I’ve been told a thousand times that readers want to be surprised. As someone who reads a lot, I don’t often find myself surprised. Bjarki, Not Bjarki by Matthew J. C. Clark (University of Iowa Press) is a wild outlier — bombastic and unyielding, the prose unravels and is woven into chaotic, precise new patterns in a single paragraph.
Ostensibly, this book is about a man who owns a woodmill. More accurately, it is about the author’s experience of the world as he researches the woodmill and its owner, Bjarki. Bjarki’s world is fascinating, and through Clark’s lens, we fall in love with the staff surrounding this specific floorboard business. Meanwhile, we are often hijacked from a scene into the narrator’s frenetic thoughts, written almost in a stream-of-consciousness — flying through moments in a way that is disarming rather than disorienting.
I’d have compared this writing style to Virginia Woolf (thinking of how jarring Mrs. Dalloway’s narration is before it settles into a rhythm) until Clark mentions Hemingway. It is almost in passing — the section focusing on his own insecurity around men doing ‘men’s work’ — describing a group conversation surrounding a disinterest in reading. Clark isn’t quite emulating these writers, but an homage is there, to be sure. The sentences and paragraphs are long but I want to share an excerpt to illustrate his style:
I was born in Boston, but I grew up in Woolwich, a rural community across the Kennebec River from Robinson Street, which is in Bath. Not directly across, but about six or seven miles upriver — that’s where I grew up. In Maine, I mean. The chronology and geography may be confusing because it’s all in my mind at once now and I want to get it exactly right, at least to a degree. There is also everything that came after that dinner, including the moment three years later, when, in the same restaurant, in the same booth, I fell in love with Bjarki. I’m serious. That whole place was made of brick.
This is a full paragraph. Each paragraph builds like this, returns to a thesis, teaches you to read it as you go, hypnotizes the reader, pulls us along like we’re on a track. I had been waiting for this book to remind me of the magic of language. Clark’s obsessions are relatable and his love for his subject(s) is palpable. Clark’s dialogue is so accurately written (I don’t mean that he accurately wrote what was said, though I trust that he did but) that the language of the dialogue and its surroundings make the speakers and their environment real.
His prose seems at once casual and lyrical in a way that makes it seem like an accident, despite the painstaking detail with which he lays out the thoughts and processes of producing this book.
The subtitle of Bjarki, Not Bjarki is “On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences,” which is amazingly concise (and accurate) for a book that seems as much about the human condition as it is about anything.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2024 issue.
