What's in a Name?

There’s really no denying that names have a lot of power. How many times have you picked up a book for no reason other than it had an interesting title? How many times has the name of a book actually impacted how you feel about the book as a whole? How many times has just hearing a powerful name inspired you?

Rather than discuss why this is, I’d actually rather just talk about a few of the best book titles out there, as well as what makes them so meaningful.

Tell me, friends: What are some of your favorite book titles? What makes them so interesting/powerful/meaningful to you?

So then, for a very short list of only a few of the best names I've encountered:

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

This is absolutely the most amazing name ever conceivable for a book. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but still…) Really, though: this is the very very most amazingest book title I’ve ever come across. I read the book once some years back, and remember feeling that the book itself didn't quite live up to how wonderful the title is. That said, though, I'd like to give the book another shot in the near future and see if my feelings on it have changed.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer
Not only is this one of the greatest book titles I've seen, it's also one of the greatest books I've read. I read it too long ago to be able to write up a fair review for you now (unless I read it again, which is likely), but trust me when I tell you: the book is extremely great and incredibly beautiful.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
This is a great example of a book that I read largely because of the title. Sure, I'd already been a fan of C.S. Lewis before reading Faces. But reading the back cover, this book really didn't appeal to me that much - it truly was the title that sold me on it. What exactly the title means though - and where it appears in the text - makes it even more powerful. What a profound phrasing, which you'll only fully understand once you read the book. (And you definitely should read it.) (Oh, and though it's not a full review, you can read a couple of my thoughts on the book here, if you'd like.)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
I haven't even read this book (yet). I just think it's a truly fantastic title, which is practically a story on its own. Really, the implications of this one phrase are mind-bending. (When we talk about love, we're not really talking about love? - cosmic.) In fact, I'm not the only one who's noticed how great of a title this is - it's been blatantly repurposed at least twice so far that I know of: once by Haruki Murakami for his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and then later by Rob Bell for his book What We Talk About When We Talk About God.

If You Feel Too Much by Jamie Tworkowski
First of all, if you're not familiar with the works of To Write Love On Her Arms, you should get familiar with them, because they're wonderful. Aside from this, If You Feel Too Much is a lovely name that perfectly addresses Tworkowski's audience and exemplifies the overall mood and heart of the book. I might even go so far as to say that, of all the books on this list, it's the most intimately connected to the content of the book itself - which is certainly to Tworkowski's credit.

(I see now that apparently I like book titles that start with "If..." I hadn't noticed before. Interesting...)


Now it's your turn!

REVIEW: Confessions - Kanae Minato

• Year first released:  2014
• ISBN of the edition I read:  0316200921
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Little, Brown and Company
• My rating (out of 5):  4

10 or 11 years ago, I read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It was a fantastic mystery (regarding a stolen gemstone) told from the perspectives of 11 different people involved in the affair. The first - and longest - part of the book sets up the entire scenario and introduces us to all the key characters. From there, we're given more and more details, ideas, and points of view from each of the other characters, until the final part, which ties everything together and brings us the ultimate solution.

Minato's much more recent Confessions has a similar setup:

Part 1 introduces us to the underlying crime (this time, the tragic, heartless murder of a 4-year-old girl) which propels the story as a whole. Each of the subsequent parts then show us a different character's perspective on the matter, before arriving at its downright chilling ending.

Unlike The Moonstone, though, the flow to Minato's story is constantly pulling us forward. We're actually presented most of the details - and even the culprit - by the end of Part 1 - the first 50 pages of the book. Then, rather than revisit the same depressing scene over and over again with each new character's perspective, we're shown the aftermath that each character faces in response to the initial murder.

It's a deliberate, clever approach that works on several levels. Once you realize that you already know the answer to the crime only a fifth of the way into the book, you will inevitably wonder, Where could the story go from here? Isn't it already finished? Indeed, it is not - not by a long shot.

The layers that each new character adds to the story unfold in a highly intricate fashion, leaving us to wonder what is really at the heart behind everything. The facts we thought we knew become distorted. We discover that the motives aren't what we had originally been told. And, importantly, we may not have seen the last of the crimes... [no spoilers, though]

We might say that Confessions is a mystery in reverse. Rather than the book merely being about trying to solve the murder at the beginning, we already know who the murderer is and how the deed was performed. What matters here is the spiral, the after effects, all of which eventually point to the book's highly effective, disturbing, shocking final page. (Pleasingly, the final twist of the book is on the very last page - you do yourself a disservice if you stop reading the book at any point before then.)

Full of deep characters, a plot that twists with almost every page, and an intriguing look at justice - what it really is and looks like, how it is achieved, who is responsible for enacting it, etc. - Confessions is one of the best mysteries I've come across. I'll definitely be diving into Minato's next book, Penance, in due time.

Point of View, pt. 2: the Narrator's Role

In the first part of this discussion on point of view, I said:

If Suzy is the main character - most of the scenes include/follow her, the narrator shares Suzy's thoughts with us, etc. - there's no very good reason to suddenly jump into Bob's head just to show us what Bob is thinking - especially when Suzy is standing in the room with Bob. Rather, a less lazy approach would be for the narrator to continue following only Suzy, and make Bob's thoughts or feelings evident by his words, his expressions, his actions, etc. - you know: "show instead of tell" and all that. 

When this happens, I wonder Who is the narrator, exactly? How does s/he know what all of these different people are thinking?

It's an interesting question, one which, frankly, not enough writers ask as they're crafting their books. Who is the narrator? 

Often, when a story is written from the third-person perspective, the narrator isn't meant to be a character from the book. (Of course the narrator is likely going to be a character for first-person stories, but we're not going to focus on that for now.) 

It's fine if the narrator isn't a character. Generally speaking, there's no reason the voice telling us the story has to be involved in the story.

Then again, we've all read plenty of books in which the narrator intrudes upon the story, responds to it, expresses their own emotions and subjectivity on the happenings. And when this happens, there's no way around it: we're reading the words of an individual personality. And an individual personality can't know what everyone in town is thinking.

These intrusions by the narrator can be small, subtle, overdrawn, exaggerated, or anything in between. Sometimes they can be as minute as a punctuation mark or as big as a monologue.

To give some examples of this, I'm going to pick on Jane Austen. Largely this is because she's already been solidified as a classic, so it's not as though I'm going to harm her reputation by saying anything bad about her. Also - let's call it what it is - she wasn't great about all of this POV business.

In the second chapter of Pride and Prejudice, we have this line: 

Mrs Bennet deigned not to make any reply...

So Mrs Bennet doesn't say anything. That's fine. But if we think about the word choice here, Austen actually took it just a step further: Mrs Bennet deigned. What this means is that Mrs Bennet felt it would be beneath her dignity to reply. 

In this case, the narrator doesn't just tell us that Mrs Bennet didn't speak - which could have been an easy, objective thing to say - the narrator goes a step further and tells us what was going on inside Mrs Bennet's head. It's a subtle difference which hinges on just one word, but it's important. 

On its own, this isn't a problem. On the very next page (at least, on the next page of the edition I read), though, we then have this line:

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how. 

Once again, we have an example of the narrator knowing what is going on in a character's head - this time, Mary: Mary wished to do something, but didn't know how. 

In the space of two pages, we have the narrator knowing what's going on both in Mrs Bennet's head and in Mary's head.

Now then. On their own, there's nothing wrong with these two sentences. It seems this book merely has an Omniscient Third Person Narrator (that's your fancy English term for the day). And as long as the narrator doesn't have any sort of personality on her own, there's nothing inherently wrong with this.

Once the narrator intrudes and displays any sort of personality traits or opinions, though, suddenly we have a problem. Then we're not just dealing with narration; we're being exposed to another, unnamed character with her own distinct ideas. 

Let's look at a subtle example of this from the very next chapter of Pride and Prejudice:

What a contrast between him and his friend!

("Him" is Mr Bingley; "his friend" is Mr Darcy.)

As you'll know from reading the book, Bingley and Darcy have highly different personalities. This statement, then, can be seen as objective enough on its own. (There is a hint of the narrator's judgement in the sentence, but since the statement is so obviously clear to any reader - and to any other character in the book - I'll call it objective enough.)

What about that exclamation mark at the end, though?

The narrator didn't want to simply tell us that Bingley and Darcy are different. Rather, she pointed it out excitedly or emphatically. In other words, suddenly the narrator is bringing her own emotions into the mix. Not only are the two characters different - the narrator feels something about their difference.

And we can see this because of one punctuation mark.

Do you see the contradiction here?

It is okay for a narrator to know what multiple characters are thinking/wishing/feeling/etc. (The Omniscient Narrator.)

It is okay for a narrator to feel something about the events or characters of the story. (The Personal Narrator.)

It is NOT okay to have both of these - an omniscient narrator AND a personal one.

This simply doesn't work. If the narrator has a personality, then suddenly she has been characterized. And if she's characterized, then - even if she isn't named or directly addressed or anything else along these lines - she can't know what any of the other characters are thinking or feeling. She can only be inside her own head - not everyone else's. 

What do you think, though, friends? Have you noticed these sorts of things in your readings? What are some examples of books that have been handled particularly well - or particularly unwell - along these lines?