I Am No One - BookWyrm

Hardcover, 352 pages

English language

Published July 5, 2016 by Tim Duggan Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-101-90585-2
OCLC Number:: 968159133

No rating (1 review)

"A mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us. After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice. But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he …

"A mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us. After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice. But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched? As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is 'no one', as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him"--

4 editions

barbara fister reviewed I Am No One by Patrick Flanery

Review of 'I Am No One' on 'LibraryThing'

No rating

I was drawn to this Early Reviewer book because the subject matter - ubiquitous surveillance and the asymmetrical relationship we have with the power of the state and our corporate monitors - is something I care about. While this has an intriguing premise, I wasn't entirely happy with the direction the author decided to take it. The narrator is a self-absorbed and lonely man who endlessly wonders whether he did the right thing leaving New York for a job at Oxford shortly after 9/11, whether whatever derailed his job at Columbia will ever catch up with him, whether all the strange things that are happening to him are actually symptoms of mental illness, and whether we will ever get out of his extremely claustrophobic head and into the open air. This is a novel of ideas, and it goes more for Kafka than for, say, Zola as it explores the …

I was drawn to this Early Reviewer book because the subject matter - ubiquitous surveillance and the asymmetrical relationship we have with the power of the state and our corporate monitors - is something I care about. While this has an intriguing premise, I wasn't entirely happy with the direction the author decided to take it. The narrator is a self-absorbed and lonely man who endlessly wonders whether he did the right thing leaving New York for a job at Oxford shortly after 9/11, whether whatever derailed his job at Columbia will ever catch up with him, whether all the strange things that are happening to him are actually symptoms of mental illness, and whether we will ever get out of his extremely claustrophobic head and into the open air. This is a novel of ideas, and it goes more for Kafka than for, say, Zola as it explores the ways our identity is shaped by technology. The "no one" of the title demonstrates that even those who are nobody important are being screened and sorted and scanned as possible threats and in that process we lose something of our own identity. But I found our narrator rather irritating company and the internal focus of the novel made this less of a novel of social and political ideas and more a philosophical one. Maybe the real problem is that too often I found myself bored.

Subjects

College teachers
Paranoia
Electronic surveillance
Fiction

Places

New York (N.Y.)