On meaning – Edmund Gordon in LRB:

“Since we rarely manage to say what we mean, how much can personality have to do with language in the first place? McGregor has been posing versions of this question since the start of his career. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), is full of characters whom words fail. The unnamed young woman who narrates part of the story can’t bring herself to tell her mother that she’s pregnant; elsewhere there’s an old man who can’t tell his wife he’s been diagnosed with cancer, a boy who can’t tell the girl across the road that he loves her and another man who can’t speak to anyone about his dead wife. The novel takes a panoramic view of the residents of a single street over the course of a day, encompassing many of the small pleasures that often go unspoken: from students on a comedown silently enjoying one another’s company to a mother unobtrusively watching her children play. The novel was longlisted for the Booker, but some reviewers complained about its ‘pretentious parade of heavily intense gestures’ and ‘fatal lack of humour’.”

(…)

“When Anna flies to Santiago – Doc has been airlifted to a hospital there – the details seem authentic enough for us to assume that if McGregor hasn’t been through something similar, he at least did his research: On the ward, a nurse showed Anna how to spoon food into Robert’s mouth. The food was mashed, and smelled of banana ... Robert looked at Anna, and at the bowl, and raised his eyebrows. He made a noise in the back of his throat ... He made a puffing sound, biting at his bottom lip ... He looked at her, and screwed up as much of his face as he was able to move.
After the high drama of the opening section, with its exotic scenery and life-or-death stakes, the story shifts to England, where we follow Doc’s long journey towards an uncertain recovery. The steps along the way are at once depressingly small and forbiddingly vast. Learning to swallow again. Learning to match the word ‘cat’ with a picture of a cat again; learning to say the word ‘cat’ again. Learning to write his name again. When my father was at the start of this process, my wife and I took our two-year-old son to visit him in hospital. I watched as Dad struggled to say ‘hello’, encouraged by the child whose own recent breakthroughs in speech had been a source of uncomplicated pride. It can be difficult to remember that someone whose linguistic skills compare unfavourably to a toddler’s is still an intelligent adult, as Doc finds one day when he returns from the toilet. ‘You managed everything by yourself then?’ a nurse calls out. ‘Excellent, well done!’ For a man who, weeks earlier, was riding a skidoo through a ‘surge’ of polar weather, it seems an underwhelming achievement. By this point, Doc has regained enough vocabulary to articulate his feelings: ‘Me. Fucking. Me, med, medal!’”

(…)

“Two years on from his stroke, my father’s speech is far from perfect. He takes time to find words. He makes mistakes. But in all the most important ways – his intellect, his temperament, his sense of humour – he’s much the same as ever. These days I’m grateful for the things about him that used to wind me up. Perhaps this won’t last. The website of the Stroke Association warns that although aphasics may not recover the ability to speak in full sentences, ‘it’s usually possible for other people to understand what they mean. This can be very frustrating.’”

Read the review here.

The higher your expectations the more fatal your lack of humour.

Why do we communicate? Probably more important, how do we communicate? And do we know what we are trying to say when we use our communication skills? Can you pass the salt please? The play, the movie, the novel are built on the assumption that behind the so-called straightforward dialogue a world opens for our eyes, profound and tragic as the world can be.
But unfortunately, sometimes the simple question is just the simple question. We ask for salt, because we need the salt.