I’d never read anything by Baker, and knew only of his book Vox, which created something of a sensation back in the late 70s or early 80s, with what I recall was a gimmick: the entire novel was a phone call or series of phone calls. What I don’t recall was who was talking; I have the impression I avoided joining interested readers at the time because I thought it was between a man and a phone sex operator. Despite this somewhat vague and shady opinion, I read and enjoyed a recent New York Review of Books review of Baker’s latest book, which included a positive survey of his entire oeuvre. I shortly afterwards stumbled on a copy of A Box of Matches at a thrift shop, and is seemed a positive push towards an proper introduction and rehabilitated opinion, not one born of speculation and headlines.A Box of Matches is a simple, quiet excursion into a man’s private contemplative space, where the thoughts do not run particularly deep. Instead of profundity, Nicholson’s unnamed narrator offers intimacy, candidly sharing quotidian thoughts and observations that arise when the mind is absorbed only in passively attending to an early morning fire. The conceit behind this “novel” is that it is composed of the daily journal entries of a man whose daily ritual is to wake around four a.m., make coffee, then settle in front of a fireplace and gradually bestir himself. The number of entries coincides with the number of matches in the box he finds to use the first morning he writes. There is no mention of the process of writing in his morning activities, and the entries have the feel of being narrated—addressing a presumptive auditor (not reader) each day with some variant of “Good morning, it’s 4:52 a.m.”Who is this narrator? Why is he communicating so intimately with me about a sock, a duck, peeing in the dark, how he saves water in the shower, his son and wife, how he takes off his pajamas, making coffee in the dark, theories about falling leaves, the nature of nightmares, etc. etc.? Each entry’s salutation warmly invites and draws the reader close. If written in normal circumstances, each entry has the feel of a letter that is dashed off for a good friend, one where content is less important than the simple act of recounting something in order to stay connected. And like such a letter, it rambles and meanders and makes several points and is only really complete because the writer has simply signed off. Not every novel has to be crowded with plot and incident, with each literary element fitting into the novel's genre-based story-telling mechanism. Baker seems to want to illustrate that point, to make it clear that any particular period of time, say, the duration of a box of matches, can serve to tell a story, though perhaps not a conventional one. Just how much invention is involved in writing in the fashion he’s chosen? Are the thoughts those of Baker or are they really fictions, the imagined thoughts of a nameless narrator? There is an instinctive urge to attribute the picayune and mundane and particular thoughts of the narrator to Baker himself, to maintain that he must be the narrator and that he is only pretending to have created a distinct fictional persona. Why would anyone bother to create a fictional narrator with these humble details so finely etched and yet so inconsequential?I found the book thoroughly engaging, nonetheless, and I was intrigued by the miniature scale, wondering at the effort it would take to create such details, rather like Albrecht Durer’s effort in producing the picture of the hare, with that creature’s fur delineated, fine-bristle stroke by stroke. What made some of this speculation possible was the novel’s length: this is a very short book, and it allowed for quick digestion and easy comprehension. Were it longer or the “plot” more defined and involved, thoughts about the composition itself might have never arisen. Further speculating, I considered interesting the degree to which the verisimilitude went, wondering whether it might have reached the level displayed in another painting, Jan Van Eyck’s painting of the newly married couple in their home, where in the background a finely wrought mirror hangs which shows the married couple and their surroundings, all reflected and backward, with a hint of the painter himself far in the backwards' viewed foreground.
A slim little book packed with quirky, sensitive ruminations about life. Emmett awakes every morning, lights a fire and enjoys some quiet time before his family awakes and starts the day. Each chapter (there are 33 because there are 33 matches in his box) begins the same way, "Good morning it's (whatever time) a.m. ..." and then Emmett shares his thoughts. He enjoys his coffee and a crunchy apple while he meditates. The writing is sensitive and lovely. Emmett's thoughts are deep and yet ordinary. He worries that the pet duck may not be warm enough in her little house. He contemplates his navel (literally!) and celebrates the everydayness of life. Emmett is a good solid guy and one really gets the feeling that he IS Nicholson Baker sharing the thoughts of a middle-aged family man. Ultimately the book is about the passage of time, the little sensations that make up life and the bigger themes of love and loss. If you need a plot-driven book this isn't for you, but if you enjoy Emmett's meanderings (how to clean a casserole dish, why he urinates while sitting down etc.) this is a terrific read. The writing is lovely. I adored this passage about taking a walk with his wife."When we started, there was still plenty of afternoon light left, and then the slow-roasting orange clouds began, and by the time we reached the little cemetery where you can see through to the lake, the light had an impoverished glow of the sort that induces one's retinas to give extra mileage to any color because the total wattage of light is so radically reduced. Where the snow had gone away, the tan layer of needles on the ground sang out with a boosted pallor, and a mitten shaped patch of cream-colored lichen on a gravestone waved at me in the gloom and made me want to have been a person who devoted his life to the study of lichen. I told Claire that I was having lichen-scientist thoughts, wishing I had become a lichen man, and she nodded. She's heard me say it before."Claire has few lines in the book but her humor shines through. As they are in bed, Emmett awake and Claire drifting off to sleep, " I asked her if she had a need for anything I might have stowed away in my pajamas. 'All set for the moment, thanks,' she said."ENJOYABLE BOOK!
What do You think about A Box Of Matches (2004)?
I liked the idea behind this little book. Each morning a man get up early before the house wakes up, and lights a fire, makes a cup of coffee, and thinks. The book is basically a stream of consciousness of where his brain takes him that morning, and it goes into some strange and hilarious places. When the box of matches is finished, so are the musings, and the book ends! Simple, but the prose is lovely, and simple, and easy. Don't expect a gripping tale, but if you like slow and detailed, with interesting observations on everyday things, you will enjoy this.
—zespri
I have a bad habit of not bothering to review three-star books, just because it’s so hard to anatomize and articulate indifference. How do you make lukewarm admiration sound interesting? It’s like telling someone, ‘I think you’re a really nice person.’ Who wants to hear that?A Box of Matches is, however, a really nice book. It’s polite, well-spoken and blandly attractive. Your mother would like it, and when, after a week or two, it stopped coming around, she’d ask wistfully, ‘Whatever happened to A Box of Matches? Such a pleasant young book. This new book now…’ and she’d trail off significantly in that way of hers.Synopses are such a bore to write – and read – but I can summarize this novel in twenty words or less: a guy wakes up early every morning, lights a fire and thinks about stuff. That’s it. There’s no plot, little character development and hardly any dialogue. Calling it a novel is just a terminological courtesy.Yet it’s all perfectly charming and, as always with Baker, distinguished by insanely precise language (in one passage, the green fuzz on a gravestone is linked to a car battery’s ‘lovely turquoise exudate’ – ‘electrical lichen’, the narrator terms it).Then why do I feel so ambivalent? I think I can explain, but in order to do so I’ll have to contradict myself somewhat (not that I have a problem with that). Just last week on this website, I was nattering on and on about Le Paysan de Paris, extolling Aragon’s commitment to the humble data of everyday life – a commitment Baker would seem to share. But now I’m thinking that maybe there’s a point at which the quotidian shades into the pedestrian, and another at which the thrillingly local becomes the complacently parochial. And that maybe Baker strays a bit too close to these liminal regions, which Aragon, for all his self-indulgence, somehow avoids. The narrator of A Box of Matches is appealing enough, but his universe is wilfully contracted, as if he’d decided: hey, I’ve got my 200-year-old farmhouse in Maine and my charming family and my exquisite perceptions, so the rest of you lot can fuck right off. Possibly I’m letting my status envy get the better of me, but I detect something sniffily bourgeois in the narrator’s attitude; he lives in a gated community of the mind, from which certain unpleasant facts are turned away by security. There’s a telling moment where he recalls watching a bunch of Marines get their hair cut in the local barbershop. Disgusted by their rampant machismo, he comments to himself: ‘I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father and a few others. Robert Service, the poet, I like.’Okay, that’s kind of funny, but once you stop chuckling sympathetically, think for a moment about the blitheness with which half of humanity is banished from this cozy little republic. While you’re at it, you might also want to ask yourself if a line about wanting nothing to do with all women would be quite so amusing. If I’m being hard on Baker, it’s only because he’s capable of so much more. He reminds me -- odd as it’s going to sound – of a Warhammer enthusiast – you know, one of those gamers who spend hours hand-painting their pewter figurines, lavishing enormous care on what is, to outsiders, an incomprehensible fringe activity. Here’s a guy who could be creating huge Sistine frescoes, and instead he’s holed up in his workshop, adding another tiny grey streak to the beard of a ‘chaos dwarf’ (I’ve never played – honest). No matter how detailed and ‘finished’ it is, at the end of the day, it’s just a dwarf, man. Hmmm… speaking of incomprehensible fringe activities, how many hours did I just waste on this unsolicited book report? Pot, meet kettle.
—Buck
Bermodalkan sekotak mancis saja Nicholson Baker mampu menterjemah setiap batang mancis yang dikorbankan setiap awal pagi kepada bab-bab yang bersifat catatan harian sekaligus menjadikan ia sebuah buku.Menilai daripada corak rutin harian beliau, boleh dikatakan buku ini terzahir daripada kebosanan Nicholson Baker sendiri ataupun beliau sendiri barangkali seorang yang membosankan. Namun fikiran beliau yang cenderung dan gemar menerbitkan teori-teori bersifat pseudo-sains memberi sedikit hiburan dalam buku ini. Menguap hingga mata berair bukan bererti mata kita perlukan lelap, malahan air mata itu sendiri sebenarnya bersifat kontradik untuk melawan rasa kantuk dengan memberi kesegaran kepada mata kita untuk terus celik. Selain petua dengan memilih untuk mendapat mimpi buruk supaya mudah terjaga dari tidur seawal pagi. Walaupun secara lazimnya kita hanyalah diberi pilihan untuk tidur walhal kekal mengalami mimpi yang bukan pilihan.Pertama kali membaca tulisan Nicholson Baker, aku masih fikir buku ini bukanlah permulaan yang sesuai untuk mengenal beliau pada pandangan pertama selain berterima kasih kerana membikin aku mahu turut membela seekor itik semirip Greta.
—Jerry Ghazali
