really struggled to get into this book, so much so that I gave up on it, I thought I would enjoy as I had loved previous works by this author, particularly Vurt,
Might venture back one day Needle In The Groove is the sixth of Jeff Noon's books I've read, and while I admit that I think they're all good books, personally I think this is one of his best.
Storywise it's a departure from his earlier works, seemingly moving away from the literary worlds of the Vurtverse, though there are moments within the narrative where I could see the conceptual connections between those earlier works and this one.
It's a story about a band, about the music they make, and about how things go wrong when the rock and roll life is lived to excess.
It's also a story about discovery and loss, and the plot had me hooked pretty much from start to finish,
As well as following the lives and adventures of the four main protagonists, the book also gives a potted history of the Manchester music scene, from skiffle through to modern techno and dance, and it's obvious from the way in which Noon tells this side of the story that he has a genuine passion for and love of music.
However, it's the way in which this novel is written that impressed me the most, Perhaps taking a touch of inspiration from music theory Noon has all but done away with punctuation and capitalisation here, breaking down the structure of every paragraph and sentence to short, beatdriven snippets of text more akin to song lyrics that prose.
Throughout the book certain lines and paragraphs verses are repeated, but in altered versions of their earlier selves, This is especially noticeable with the various remixes of the band's main hit, Scorched Out For Love, but it also appears more subtly in other places, offering up a sense of familiarity, of something halfremembered, almost like a dance tune heavy on samples might subtly remind you of the songs those samples are taken from.
I can see where some readers might find Noon's writing experiments in this novel gimmicky, or pretentious, and make no mistake it does require a certain level of pretentiousness to even consider trying something like this.
The thing is, as far as I'm concerned he pulls it off so incredibly well and with so much style and panache that I can easily forgive him his pretensions.
This is a book to read if you have a love of music, especially the edgier side of music borne out of Manchester in the last half dozen decades.
It's also a book to read if you want to see just how easily the rules of writing can be stretched and twisted without losing the story.
Совсем небольшая новелла, несмотря на заявления об экспериментальности, не сильно экспериментальнее трилогии "Вирт" того же автора. Даже темы поднимаются схожие: субстанции, вызываемые ими коллективные галлюцинации, потеря и поиск в них себя. Очень музыкальная и поэтичная книга, читать было сплошное удовольствие. A novel to savior in small doses, The layout of the text encourages reading some passages like poetry, some like prose, some like art, The musical timberline from skiffle through punk and new wave to down tempo and groove makes a fine backdrop for a gritty story of longing and discovery.
I suspect this is the experience my English teachers wanted me to get from The Catcher in the Rye, Ak vai.
Es mēģināšu atsauksmi, bet man pazuda valoda, Ir tikai apturēta sirds un mutuļojošas emocijas, Having read several other of Noon's books, I found this one very different but no less enjoyable, Instead of creating a whole new imaginary world as in Vurt etc, this is a tale based around a real Manchester, drawing inspiration from five decades of a genrespanning music scene, focusing mainly on punk and the death thereof.
The book is still touched with fantasy but it is more of a means to an end rather than the main thrust of the book.
It is set in our normal world and the fantasy element I won't give away any details allows the characters to explore themselves, their music and the past.
It is written in, what I find to be, an amazing style, though I can see how some people might struggle with it.
There is little punctuation/ the phrases instead being separated by slashes/ these give the book a sort of digital feel/ and at the same time/ the feeling of reading inside someone's head/ their thoughts put straight down on paper/ instead of being thought over and tidied up first.
See what I mean
The book is full of music and the descriptions of songs blew my mind, particularly when King Crimson happened to come on the radio while I was reading.
After a chapter where, perhaps, the band meet up to rehearse, there will be a page long chapter 'describing' 'writing' or 'telling' might be better verbs here the song itself in beautiful, exploding, starbursts streaming over the riffs, poetry that I think can only be fully appreciated by someone who really appreciates music, whatever your chosen genre.
All in all, this is a book about music and musicians how they come to be and how they often come to end.
The style, a stark lyrical stream of consciousness, works far better than I feared it would, It both sets and suits the mood, and captures the perfect atmosphere for the first half of Needle In The Groove, But then the plot such as there is one starts to take over, and its like waking from a dream before you were done: the spell is broken.
unlike anything / this book made me feel alive / there is a richness and a real spark of genius within its pages / I've found nothing like it before
Noon is as innovative as he is intune with the underlying essence of life / this book made me want to be even more alive than I am
part mystery / part eulogy / part miracle / part tragedy
read this and then enjoy being young and alive yes, there are a couple of Morrissey references in there, and even more references to Manchester's music scene in general.
Just really awesome by the end i love jeff noon, he writes with a complete lack of fear and without rules, every time i finish one of his novels even one i have previously read i want to go and write something myself, if you can motivate me then you must be doing something right I'm not entirely convinced that this book knew what it wanted to be.
Very broadly speaking, texts that earn the handle "experimental" are those that tweak some stylistic convention attaining to realism in order to show A.
the constructedness of all texts andslashor B, that realism is itself a genre laden with political and ideological codes which typically present bourgeois values as normative, And Noon's Needle in the Groove is certainly experimental, The novel's dialogue is set off by emdashes a la Gaddis, all terminal punctuation marks have been replaced by slashes, effectively making the text read like an album's liner notes an effect I think Noon was striving for, and there's almost no exposition to ground the reader to either setting or plot.
So setting and plot are bourgeois affectations and quotation marks are bourgeois affectations and if you need periods then you're like totally squaresville man 'cause that's not what this Needle In The Groove's about.
But so then what is this book about Here, bassist, Elliot Hall oh, there aren't any capital letters either, so it's actually elliot hall, is recruited to join a band with drummer,spot, singer, donna, and dj, jody, who are making an album of what we're led to understand is a special, though unspecified, kind of new music that is being recorded on the scifi recording medium, liquid.
These liquid recordings are about the size of a gumball and can have their recordings remixed just by shaking them as
in, shaking this gumballsized globe produces a different track when that globe is replayed.
Much of the first half of the novel is about the band laying down more and more versions of what they expect will be their hit single and then shaking the globe the last version was recorded on and then being notquitesatisfied and then trying again.
Woven throughout these sessions is the disclosure of elliot's cliched drug habit, from which he's recovering, and the band's various, and cliched, love triangles, and the revelations about evertaciturnspot's musical lineage and cliched messedup childhood the angst from which childhood drives his creativity.
From these brief scenelets the reader gathers that each musician desires contact with their musical heroes and inspirations, which contact is only possible to them, as it is to us, through the music they left for us.
But then, without much preamble, these guys decide to freebase the liquid recording globes' liquid and transport themselves to the moments when their musical role models were in their primes.
This, Noon's literalization of the cliched apothegm about music being a drug capable of transportation, is the most interesting part of the book, and it allows Noon to introduce competing timelines and hallucinatory visions and just basically confuse the reader's certainty of what's really happening in this novel and what isn't.
This would seem to underline the novel's experimental cred in that these effects show the novel's and the Novel's artificiality and play against our bourgeois expectations about novels taking care of us and providing clear conclusions.
The rest of the novel is an investigation into one of the band members' deaths, which investigation necessitates the use of the last remaining globes' liquid a recording medium that has since been discontinued because, one gathers, many people began taking advantage of its hallucinogenic potential and leads to a revelation that isn't especially revelatory.
And I think I would be cool with all this if there was harmony between the novel's experimental features and its central theme.
The thing that this kind of experimentation accomplishes is a sense of distance between the text and the reader this text resists the reader's attempts to ignore its artificiality as well as get transported into the world of the text's construction.
Which is fine, but then the novel is ABOUT art's capacity to transport us and function as a kind of hallucinogen that makes squiggles on a page or scratches embedded in vinyl seem real.
This dissonance is, to me at least, unaccountable, Maybe Noon wants to be a musician instead, or maybe he wants to suggest that these artificial means of connecting with humanity aren't entirely sufficient, or maybe his point is that bassists are shallow and shouldn't get to narrate.
At the end of the whole everything, though, I'm left thinking that this book didn't know what it wanted to be, "if music were a drug would you take it" Hell yes! A reread for me andyears after publication, this still holds up, despite the changes in music trends it deals in.
Video review sitelink youtube. com/watchvbPoOP Wildly inventive, music brought to words, words transliterated into musical sound, If you can imagine such a thing! Verbal dubs, reverb and remixes all dance across the pages, The plot is a bit weak, Noon's usual obsessions with trying to recapture a girl long lost but preserved in an aching heart.
The history of generational repeated behaviour is just a bit soap operatic for my taste, but I just lay back and let the word vive infuse my whole body.
Vurt and pollen are still best but another great fiction story based on our a latest social evolutions!! In this astonishing novel Jeff Noon allows the complex rhythms of dance music to infect his language, creating a new kind of writing / liquid dub poetics / in the grooves he discovers a world where the scratches of the stylus cut the body / a dj's samples are melodies of blood / love is a ghost lost in the boom box / and the only remix that really matters is the remix of the heart
After years of playing bass in lousy twobit bands, elliot finally gets his big chance / he meets a singer, a dj and a drummer who seem to have everything / passion, talent, hypnotic songs, and a whole new way of funky seduction / but just as their first dance record is climbing the charts, one of the band disappears / Elliot's search for the missing musician becomes a wild, fiercely emotional trip into the dark soul of rhythm.
Trippy, stonerriffic, phychadelic account of a band trying to make it big in the mid ninties, Crazy. Jeff Noon uses cutup technique / makes it an interesting read / fastpaced, aggressive, captivating at times / occasionally a bit frustrating / captures voice well / good sense of rhythm through language / thus reflecting dance music / good for fans of Manchester music scene / name checks many musical heroes / plot is reminiscent of Vurt / worth a spin.
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