I don’t really know where to begin. No, Your Name Here isn’t a book to be categorized as BSRAYDEKWTDWT – you start at the beginning and work your way to the end – but it is a book you don’t know how to process. And even that’s not quite right: it’s entirely linear. There’s a beginning a middle and an end (kind of). Rather, there are a few of each.
That awkwardly unavoidable question
And so comes the rather inherent question any book is supposed to rely upon as a selling point: What is it about?
The problem is I don’t know where to start. Let’s see, here we go: You (and a bunch of other “You’s”) are reading different books on an airplane [You – yes, you – brushed up on your Calvino, didn’t you?]. One of these books is by that author Helen DeWitt, Your Name Here. Another is Lotteryland by one Rachel Zozanian. There’s a hotshot film auteur on the plane. All of the books have Arabic characters (not people, but, like, you know … letters). Any sense of overarching narrative is then disrupted by a series of emails between Helen and Ilya or their respective counterparts: Rachel and Alyosha (or Alexander or Dmitri or Kaplan or etc).
I’m the first to say that this book isn’t for everyone. I’ve handed the first chapter (excerpted in N+1) to a friend only to be told it’s garbage. I’ve tried (on countless occasions) to get Rhea to read The Last Samurai. She got a third of the way through, which I consider a success. I kind of feel like Mike at the beginning of YNH when he talks with his friend: “No, no, you have to read it, it’s fucking great, there is Greek and Japanese, but it’s motivated.” Alas, I wonder how large the audience for a book I can’t even describe will be.
I learned quickly during my jaunt of freelancing not to describe a band by comparing it to other bands (“Dude, it sounds like the Strokes and Aphex Twin got in a fight in an 8-bit version of ‘From the Aeroplane Over the Sea,’ bro.”). However, think Calvino meets Adaptation meets 8 1/2 meets Tristam Shandy (starring Steve Coogan!) meets smut, meets TTYL meets, well, Lotteryland all integrated with a few hefty ‘Hooked on Arabic” lessons.
I had a great time reading Your Name Here. I’d look up from the text every handful of pages thinking, “Good god, Helen [Rachel, Ilya, the Body] is doing it! I can’t believe she’s pulling this off!” I also continuously wondered if the book will actually be published as it is or in “a more-or-less direct and therefore awkard translation” from an email in the text: “In modern literature there are quite a number of famous books which are as difficult to understand as yours, the only problem is that although after publication readers come to appreciate the complexity of these works, before publication how can the publisher be convinced?” In some ways, a book about an author looking to complete and publish a book fits rather nicely as a digital file for anyone to stumble across. At the same time, I want to root for Helen and for the book to make millions and get huge film advances and for her to publish the many other books she alludes to have already written. I am an insufferable and selfish brat and I want to be another second person narrator in another unfinished book by Helen and her Thompson-esque co-author.
And yes, you can still get your copy here.
