Summary:
A collection of stories about a small town in England called Notwithstanding. The stories range from the forties and fifties to the eighties and nineties. Some are about the narrator himself, though not many. Most of the stories take place before the narrator was born, and many do not even involve the narrator's family, let alone him.
Thoughts:
The book is disjointed at best. I bought this in a Waterstone's (the British version of Barnes and Noble) while on my honeymoon in London, and was disappointed by it. While reading, I felt that some stories went on far too long, some only just started getting me interested and then they were over. The idea behind the book was obviously to collect those stories from a small town that everyone tells and everyone knows, because they've been told so many times, like the time Timmy fell into a well and the time that Big Mike caught the huge fish from the town's only lake.
The whole thing was depressing, because unlike most of those kinds of stories everyone knows from their childhood, few of the stories related about the town of Notwithstanding actually make you smile. They almost all ended with sadness, and when they did, like the one about a boy catching the biggest pike in a woman's backyard pond, the narrator goes on to say something along the lines of, "Young Ms. So-and-so was diagnosed six months later with an advanced stage cancer and was dead a year later. She was so young and beautiful." Just stop at the happy "yay we got it" part. Don't remind us what you said three chapters earlier about the woman dying.
The other thing about Notwithstanding is that there was absolutely no chronological anything. It skips from the narrator's thirty year old self to a story from the sixties to the narrator's boyhood friend to "now" to the thirties. With jumps all over like that, I could hardly tell which way was up. It was worse than the Time Traveler's Wife because at least that had a vague order to it, and it told you who was how old and where you were in the story. Notwithstanding was just a jumble of stories told because they were there. It was like the author ran down to the neighborhood pub, and listened to two drunken good-ol'-boys talking about their favorite remember-whens and the author wrote them all down in the order they came out of liquored up mouths.
Pages: 342
Genre: Fiction, Short stories
Grade: C-
Would I Recommend?: Not on your life. Boring, and not even amusing for those of us Anglophiles who would love to know what a small English town is like.
Book 1 of 30 for the year.
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