John Colman WoodRecensioni

When a chance discovery challenges everything an anthropologist understands of his wife's lingering illness and death, he returns to the African plains where their parting began. The journey is told through objective discourses on Dasse tribal mourning rituals contrasted with a narrative of the anthropologist's own thoughts and experiences.

This book left me thinking of John Banville's The Sea (Man Booker Prize 2005) because of the way the wording and cadence evoke a feeling of place, in this case the desert rather than the sea, and the sense of foreboding that overshadows the whole work. In both, the ending revelation is haunting in its finality.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

I am reviewing this as a Librarything Early Reviewer.
This text is the memoir(?) of an anthropologist who has lived with his artist wife/partner and has subsequently lost her through illness; he has been the sole carer during her drawn out end of life. He then returns to Africa where they have spent time together to take on a cathartic journey with the native peoples.
The book is not one that you can enjoy but if the intention is to give the reader the disjointed, detached feeling that the recently bereaved have then it works.
The main character's partner is never named although he is interested in the local names for the things around him.
There is no feeling of completion at the end of the book and I wonder if that is again deliberate.
It has taken me a long time to bring myself to read this fully as it is not a topic that I relish but having reached the end I cannot honestly find it within me to recommend it.

"The Names of Things" is a charming little novel. Simple and well-written. Information is revealed slowly. Who is the narrator - this unnamed man who seems to be grieving? Who is the boy who guides him? Who is the unnamed woman? Eventually, we discover that the man is an anthropologist who is returning to visit Africa after the death of his wife, a painter and a woman with her own secrets. Foreshadowing is dropped lightly into the book, but we learn most of the details through flashbacks to the couple's previous sojourn in Africa. It's beautiful and heartbreaking and tragic.

I suspect that the lack of names for people and places may displease some readers, but for me it was part of the book's charm and its message. The title is, after all, about names. And as we learn later in the book: "What he wanted remained unnamed, unsaid, because he didn't know what to say, and even if he did, he wouldn't know how." When he first arrived in Africa, a boy "taught him the names of things," but now he cannot name the thing that will save him, will make him whole. The reader travels with him as he tries to discover it.

The book is a quick read, but I recommend it for the patient reader.

This novel is the story of an anthropologist who spent years with his artist wife studying tribes of northern Kenya. After her death he returns to the area and travels around areas they have known, remembering their life there and afterwards when they returned to academic life in the western world. The story moves from the present to the past and is interspersed with pages from his journal, all of which make it rather disconnected and jumpy. It's also a very reflective book as the anthropologist seeks to find peace with his life. I'm afraid it really wasn't my cup of tea.½

Quietly contemplative story of a man living through the aftermath of his wife's long illness and death. I didn't *enjoy* it, exactly - too melancholy for that - but it was a moving read. I found the passages that moved back and forth between the present and the past a little disjointed, but it was well-written and intriguing.

Life, love, death, & betrayal; they are all in the Names Of Things.
The story jumps from a present day journey to memories of an anthropologist. He just lost his wife to disease, and took a trip back to the Dasse clan that he visited years ago. The names of the couple or the disease are never mentioned, which might keep you from connecting with them. But the story itself is interesting and captivating.

Generally I enjoy simple books in which "not much happens" -- they often turn out to have a quiet brilliance -- but I had difficulty finding an "in" to this narrative. Some of the anthropological details rang more true to me than the introspection. I'd like to try this book again in a different stage of life -- I can imagine it feeling very meaningful, but it didn't do that for me this time.

This is a slow, quiet read about an anthropologist and his artist wife. The story swings back and forth in time and over the years we see the wife's loneliness, the strain between the couple and the husband's grief and guilt following her death (although not specified, probably from AIDS). Throughout we also have the husband's field study notes about a group of Kenyan nomads, with emphasis on their death rituals. This is not a memorable book for me; it was an enjoyable read, but will not stick with me.

An anthropologist grieving the loss of his wife describes his anthropological studies in Africa.

The book was about much more than anthropology. The narrative weaves back and forth between the man's current experience and the life he shared with his wife. I struggled to get through it, but I think this is a book that many others will enjoy.

An anthropologist goes on a pilgrimage across northeast Africa after the death of his wife, coming to terms with her loss and wondering whether he really even knew her at all.

It's interesting that I can't tell you the anthropologist's name, as I don't believe it is ever mentioned in the book. He is simply referred to as "he" and "him", or by the native word "ferenji" used for Westerners. Likewise his wife is simply referred to as "she".

This story is at once very simple, getting to the heart of the matter, without excessive flourish or glamor, and yet it is complex, winding around on itself. There isn't a great amount of dialogue in the book, as the majority of the story is self-discovery and the discovery of truth. All of his interaction in the story is with the Africans he encounters and stays with during his journey, and they are a simple and quiet people, not given to excessive chatting.

There are some interesting transitions between chapters where bits of the Dasse culture are revealed. The author writes of "rituals that surround death and dying", allowing a glimpse into Dasse society, and giving the reader a better understanding of these people that the anthropologist and his wife lived with and studied.

After his artist wife dies from an unnamed disease that sounds suspiciously like AIDS, the anthropologist begins to look through her journals and questions arise, causing him to embark on a trek back to the village of his friend Abudo, in hopes of finding answers.

My final word: This was an enjoyable read, and went fairly quickly. The author is very adept at bringing you into the story with lovely description that isn't overdone, and a writing style that can flow from verbose to rather clipped, the anthropologist varying from very logical reasoning that examines his own life with scientific precision to reflecting on beautifully sensitive and emotional moments with his wife in their life together. A lovely little story.

The Names of Things
I thought the name of the book was interesting since the name of the main character and his wife didn't have names. They were referred to as the man and his wife.
I liked the book. It was a quiet, serious book, with wonderful description. Though there was not a lot of action, it was a compelling read. The story is about an anthropologist studying the Dasse tribe in Africa. The story moves back and forth between the past and present. I found the main character rather self-absorbed. Everything revolved around him and his research. He was reckless and did not take into account the consequences of his actions. He seemed to do things based on emotion rather than good sense. Even though he had his wife with him, her needs were not nearly as important as his. In fact, she eventually moves to “town” so she can follow her passions: drawing and painting.
Interspersed between chapters are descriptions of the tribal funeral customs. It's confusing at first. Then you realize that the man's wife is dying. The description of how he takes care of her is very touching. It is interesting, then, to contrast the different funeral customs for each country.
The ending was quite something. I don't think I have ever read anything like it.

The Names of Things by John Colman Wood is the journey of an anthropologist through the grieving processes he documented among the Northeast African Dasse nomadic camps following the passing of his wife sometime later. Beautifully written in alternating time frames from the anthropologist’s past field work that helped him create two books on the nomadic lives of these people and their grieving rituals and the present when he returns to the African Chalbi Desert to cope with his wife’s passing. Wood also includes excerpts on the tribe’s grieving rituals throughout the book, which help to anchor the story in Africa, and help the reader learn how the tribe has named the unnameable — a task the anthropologist must learn.

The prose of this novel is hypnotic and carries the reader into the desert with these people as the anthropologist gains their favor and begins to feel at one with the community. Wood not only raises questions of an academic nature about the role of an anthropologist, but also whether his presence has polluted the natural dynamic of the community by introducing foreign ideas and culture into their community. But the presence of the anthropologist among this community also raises questions of how well he can integrate into the community and understand their rituals, feelings, and perspectives, especially since he always remains mostly an outsider to their customs and their grief.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/09/the-names-of-things-by-john-colman-wood.html

The Names of Things by John Colman Wood

This is probably going to be one of the rare books that I read more than once. I do love anthropological studies, but this is much more than that. The author writes about the way he and his wife experience their marriage differently. It is said that when you lose a parent or partner for whom you felt no love, there is still grief, grief for what you wish had been. That is the main story I took away from this book. I found reading it a touching experience - beautifully expressed - beautifully written. Highly recommended for both the anthropological information as well as the personal story.

I won this book by requesting it from Early Reviewers. And I'm glad I won it. As a person who majored in Anthropology I always wonder what the effect the observer had on the observed. But never the other way around. Anthropology is a solitary profession, trying to take in & understand, make sense of the customs of another people.
I kept picking up the book and putting it down as is sometimes the way with a book. But always I felt a certain "peacefulness" when I read. After the death of the woman, the man goes back to the people he observed when they were married. But to me it was more of a journey to find the person in him. To maybe get back to what truly made him happy since the person he loved was gone. Seemed like he was trying to pay back some sort of spirit debt for his absence from her life.
While its a somber story with an ending not altogether unexpected, i would recommend the book and have in fact lent it to other members in my book club.

I had a small gap in the reading of this and, unusually, found that what i had read had not remained with me sufficiently for me to pick up the book and continue; i had to go back to the beginning and start again. I only mention this because it is relevant to my review in that i, normally an involved reader, am able to follow several books at once (recently it was a dozen i had going), without confusing them, but this time i was not able to....
First of all, the plot is not told in chronological order but jumps back and forth through time from the present, the book's opening, to several different points in the past. Also, intermixed in the plot are snippets from an anthropologist's notes or writings; the implication is that they are those of the main character, a never named American studying in East Africa, though i think they could well be actual notes made by Wood in the course of his studies.
...
Usually if a particular book ~ or sometimes it's all of an author's works ~ is less character-driven it will be more plot-oriented; in this case, however, i don't find that compensation. ...I don't really understand Wood's meaning or purpose behind the book; since there really is not much of a plot, as i mentioned, nor do the characters present anything new or compelling to me, certainly not the two North Americans, while the Africans are hard to distinguish though as a group perhaps new, why was the book written?
In a sense, it seems as though the sole purpose to the novel is to present what the life of an anthropologist is like....At any rate, despite the several negative points i have made, i did not not enjoy the book so much as find it necessary to reclassify it in my mind. It clearly does not fit into my categorisation as “Novel, good”, yet it is not clearly a book to throw away....An awkward review, i'm afraid, of what is, in a number of ways, an awkward book.

The complete review, with further ramblings on it, may be read here: http://rhydypennau.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/names-of-things-john-coleman-wood.html½

The Names of Things, by John Colman Wood, tells the story of an unnamed anthropologist studying the nomadic Dasse people of the Chalbi Desert. In his field work, he observes the customs and rituals, as well as the normal day-to-day interactions, of the camel-herding Dasse. He is entranced by them, falling easily into their life. He builds a friendship with one of the nomadic men.

“You seized a bit of life, and life damaged you.”

The anthropologist’s wife, an artist, goes with him. She does not adjust, merely endures. She complains to him, but these go unheeded. He thinks that she can paint anywhere and shouldn't really mind the upheaval of her life. As he becomes more involved in his work, his wife slips further away from him. Eventually, she is lost entirely. The anthropologist must then sift through his grief and the deceptive past to find answers. He returns to the desert, the scene of the crime, to make sense of things.

“Death is a strange betrayal. The dead leave the living more certainly than if they’d run off with a lover.”

Told in alternating first-person and third-persons narration, the reader gets a multifaceted look into the anthropologist’s life. The third-persons drives home the notion that this man is an observer, even of his own life. He is an anthropologist through and through. Still, the overall tone is intimate and personal. We feel very close to this man. The anthropologists’ sorrows and desires become our own.
The desert wilderness comes to life as well. The people, animals, and scenery are wonderfully described. Dasse burial rituals are very detailed. The reader is fully drawn into this world.

“All I wanted was to sing and dance and share the delight and seriousness of that night, and my desire to do so, a desire which arose from the differences between us, my incapacity, my lack of understanding, was the very thing that held me back.”

This book is not a thrill ride, not an adventure. It is quiet and contemplative, lyrical and flowing. The story is deceptively simple: what seems like a meandering tale turns into a poignant and evocative look at love, loss, and grief.

Fantastic! This novel transports the reader to the plains of Africa with magnificent descriptions and straight on cultural research. We become nomads as we travel with the Dasse people. After a few pages it is easy to feel the desert and smell its scents. But the book is more than an anthropologist's journey. It is also a thought provoking tale of a marriage of the heart as well as the soul. The main character is truly an observer, both of indigenous peoples and of his place among them. As an anthropologist, he learns to observe and not to interact, a trait he carries into the relationship with his wife. In the end, the intimacy he lacks with her adds to the grief he feels upon her death. This grief remains with him to the end of the tale and may in fact be the cause of his own demise. Wonderfully written, the story is worth retelling, over and over. I will pass this one along.

I thought this book was a wonderful written book based on a anthropologist's view of the world. I like the descriptions of the people the anthropologist studied, I liked the way that the story itself was interspersed with quotes from the book the anthropologist had "written." I also liked how it showed us that all people no matter their culture deal with the same events and emotions. We just deal with it differently. I wish it had ended differently because the ending was a little disappointing to me, and it is vulgar in a few places which might offend a few readers. It is also a bit slow going but the journey is definitely worth it. It is a nicely written novel about a man dealing with grief and I enjoyed it.

I'm not an anthropologist and I've never been to Africa, but after reading The Names of Things, I found myself wishing for both. This is an outstanding book - sad, stark, beautiful, haunting, hypnotic, enthralling, and incredibly descriptive.

"Desert is strewn nearly everywhere with volcanic rubble. Rocks are as common as air..."

"He sat and waited, suspended in an invisible bell jar of grief..."

"Beside an ancient thorn tree, thick and black and graceful as live oak, limbs sprawling low and parallel to the earth rather than reaching upward, was a shallow pool of clear dark water, fed from a spring among a pile of boulders set against the slope of the escarpment..."

"You seized a bit of life, and life damaged you..."

This is the story of an anthropologist who returns to Africa after the death of his wife to live with the Dasse people. As he studies them, he ponders how his presence must impact their lives. As time goes on, we wonder who has changed more - the Dasse or the anthropologist as he struggles to come to terms with his grief.

We learn the names of the Dasse people, their ceremonies and rituals, greetings and more, in their native language. Yet we never do learn the names of the anthropologist or his wife, or even the country where the story takes place or the neighboring country to the north where the anthropologist eventually walks with "his one intention, if you could call it that...to be lost." As the story moves along, this becomes irrelevant - knowing the names of things is important only in the most superficial sense.

This isn't an adventure book - the story moves slowly, gently meandering through the deserts and steppes and escarpments - although there are certainly some wild and suspenseful parts of the book that make it impossible to put down. It isn't a travel book, though you'll certainly feel as if you are right there, seeing the sights and becoming engaged in the culture right along with the anthropologist. It isn't about philosophy, although there is an existential element that runs throughout the entire story. It isn't even a romance, though we experience his joy, his hopes, his fears, his suspicions and his grief when he's reminiscing about his wife. It's simply an intelligently written, elegant book sure to transport the reader to an amazing place.

The writing is flawless, the story flows perfectly, and the author's voice is eloquent. I give it five stars all the way.

I was given the honor of reading this book for free through LibraryThing in exchange for providing a fair and honest review.

I was almost an anthropologist. I majored in the subject in college, drawn to it by my own unusual childhood, which was spent traveling for years among different cultures than that of my birth. The fundamentals of anthropological field work resonated with me: always observing and learning, participating only at arm's length, yet somehow making usefulness out of the loneliness of never quite belonging. I found appealing this idea that somehow there was a special point to a liminal existence, that only one who was outside could adequately translate one culture for another. However, I didn't end up becoming an anthropologist. I fell in love and decided that I couldn't ask my husband to traipse through the wilderness with me. Not to mention that after having already spent years traipsing through the wilderness, I had adapted pretty well to the softness of belonging and having.

The unnamed narrator of The Names of Things had no such compunction. He brings his wife, a painter, with him to Africa, for his extended field work with the Dasse people, often disappearing off into the desert for weeks at a time. In his mind, she could paint anywhere, so her eventual objections to the locale are moot, especially as he has committed himself irrevocably at that point to the focus of his work. Finally they compromise and she takes up residence in a larger, more temperate community farther away from the Chalbi desert. That compromise, which seems at the time to save their marriage and his career, leads to an an accident and an illness that takes everything away.

This is a slow and thoughtful book, beautifully written. At first I was uncertain about the use of third-person narrative interspersed with first-person book and journal entries, until I realized that the format perfectly portrays the narrator's biggest quandary: he views life, even his own life, through the eyes of an anthropologist, always observing, explaining, and rationalizing what he sees and experiences, rather than directly experiencing the events themselves. When confronted by the greatest loss of his life, and a revelation that may or may not explain or undermine that loss, he struggles to know his own reaction, almost as if he were a stranger to himself, an observer lost in his own mind. He is confronted by grief that rituals do not heal, a mystery that reason cannot solve, and a journey that appears to have no purpose or ending other than one he invents for it.
This is an impressive novel, well informed by the experience of the author, an anthropologist himself and also a talented writer who reminded me of the wonderful Oliver La Farge. The book balances realistic ethnography with insightfulness, in particular, the extraordinary insight that so much of insight itself is colored by the one doing the seeing. Knowing the names of things does not allow one to know the things themselves.

I received an early review copy of this book.

This is an excellent book. That's just about all I can really say about The Names of Things.

But I'll try to say more.

This is the story of an anthropologist who is reflecting upon his life, his marriage, his profession, after the death of his artist-wife. Although the book starts off somewhat unevenly, it becomes clear that author John Colman Wood has gotten to the heart of two very important distinctions: first, the difference between science and art as intellectual enterprises; second, - and perhaps more important - the difference between studying a culture and living a life (within a culture).

Ultimately, the book is about one man's reflections on his life, his insecurities, his limitations, and his failures. Wood, an anthropologist and former journalist, brings a great deal of experience and insight into what would otherwise have been a "run-of-the-mill" fine story, transforming it into something really special.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

(NOTE: I read the Kindle version of this book.)