Point of View

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is written from both the third and first person points of view. Throughout the novel, the author alternates between these two narrative vantage points in order to create a distinct contrast between the past and the present. At the start of the text, the third person narrator also employs the direct address. This means that the narrator uses second person pronouns in order to speak immediately to either the reader or another unnamed listener. For example, the novel begins with the lines, “If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house” (1). From the outset of the narrative, therefore, the reader feels invited into the narrative world. The third person narrator is not simply describing a...