Alienation plays a critical role in existential novels by writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Well, hang on tight, João Gilberto Noll's unnamed main character in Lord experiences alienation in the extreme. Most of his memory is slipping and he's lost any firm grounding for his sense of identity. Sure, he's an older author from Brazil with a string of books to his credit but once he arrives at Heathrow Airport – complete disorientation.
Where's the Englishman who invited him to London? What are these Brits expecting? From first page to last: dreaminess, hallucinations, novel as Salvador Dali art, novel as David Lynch film. Here's a batch of Lord direct quotes along with my comments -
“All of a sudden I felt amazingly calm. If he didn't show up, I'd go to a cheap little hotel and return to Brazil the following day.”
The Englishman does show up and the narrator need not return to Brazil but we're given the feeling the narrator can switch identities as easily as switching hats, or should I say, now that he's in England, switching bowlers with all the associations to Samuel Beckett.
“My old language, with which I had been so intimate already seemed to be deserting me – except of course the general notion of it, or who knows, it might still provide me a little help in some extreme cases, like if I were about to die I might still be able to pronounce a dear old word from my childhood, one of those words you don't even know you have inside of you until it comes out when all the useless words of now drift away to the point where the hard edge of that sharp longing can reemerge in but one or two syllables.”
As a writer himself, one would think the narrator could at least take refuge in his native tongue. However, what happens if even all those words abandon him and all that's left are a few stray, half remembered words from childhood? Sidebar: I also included the above quote to underscore the poetic voice in Lord pulling us along, page by page, almost as if a counterforce to all the chaos.
“Where had I been all day? Looking for a mirror because I need evidence that I'm still the same, that another has not taken my place.”
In addition to language, what better benchmark can there be in establishing one's identity than peering into a mirror to make sure one's face has remained the same? Of course the irony: we change moment by moment. Whatever continuity we experience in our idea of self amounts to little more than a conceptual construct.
"I needed to attach myself blindly to the Englishman who had called me to London; I needed to reinvent him within me, allowing me to lose myself; I needed to allow the other to be born inside me, inside this very person whom I used to call "I," but who seemed so dissolved lately, ready and willing to receive the crude essence of the Englishman."
Do you hear a note of desperation? The narrator appears to have a frantic need to ground his identity - if not by subsuming the identity of another than by changing his hair color, by grasping at sex both in the body and in fantasy, by developing a friendship, by taking on a role, by seeking employment within a university.
What's so curious about this novel - we can question each and every turn of event, all the bizarre observations and moves of the narrator. Is what's happening real or is it all imagined?
Lord surely counts as one of the more unique first-person novels. Among other things, a tale with a startling ending.
Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll, 1946-2017
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