If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

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McGregor lets the description speak for itself and there is no censorship or emotion in the gory details. He says, there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. The new life the pregnant girl is coming to terms with is balanced with the inevitability of death; and just as the possibility of one relationship is closed down, another opens up.

Alternate chapters interlace past and present and knit a thorough map of inconsequential details that could have changed the course of other people’s paths in giving shape to unuttered secrets and yearnings, stillborn promises and unspoken fears that locked opportunity in the trap of perfidious forlonness. The parallel narrative is that of Robert’s friends which is an intriguing mix of third person and what almost seems to be first person narrative as if one were entering into the mind of the individual, although the lack of person pronouns makes these people almost without identity as if they don’t have the courage of right to use the word “I”. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant. From the text we slowly understand that the area has become a refugee zone and that people are fleeing from Britain to refugee camps in northern France. Most of the characters have a place of abode which, though hardly a home in the traditional sense gives them a sense of place albeit a shelter, a rehab clinic or dossing on Robert’s floor.That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof. The separation between blacks and whites are huge, and every family in the suburb is secured in any possible way.

So here, though we can see the whole street, we can't believe in any of its backdrop people, these stuck-on fuzzy-felt figures.His first collection of short stories is This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012), set in the Lincolnshire fens. The story Wires begins with a dramatic but straightforward incident when a sugar-beet (a common product on the eastern flatlands) falls off a lorry through the windscreen of a young woman’s car. It is common and more tolerable for those of us who see down-and-outs in the street to think of them as nameless faces, of people without intelligence or feelings: It is common for authors to look at down-and-outs from afar, as if they were another race, try to make excuses for them, judge them or use them as didactic material, but McGregor lets the narrative and the thoughts of the characters speak for themselves. Her news, that of discovering she is pregnant by a casual encounter, misses any sense of either fear or elation.