3 thoughts on “O for Obscurity, Or, The Story of N — Andrew Hook”

1. ”N” – An Introduction

   “…the Residents had neglected the fetid, forgotten and foul smelling object currently residing on their coffee table.”

   I was listening (still am, as I write this) to the album ESKIMO that I found on Spotify as I became hooked by this book.
   A book interspersed by items of artwork with a variable form of monochrome.
   Today is my 73rd birthday, 18 January always being the psychological Midwinter for me if possibly not for Eskimos!

2. PROLOGUE: The Mark of the Man

   N Senada, famously Nemonymous, here, I guess, as N, is shown on a plane flight in his mid sixties, coughing at the air hostess, wary of name and other defining bureaucracy. I am wondering that, if by pure chance, I happen to be reading and reviewing (here), alongside this book, one about a comparable (?) character called Ezra Slef? We shall see. Some striking prose work and characterisation in this ‘O’ book so far. Nada= nothing, Se=Self or Slef?

3. 1. Beginnings Are Endings For All But A Few

   “N…N!”

   That’s his mother calling him, when he was 12, just after the end of the Great War in Germany, amid the scrawny garden hens in contrast to the earlier travel by planes? But now the plane becomes a retrocausal saxophone? Where music is invisibility and he dreams of being a sheaf of paper. Autistic as artistic. The many connections towards an eventual gestalt, connections with the explicit knowledge of the overall history of time and place, with the more singular backstory and nature of his parents, and with the art of music to transcend his lack of articulated dialogue.
   The saxophone itself with its bulb or bell. The single letters of people’s names like N and K mixing with music’s keynotes “code.” And so much more.
   “There are those who cover a scratch with a plaster whilst simultaneously ruin livers with flagons of beer.”
   This first chapter is a genuine tour de force of style and subject impartment. It so far FEELS like someone has merely been limbering up for writing this work that already promises to be a seminal one.

   “There is nothing so obscure as the allegiance of the self to the self.” (Sic)