Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Vintage (1991), Edition: Reissue, 128 pages
Description
A story in which the author examines the little details of home life. The action takes place in the moments before, during and after the feeding of Bug, the baby. Nicholson Baker is the author of Vox, The Mezzanine, The Fermata, U & I and Thoughts.
Media reviews
Baker's writing is on the order of the newest genetics. From a minute fragment of tissue, you grow an entire organism. An entire book does indeed sprout out of bottle-time in Wollaston. Whether it is a speculative novel or a speculative memoir depends on whether the father-narrator in the squeaky
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rocker is Baker himself, or Baker at one fictional remove. It makes no difference; either way, we are down the rabbit hole and into a garden of thinking reeds.
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1990
Physical description
121 p.
ISBN
0679734406 / 9780679734406
Call number
LIT.BAN.ROT
Library's review
Novel.
Nicholson Baker writes in 360-degree Sensurround--his descriptions of the seemingly banal awakening the most jaded of senses into recognition, admiration, and amusement. In Room Temperature, his self-deprecating, endlessly curious narrator is at home giving his baby girl a bottle and allowing
Nicholson Baker writes in 360-degree Sensurround--his descriptions of the seemingly banal awakening the most jaded of senses into recognition, admiration, and amusement. In Room Temperature, his self-deprecating, endlessly curious narrator is at home giving his baby girl a bottle and allowing
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his mind to wander. Uppermost in his thoughts are his wife and daughter, but there is also that obsession with commas and some concern with tiny taboos like nose-picking and stealing change from his parents. Truth-telling is the operative mode; at one point he tries to get his wife to explain a doodle by quoting a review of early Yeats: "Always true is always new." Room Temperature is a rare novel of domestic pleasure and stability, with a twist. "Was there ever a limit between us? Would disgust ever outweigh love?" Baker's alter ego asks, and seems determined to find out. Show Less
Pages
121