing. It is expensive and therefore might be one that eludes me forever. Let's see...

The Unfortunates is possibly the most famous of his works. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a unique reading experience. But I must admit that I missed the ironic comedy that is found so abundantly in Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry and House Mother Normal. This novel was decidedly sombre all the way through. Of Johnson's other novels it most closely resembles Trawl but it was more enjoyable because of the novelty (probably a word he would have sneered at) of the format.

(I found this book in a charity shop for only £2 and all 27 chapters were intact. I was certainly not one of the unfortunates that day!)

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dazzling. The famous book in a box. Only the first and last signatures are marked so that you can read the middle, loose signatures in any order you want. Sounds gimmicky but it works and the prose is Joycean and evocative. A heady achievement.

[Motherbooker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 stars

There are a whopping 15,511,210,043,330,985,984,000,000 different ways to read B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates. So, of course, I decided to give it a go. His unconventional 'book in a box' is one of the often-overlooked literary experiments of the late 60s. Instead of appearing in a traditional bound format, the story is presented as 27 separate sections all placed in a box. Aside from the first and last parts, the rest can be read in any order the reader wishes. You can choose to go with the order that you got it in or you can shuffle to your heart's content. I decided not to mess with fate and just read straight out of the box.

But "what is the point of this?" you might be asking. The Unfortunates is Johnson's attempt to mimic the random way that our memories work. The novel opens with a journalist returning to a city he knows pretty well. He's on his way to watch and report on a football match but, as he walks through the familiar streets, he begins to remember the people from his past. Specifically, his old friend who died of cancer and the former lover who spurned him in his youth. The sites and locations that he revisits take him back to times gone by and we get to read his attempts to piece together the memories that have already started to fade.

As an experiment, I think this really works. The idea of picking sections at random is fun and it does provide a very different type of reading experience. On my readthrough, we got to the football match quite quickly, which meant that there were quite a few sections later on talking about making his way there. This disconnected and almost hazy approach to storytelling is certainly thought-provoking. As a way to replicate that idea of association and human memory, I think the format really works. As an experiment into storytelling, I think it's successful. But, is it enjoyable? Does it need to be enjoyable? After all, as we know, the story is autobiographical, so we're dealing with Johnson's real memories about real people. This isn't a fictional tale that is meant to titillate but a way to present true feelings.

Not that reality can't be entertaining but it certainly explains the simplistic approach to the narrative. I think the aspect of the book that I really struggled with was the narrative. It was slightly brusque and very to-the-point. It lacks any real flourish or lyrical aspect because that's not the purpose. This is about transposing memories onto the page. It is about expressing the truth. It has more of a journalistic quality to the writing, which I often struggled to connect with. Which isn't to say that Johnson isn't a great writer. The way that he crafts his tale and interweaves the various strands is wonderful. Each memory is fragmented and there are gaps within the narrative. The narrator is constantly questioning facts and admitting to gaps in his memory. There is a lot of complexity here but it all comes together so easily and in such a readable way.

An easy read but a difficult book to review. You can appreciate and enjoy what Johnson is trying to achieve. You can also appreciate and enjoy the way he approaches the act of writing. You get a real sense of the limits of human memory as well as its importance. You can also appreciate and enjoy the fact that Johnson is exploring not just the idea of memory but of truth and human existence. In the end, memories are all we end up having but, over time, we cannot trust those memories to reminisce. If we are our memory and, at the same time, are also someone else's memory, then what do we become when those memories start to fade? What do the people we have lost or left behind become? This simple book in a box is sure to make you question everything. It's the kind of reading experience that demands multiple readthroughs. Thankfully, you'll have plenty of ways to try going through it.

[Tom May · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique novel, in form - of course, with its unbound, reorderable sections - and likely too in emotional openness for its time as Jonathan Coe discerns in his 1999 introduction. It is tellingly masculine, honestly revealing a picture of one man's thoughts and feelings, with the focus wandering around divertingly. Its two palpable centres seem to be Tony's life and death through cancer and the football match the narrative has to report on: a profession he doesn't seem to see as real writing, but which pays well.

While I discern a certain scepticism about contemporary consumerist practices like going shopping, Johnson's narrator seems at one with the crowd in other ways, chiefly in enjoying football and pubs, though you get the sense his enjoyment of football isn't enhanced by having to write about it for a living. There is a final passage when he is on a bench in a public square and witnesses military recruitment going on, which provokes his rather caustic commentary - which may surely have been influenced by his own experience of the tedium and nationalist delusions of National Service.

Indeed, whole Coe claims this is apolitical, which I wouldn't really say is the case. There are repeated references to Brecht and even, tellingly, local commemorations of class struggle that the narrator is immersed in within, I think, his University days in this city. While these are all fairly brief moments, they clearly indicate left-wing dissent rather than complacent conservatism.

Anyway, I found this a fascinating exploration of one man's mindset at given times, and an excellent encapsulation of the complex process of grieving for someone you are close to. This is fused with an interesting depiction of Nottingham, including Ian Nairn-esque architectural musings, and a clear account of what it felt like to be part of the socially mobile working class generation born in the 1930s.

[Zilla Novikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

The style of the book is fascinating - a book in a box! - and I love a book where form serves story. The only problem is that I find myself thoroughly disliking the way the narrator regards women and indeed anyone. It's a brilliant novel with exquisite writing which I doubt that I'll ever reread since I did not enjoy the hours spent with the narrator inside his head. C'est la vie.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Unfortunates is Johnson’s notorious “novel in a box.” Its signatures of varying length are held together by a ribbon and there are 27 of them, the first of which is marked First and last of which is marked Last and those in between were randomly ordered by the collator with the reader invited to further randomize the order. Why, you might ask? The novel is a work of non-fiction in the form of a novel—throughout his life, Johnson insisted on that elusive distinction. It captures the work assignment of Johnson, sent to a north England city to cover a soccer match, only to belatedly (and not convincingly) realize as he arrives in the train station that this is the city where his friend Tony lived and died a tragic victim of cancer as a young man just embarking on both his academic life and his life as a family man, married with young children. Johnson then seeks to recapture the experience of covering the match, revisiting his relationship with Tony (and his relationship with the woman, Wendy, who broke his own heart and whose relationship with Johnson overlaps that with Tony), and recounting his grief (double-sworded: friend, love). Sometimes he is focused on the details of a writer on assignment (the game, travel, writing, eating out) but often these details get knocked aside by a memory of Tony or one of Wendy, coming in on the Tony reminiscence but often taking over the recollection. The random way memory works and the tentative hold the mind has on what occurs to us, what moves us, what interrupts us, is the rationale for the free signatures. Unfortunately, the mind is far more liquid than a boxful of signatures. And my box contained four duplicate signatures, which at first I thought might be intentional because the mind also repeats itself, but not exactly. We may revisit the same memory or issue over and over but not in the same words and sequence of thoughts. I quickly realized it was a collator’s error. Still the device struggles to work even as the prose succeeds. Other than the fringe benefit of being able to put a particularly interesting section back in the pile somewhere ahead or to look at the clock before shutting out the light and sift through the remaining signatures to find a one or two-pager before quitting for the night, it doesn’t adequately replicate the mind’s experience. Johnson would no doubt counter that there was no better solution, but a failed solution is still a failed solution. It’s interesting as a device but even as such it distracts from the novel’s end: to capture a time of great grief and confused mourning and how one’s conscience navigates that time. When I was just reading signature after signature without regard for my freedom to choose the next one or any other one—in other words when it was like reading a bound book—you were inside Johnson’s mind and his sorrows, realizing his gift as a writer was in his honesty, his clear and witty prose, his refusal to compromise with what he was experiencing (touching it up so he might look better or for it to seem more important or whatever). It remains what it was and that is terribly human and quite moving.

[Mangrii · Rating 3 out of 5]

"¿Puede tener sentido una muerte? ¿O ser absurda? ¿Es posible hablar de la muerte en estos términos? No lo sé, sólo siento el dolor, el dolor."

Sería 1969 cuando B. S. Johnson decidió romper con los moldes encorsetados de la novela y trasladar una memorias personales a un formato de lo más extraño: 27 secciones separadas sin encuadernar (reunidas en una caja) que pueden leerse en el orden que se desee, excepto las tituladas "Primera" y "Última".

La trama del libro es de lo más sencilla: el narrador, un periodista deportivo anónimo (que sería B. S. Johnson), llega a una ciudad sin nombre (que se ha identificado como Nottingham por sus puntos de referencia), es enviado a cubrir un partido de fútbol. Mientras camina por la ciudad hacia el estadio, parando por el camino a comer y beber, recuerda a su buen amigo Tony, fallecido recientemente de cáncer. Memoria y ficción se entremezclan en detalles y momentos específicos que nos llega como información fragmentada, como se encuentra el propio libro.

De una sección a otra es el azar el que decide por nosotros lo que nos encontraremos. Los desafortunados nos sumerge en un flujo de conciencia continúo en el que debemos rearmar los sucesos. Para ello “tan solo” tenemos 15,5 septillones de combinaciones. Las elecciones harán que unos sucesos u otros llegan a nosotros en momentos diferentes, a veces, creando sensaciones diferentes en el lector. Sin embargo, el objetivo de Johnson se cumple a la perfección: vincular a la novela la fragmentación de la mente humana cuando tratamos de recordar. Al final, Los desafortunados habla sobre la aleatoriedad de la vida, tal como la conocemos, intentando trasladar esa sensación a nosotros como lectores.

[Orange Postman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A switch cycle of stories spread across my chess table, and like the game of chess, there is a first and last move—the variations are not in order. Twenty-seven short stories, to be more specific, some were one page, and others six, but all the stories were part of a timeline for me to choose my first story of B.S. Johnson’s, The Unfortunates. I parted the First and the Last pages before placing the remaining 25 pages clockwise, and then counterclockwise. You are given two instructions by the author: One, a person can read The Unfortunates in order, and two, a person can shuffle the stories within the first and the last. I chose the latter.
The Unfortunates is a boxed series of stories between the first and last chapter. It does not matter how your stories are placed, the story will be the same. I have read The Unfortunates twice, each reading revolving the stories; and in each revolution I received the same conclusion. This is the point of B.S. Johnson’s intention, to take the chronological method away from the norm of reading a novel. He does so remarkably.
In the novel, you follow the narrator who talks about his friend, Tony, a friend dying of cancer. The narrator, a journalist, begins reporting a story about City, a football team in England. You empathize about the misdiagnosis of Tony, because of how the narrator and June, his wife, experience the pain. There is a moment of euphoria for June because the large lump is extracted, and she feels a new beginning. We meet Tony’s family, who doesn’t know he’s sick. Tony and June have a baby, the narrator gets a girlfriend, and a friend commits suicide. B.S. Johnson delivers the daily life of these young people at the beginning of their adult lives, and the deterioration of Tony near the end of his. Upon reflecting Tony’s death, the narrator feels as if the longevity of life between him and Tony may not have been much. The narrator: “Death. Let the dead live with the dead.”
B.S. Johnson’s literary exercise is to show that no matter the order, the beginning and conclusion of his story will remain the same. The Unfortunates is a great novel in respect to literature and its artistic attributes of physical layout.
Book Review from the OrangePostman.com

[Leisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is by far one of the most unique reading experiences I have ever had. Initially, I was hesitant as to how this novel (which is not actually a novel) would come together, but B. S. Johnson has created a beautiful rumination on death and life as it proceeds after a loved one has passed.

As I mentioned, this is not really a novel. In fact, I'd be more apt to call it a memoir of the author's memories surrounding his friend, Tony. What is really brilliant about this book (which Johnson points out several times) is how the memory of someone can change how we perceive our past and present. The memory of Tony infiltrates even the most mundane circumstances of Johnson's existence. To most of us, I do not think this is something we would recognize... at least not on a conscious level. However, Johnson puts into words the flexibility of the mind and its ability to alter our perception of life.

Obviously a review cannot be written without mentioning the structure of this book. I think the separate, randomly organized 27 sections were a brilliant way to illustrate the disjointed nature of the way humans think. We often do not remember life in a linear fashion, so to present it as such would not be an accurate, truthful representation. Sometimes sentences were a little tedious to read because many would often go on for pages (Johnson is a huge fan of the comma... and hence, the comma splice), but again this is reflective of the winding nature thoughts/memories often take.

Overall, everything (structure and content) come together beautifully in this novel/memoir, and it is something that will definitely stick in my own memories for a long time to come.