A Box Of Matches - Hardcover

Baker, Nicholson

3.69

2,508 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701174021 ISBN 13: 9780701174026

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

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Here is Nicholson Baker at his obsessive-compulsive best, with humour and observation to die for, but with underlying truths and sadness about the ephemerality of life, the joy of small things, the darkness which is just the other side of everyday life - all human life in a box of matches. This book gets at the real meaning of 'the examined life', and it's unmistakably serious, but also side-splittingly funny.'It is 4.32 am...' most chapters start similarly... A man gets up earlier and earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches, also in the dark, feeling his way around, through his silent house, where wife and children sleep, and then rummages through the thoughts which crowd his head and preoccupy him. Meanwhile outside, there's snow on the ground, Greta the duck is asleep in her dog kennel with a rug thrown over it, but that doesn't stop her bowl of water freezing each night. This is mid-life man, domesticated but still an alien creature, whose thoughts veer brilliantly from love and marriage, to firelighters and suicide, from peeing in the dark to ant-farms in the twinkling of an eye. This is virtuoso writing, idiosyncratic, brilliant, funny and touching. Nicholson Baker back on MEZZANINE form for a new generation of readers. (2002-10-18)

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Review:

One man's simple, colloquial meditations on his past, his family, and his life's daily minutia are the substance of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches.

Feeling that life is passing him by, Emmett, a middle-aged medical textbook editor, decides to wake up early each day to sit by a fire in his country house and record his thoughts in a diary. "Good morning," Emmett begins, "its January and its 4.17 am, and I'm going to sit here in the dark." From this vantage point, Emmett reflects stream-of-consciousness style on whatever occurs to him, no matter how mundane: his recent trip to Home Depot, how he met his wife, the habits of the family duck. Routines, such as how he makes his morning coffee in the dark or picks up his underwear with his toes, are described with childlike reverence and directness.

All told, nothing much happens in A Box of Matches, which seems to be the point. Baker is more interested in the idea that for many, life is made up of such apparent trivialities, and that only by pausing to appreciate them can anyone gain any lasting satisfaction. Baker emphasises this through the moments of understated wisdom and joy that Emmett derives from ordinary occurrences, such as the daylight through the window: "a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so."

This is the philosophical equivalent of a one-joke premise, however, and there are moments when Emmett's naivet� and laundry list-like narrative wear thin. Likely understanding this, Baker has wisely kept things short. A curious, often charming novel, A Box of Matches will inspire some readers, while inspiring frustration in others. --Ross Doll, Amazon.com

Review:

Baker is possibly at his best when writing about small things, or about details. He is good on sex too, but a box of matches is more his sort of thing. For all of life is here, in a box of matches. Or all the potential of life. Potential for what? For the study of the mind of the average mid-life male, possibly the most exotic and fascinating of all sub-species of the human. Baker's loyal readership will be delighted by this book. Some members of that privileged group will lament the lack of sex; others will celebrate its relative absence. Nobody who has read him before will be disappointed, but perhaps the luckiest people are the ones who are just about to discover for themselves the wonderful Nicholson Baker.

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