A Box Of Matches

Product Description

Here is Nicholson Baker at his obsessive-compulsive best, with humour & observation to die for, but with underlying truths & 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', & it's unmistakably serious, but also side-splittingly funny.' It is 4.32 am...' most chapters start similarly... A man gets up earlier & earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee & lights the fire with a box of matches, also in the dark, feeling his way around, through his silent house, where wife & children sleep, & then rummages through the thoughts which crowd his head & 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 & marriage, to firelighters & suicide, from peeing in the dark to ant-farms in the twinkling of an eye. This is virtuoso writing, idiosyncratic, brilliant, funny & touching. Nicholson Baker back on MEZZANINE form for a new generation of readers.