• Complain

Denis Johnson - The Name of the World

Here you can read online Denis Johnson - The Name of the World full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2009, publisher: HarperCollins, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Denis Johnson The Name of the World
  • Book:
    The Name of the World
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    HarperCollins
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2009
  • ISBN:
    9780061869396
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Name of the World: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Name of the World" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The acclaimed author of and returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life hes a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, Im speaking as Id speak of a change in the earths climate, or the recent war. Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror, he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Denis Johnson: author's other books


Who wrote The Name of the World? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Name of the World — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Name of the World" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Denis Johnson

The Name of the World

For Cha and Ellie

~ ~ ~

Since my early teens Ive associated everything to do with college, the academic life, with certain images borne toward me, I suppose, from the TV screen, in particular from the films of the 1930s they used to broadcast relentlessly when I was a boy, and especially from a single scene: Fresh-faced young people come in from an autumn night to stand around the fireplace in the home of a beloved professor. I smell the bonfire smoke in their clothes and the professors aromatic pipe tobacco, and I feel the general, unquestioned sweetness of youth, of autumn, of college the sweetness of this life. Not that I was ever in love with this dream, or even particularly drawn to it. Its just that I concluded it existed somewhere. My own undergraduate career stretched over six or seven years, interrupted by bouts of work and transfers to a second and then a third institution, and I remember it all as a succession of requirements and endorsements. I didnt attend the football games. I dont remember coming across any bonfires. By several of my teachers I was impressed, even awed, and their influence shaped me as much as anything else along the way, but I never had a look inside any of their homes. All this by way of saying it came as a surprise, the gratitude with which I accepted an invitation to teach at a university.

When the chance came along, I was nearly fifty. After college Id taught high school for better than a decade, earning postgraduate credits in the summers. One day I wrote a letter to a presidential candidate, advising him on policy and strategy (this was Senator Thomas Thom of Oklahoma; he faded early in the primaries), and although Id had no idea people who wrote such letters were ever heeded, much less hired, in a blink I went from Mr. Reed the Social Studies person to Mike Reed the speechwriter, staff floater, and cloakroom confidant, and spent nearly twelve years in Washington. I quit just after Senator Thom began his fifth term. I took the job at the University when my book idea was turned down Id offered to witness to powers corrupting influence, but apparently no such witness was required.

Then I found myself in the Comparative Studies wing of the Humanities Building, although I was actually an Adjunct Associate Professor of History. (The Humanities Department was long ago dissolved to form more departments, bigger departments; the old building houses budgetary mavericks, grant-sponsored programs and the like, experiments that live out their funding periods and fade away. Somehow this became the home of History.) I ran small seminars, asking bright, undirected students to read books Id already read and then listening while they presented papers to the rest of the group for criticism. In other words, I didnt do anything. This would have interfered not at all with a glorious future in that place, but I didnt bother with the other side of business there, either, the meetings and the memos and so on.

Four renewals was about the limit for my type of appointment, and I was near the end of my third. After next year, theyd move me along. Meanwhile, I was on vacation.

But people in positions like mine have to keep alert for new ones, and so I found myself one evening dining in a group of eleven at the home of Ted MacKey, Chairman of the School of Music. The surroundings came close to the 1930s moving picture of this life: the snowflakes coming down outside in a college-town night that threatened to add to itself the jingling of sleigh bells and the songs of young carolers, while inside the house, lodge-like in its dimensions, we all drank hot buttered rum around a warm blaze that sent a changing light under the lustrous mantel and onto windows of leaded glass, and onto a black antique telescope and a monstrous beige globe I would have bet presented the world as it had been long ago, but would never be again. We drank hot buttered rum in the atmosphere, in other words, of a very expensive gift shop. It oppressed me. It oppressed me although Id been given my supper in plenty of homes exactly like it at other universities and in Washington, and Id even eaten here at Ted MacKeys, two winters previous. It oppressed me for that thought as much as any other, maybe, the mental image of a thousand such dwellings pressed window to window across the wide undifferentiated air of a plunging chasm, and me with a spoon and a bowl and a smile in every one of them.

The dinner that night honored a distinguished visitor to our campus, the Israeli composer Izaak Andropov. As it happened, hed taken a fever, and didnt attend.

I was here to make a new acquaintance, the head of a University fiefdom called the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. The Forum had money. They had Associate-level jobs. They had offices, salaries, everything. Best of all they had no duties, no classes. Or so Ted MacKey had promised me, letting out this information in a casual way, as if I might not be looking around for another slot someplace the year after next. This happened all the time, that is, people I hardly knew often suggested, one way or another, that theyd like to help me. I was the object of much goodwill, in fact, sometimes because the man Id worked for in Washington was disliked, and Id quit him; or, conversely, because he was liked, and Id worked for him. In any case, here was a chance to stretch out my vacation another academic year or two. Nothing ever happened at the Forum beyond an occasional presentation by one of the scholars, most of them emeriti from Big Ten universities and such, who just dragged out the lectures theyd been dragging out this way since the days when Ted MacKeys big beige globe had known what it was talking about.

I dont think any of the guests knew each other more than casually, but we didnt have to struggle much for things to say, as Ted MacKey had arranged a short concert for us. A young woman played the guitar and another the cello, after which Teds grade-school son played the lute with astonishing self-possession, wearing pajamas and a robe and fuzzy slippers, and concentrating, plainly, not on his fingers but on the truth of his music.

I was seated next to Dr. J. J. Stein, the one who pulled the strings at the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. Some kind of Scotch broth was dealt out. Even if I was aware Id enjoyed too many of them, I didnt mind these dinners, particularly at the University. I like being around people who like being where they are. In the scholarly world, the world of the mind, much more than in the world of politics, its common to meet people whove truly earned their comfort, at least in a sense, having labored through and left behind the parts of childhood so unpleasant for scholars, brains, intellectuals. And here they are, respected and safe at last, while the others slug it out in the marketplace. Dr. J. J. Stein was the person I might have imagined if Id been trying to visualize this meeting in advance, a happy, bearded, balding scholar. And he went on to make an explanation for me of a kind I might have expected, too incredibly earnest thinkers always have to explain the names they choose for their projects, because the names mean absolutely nothing when you hear them as to why Forum was just the right word, why only Interpretive conveyed the right sense, why, when youd finished considering all the words in the English language, Scholarship had to be the one.

I wasnt sure how deliberate a job of selling had been set for me in Dr. J.J.s mind, but it happened I had an idea I wanted to elaborate, one requiring research assistants and more than one office, the kind of enterprise that might rope in all sorts of scholars and result in an anthology of essays all on a theme, and this vision I produced for him while he interrupted with enthusiastic questions, and the cellist, just on the other side of him, got attractively tipsy. In the midst of this it occurred to me aloud that Dr. J.J. might write my anthologys introduction and make it an occasion for talking about his Forum. The cellist, one of Teds grad students, developed a kind of ironic interest in the plan, and asked questions herself, and pretty soon started interrupting the Doctors interruptions, chiefly by saying, almost exclusively by saying, Oh

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Name of the World»

Look at similar books to The Name of the World. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Name of the World»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Name of the World and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.