#naive. super

[fakebookreport]

Naive. Super by Erlend Loe

I wanted to love this novel. I really did. It’s been called “charming,” and “deceptively simple,” by people who are way smarter than I am. A brief overview: an unnamed, 25 y/o, male narrator takes us through what could be called a nervous breakdown in excruciating detail. He does a whole lot of doing nothing and playing with children’s toys and riding a bicycle around his town. There’s not much of a plot and the characters seem to fit archetypes of roles rather than playing the roles in actuality.

It’s worth mentioning that I read this book for a class on “Neurodivergent Literature,” and that it’s been translated from Norwegian into English. It was also published in 1996. (None of those facts bear any relation to each other, but please enjoy my hodgepodge of a sentence or two.) I was a bit confused about this narrator being used as an example (by my professor) of a neurodivergent and/or mentally ill narrator becauses I found most of his choices and thought processes to be very easy to understand and follow. Then I remembered I have mental illnesses out the wazoo and I’m not exactly the poster child of normalcy.

That being said, what really got to me about this novel was the syntax. This could’ve been an amazingly eloquent novel, and it does express some very complex ideas, but they’re executed horribly. Most of the sentences are basic, simple sentences, and a lot of them are fragments. The narrator is obviously highly intelligent and I see that Loe was trying to create a certain voice (or vibe, as the youth would say) but all he really accomplished was creating the voice of an adult man who talks like a second grader. Not cute! 

I did enjoy the ending because it sort of broke the narrator’s ridgid (yet hopeful) worldview and this navel-gazer realized not everything is about him.

[johannesbrahms]

Books read in 2017 part 3:

1. Naive. Super, written by Erlend Loe

2.  A instalação do medo, written by Rui Zink

3. The Seagull, written by Anton Chekhov

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Erlend Loe, Naive. Super

[aspirationswrappedupinbooks]

Everything seemed meaningless to me. All of a sudden. My own life, the lives of others, of animals of plants, the whole world. It no longer fitted together.

Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super

[annabelsmith]

Friday Faves: Erlend Loe's 'Naive. Super'

…in which I invite someone bookish to share one of their all-time favourite works of fiction and what it means to them. This week’s Friday Fave comes from Connor Tomas O'Brien:

I’ve tried to get friends reading Erlend Loe’s Naïve. Super for years, with relatively little success. It’s one of those books that’s virtually irreducible – the only way to understand what it’s about is to read it all the way through.

                        (As an aside before I even get started, irreducible books are probably, in my very humble opinion, the only kinds of books worth reading. If it’s possible to broadly explain a book away in a sentence or a paragraph or a page, it seems as though that’s a sign of the work’s weakness, as opposed to a strength. At least, as somebody working on a book I find almost impossible to explain, I really, really hope so).

Naïve. Super is structured around a Norwegian twenty-something suffering a kind of mental collapse after losing to his brother in a game of croquet. From there, not much happens. The protagonist drops all his commitments and ends up housesitting for his brother, his only job to fax any mail that arrives in the letterbox. The protagonist plays with wooden BRIO toys and throws a ball against a wall, writes lists, plays with the fax machine, and reads the works of physicist Paul Davies.

Naïve. Super is similar to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, another one of my favourites. Both Loe and Murakami play with the scale of the world, distorting and amplifying the mundane until it ends up rendered strange and fantastic. In a sense, both The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Naïve. Super would probably best be understood as ‘hikikomori fiction’, examining what happens when an individual drifts (whether willingly or not) outside the realm of social convention.

I recently read a review of Naïve. Super on Goodreads in which the reviewer referred to the story’s protagonist an “imbecile”, supporting their assessment by noting that, “The character in this book makes the STUPIDEST lists I've ever seen. I think one of them was all the animals he has seen in his life. ALL THE ANIMALS he has seen in his life!”

I guess, if anything, the question Naïve. Super fronts is simple: why are so many of us afraid to relate to the world as a child might? Why do we tend to instinctively associate naivety with stupidity, and how much do we miss by deliberately attempting to obscure our lack of experience instead of reveling in it?

Being a person is undeniably odd. We construct institutions and establish routines and conventions to cover up this oddness, and eventually these institutions routines and conventions solidify into “the way things are done”. All great writing calls “the way things are done” into question, but few pieces are as straightforward about it as Naïve. Super.

Connor Tomas O’Brien is an Adelaide-based writer and web designer. He is the co-founder of independent Australian ebookstore platform Tomely and co-director of the upcoming EWF Digital Writers’ Festival.

Connor is currently completing a Creative Writing PhD at The University of Adelaide examining the role of technology in contemporary literary fiction.

He has written for Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, and Collect Magazine, and has worked on digital publishing projects for Momentum, Sleepers Publishing, the Sydney Review of Books, and Little Brown.

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[quotablebookquotes]

I don't think I am any different from other people. I have the same dreams. I want a family. I want a house. A car. Why shouldn't I want that? Everybody does. And when I have it, I want it all to work.

Erlend Loe, Naive. Super

[quotablebookquotes]

I sat there thinking this had to be the pits. I was afraid that I had become fed up with life, that I would never ever feel enthusiasm again.

Erlend Loe, Naive. Super

[quotablebookquotes]

I feel I am on a high. For the first time in a very long while I have a feeling that anything can happen. This morning I woke up thinking everything could happen, that things would just come to me, and that they would be good.

Erlend Loe, Naive. Super