“Nothing matters.”
“From the moment you are born, you start to die.”
“The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. You’ll live to be a maximum of one hundred. Life isn’t worth the bother!”
So says Pierre Anthon when he decides that there is no meaning to life, leaves the classroom, climbs a plum tree, and stays there.
His friends and classmates cannot get him to come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to him that there is a meaning to life, they set out to build a heap of meaning in an abandoned sawmill.
But it soon becomes obvious that each person cannot give up what is most meaningful, so they begin to decide for one another what the others must give up. The pile is started with a lifetime’s collection of Dungeons & Dragons books, a fishing rod, a pair of green sandals, a pet hamster — but then, as each demand becomes more extreme, things start taking a very morbid twist, and the kids become ever more desperate to get Pierre Anthon down. And what if, after all these sacrifices, the pile is not meaningful enough?
A Lord of the Flies for the twenty-first century, Nothing is a visionary existential novel — about everything, and nothing — that will haunt you.
Title: Nothing
Author: Janne Teller
Publisher: Atheneum (February 9, 2010)
Pages: 227
Filed under: Books, Reading Lists
When I first picked this one up, I wanted to put it down right away. It felt simplistic and improbable. Then I went back to look at the reviews to see why I had put it on my reading list in the first place. I saw “parable”, “gruesome” and “challenging.” I went back at it and boy did it deliver!
I don’t think it’s one of those books someone reads for the enjoyment of the story of the love of the characters. It moves fast. There is only enough detail to keep the plot somewhat believable. When it comes down to it, though, it is what it is. It’s a parable and, thus, not necessarily meant to be entirely realistic. The events that occur would likely have been far more disturbing had they taken place in a regular realistic fiction story, but in this book I found them compelling. I winced but the narrative didn’t allow me to dwell on the particular horror or gruesomeness long before it posed some rather interesting questions and insight.
I would say that the novel is definitely literary. And provocative. It’s a book to be examined and discussed. I think the issues tackled in “Nothing” are a bit more complex and varied than “Lord of the Flies”. However, it isn’t a shotgun of weirdness. For example, you could come at the book and examine every bit of it within the framework of existential nihilism. You could also examine it through the lens of materialism, dualism, etc.
My only criticism at this point is that it was originally published in Danish and there are a few phrases here and there where the impact has been lost in translation.
[...] Nothing by Janne Teller [...]
It is a weird little book isn’t it? You are right, Kate, “Nothing” is thought provoking and challenging. I had the most trouble with the decapitation of the dog, not that it was too offensive (it will be for many readers) but it was the first time I was pulled away from the story, thinking it was improbable. The escalation of each addition to the heap of meaning though is one of the major points of Teller’s work. So gruesome, shocking, offensive elements are necessary. Even though our narrator is a YA and it is clearly about YA’s… I would be surprised if it appeals to YA’s.
I’m not sure how well it would appeal to teens, either. Right after I first read it, I described it to a teen who became very excited about the premise and put the title into her “books to read” list on her iPhone. Still, I suspect that Danish youth are more likely to read and discuss a philosophical book like this. I’ll make some teens read it and see what they think.
I had a hard time with this one. I understand that it is not meant to be entirely realistic, but there were too many times that I felt pulled out of the story when it got too unrealistic (digging up the coffin, decapitating the dog, cutting off the finger, and paying $3.6 million for the pile of meaning). I was also left with a very uneasy feeling upon finishing the book. I think I had the hardest time with the loss of innocence, and how hard it ended up making Sofie throughout the end of the book. It felt very “Lord of the Flies”ish, but definitely not one I would pick to win the Printz
I thought this book was quite good.
Parable – 1. a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. 2. a statement or comment that conveys a meaning indirectly by the use of comparison, analogy, or the like.
Heh. Get it? A comment about meaning in a form that conveys meaning.
But further, it’s not “not meant to be entirely realistic”, it’s really not realistic at all. Except on the surface, in that the setting is putatively the real world and the characters appear human. So if you get caught up in the gruesomeness, it’s really missing the point.
I think there are lots of high school kids that will read this and love it. It’s the crowd that was my crowd when I was in high school. In fact, I went through some of the same struggles when I independently invented nihilism back then. If only my dad could have handed me this book! I didn’t sit in a plum tree, mind you … not *literally*, that is.
Boy, the Danes and their parables … The Woman and the Ape by Peter Hoeg is another good one (though not YA).
I think this should be in the running for the Printz.
Ian said: “2. a statement or comment that conveys a meaning indirectly by the use of comparison, analogy, or the like.”
But what is the meaning that the book is conveying?
Also, I found it odd when the book devolved into a revenge fantasy in which each kid got to choose which meaningful thing the next kid would give up.
And I don’t remember there being a lot of talk about Sophie’s innocence before it was taken away, but I’d have to reread the book to be sure.
To me, this book is a sort of Lord of the Flies ripoff without the internal logic of Lord of the Flies. In that book, the kids are competing for power and distribution of resources–something human beings have unfortunately been known to do.
Nothing is only superficially similar to Lord of the Flies. Sure, in both books the kids get kind of nasty with each other. But in Lord of the Flies, the point is that without authority, without civilization, people devolve pretty fast, and there’s no way out of the spiral.
I argue that despite the nastiness and bitterness that the kids go through in Nothing, the book is actually a *defense* of civilization! Someone comes along with his newfound nihilism and says “nothing matters” – and do his classmates say “yeah, you’re right,” and sit around moping for the rest of the book? No. No, they do not. Instead, they try their hardest to prove to Pierre that their lives *do so* have meaning.
Let me interrupt my train of thought here to say that if the book had no other redeeming value, that, to me, would still make it a damn fine book.
The kids don’t get nasty with each other because they’re out of control – they only do it in the service of their great cause. They realize that meaning *hurts*. And in a parable, you follow the train of thought to its logical conclusion, so you go from things people love to digging up a body to the life of an animal and on through hacking off a part of someone’s body. They aren’t being nasty suggesting the things with meaning, though they do get nasty if someone refuses (thereby thwarting their cause).
So, far from being an examination of just how thin the line is between civilization and anarchy, like Lord of the Flies, Nothing is about a group of kids who will stop at nothing to preserve civilization and the meaning of civilization.
When asked to read nothing I thought that wouldn’t be hard to accomplish until I realized there was an actual book called “Nothing”. Okay, now that I got this joke out of my system. time for the book. In fact I felt it would be kewl to tell people I was reading nothing and see their responses.
If I were to describe “Nothing” by Teller I would say. “This is a gruesome little book with many paradoxes inside from a youth or teen perspective. All in all this “Nothing” is really something. A book that makes the reader wince and yet think or ponder even after you put it down. It is like watching an accident happen when you know there is not anything you can do to stop it and it feels like it happens in slow motion. It is similar to a grizzly fascination that you just can’t look away from. And lastly, for a book about everybody looking for meaning, it will also make you search for your own meaning or how you look for meaning. This is not a book for the faint of heart.”
I first found myself re-reading the book immediately after finishing it in order to research the order of the things given to the heap. I was thinking there was a logic or meaning hidden there but the order didn’t help me. After someone in the novel had taken a life of an animal the giving up a yellow bike did not seem like the order was building in a straight line-at least within the setting’s time of the book. There may have been times in the past where animal lives were so unimportant but then we may not have had yellow bikes in those days.
Two other themes then came to mind about the story. One theme is the progression of violence. This could be thought of as violence of humans or even teens and the stirring up of violence by an idea. I’m already thinking back to last Fall and the bullying in the news across the country. The second theme was on the act of meaningful giving. Can forcing or persuading a person to give something up cross the boundary to actually be taking something from a person or theft? Because of these possible discussions of themes I already think this book becomes significant for teens to explore as they are trying to see what kind of person they are becoming and what they would do. Like “The Wave”; “the Chocolate War” and “Lord of the Flies” it also brings in the crowd or mob element to the story.