Petroc Trelawny presents Radio 3's classical breakfast show. 
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Match Report
A fictional football match report that was included in the box containing the first edition of 'The Unfortunates' by B S Johnson.
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Epigrams
These two Epigrams were also included in the box in which The Unfortunates was first published:
LAURENCE STERNE:
I will tell you in three words what the book is – It is a history – A history of who ? what ? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself – It is a history-book, Sir (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind.
SAMUEL JOHNSON:
I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful -
The First Edition
First edition of BS Johnson's The Unfortunates, showing the box and the loose 'chapters' which Johnson intended his readers to shuffle and read in random order.
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The Unfortunates and BS Johnson
The book is much loved. Why ? Perhaps because the novel is a compelling and extraordinary one, an intense journey into memory and loss; perhaps because it’s also funny and forceful about the consolations of life – friendship, love, food, football; perhaps because it’s a beautifully rendered account of the precise experience of a day in an English town – mooching, overhearing, remembering, watching and writing; and perhaps because Johnson’s uncompromising approach to the ‘truth’ - which led him to innovations like this shufflable form - is as accessible to a current generation of novelists as it seems to have been ‘difficult’ then.
Perhaps also some of this interest grew because Bryan Johnson, the author and, in a complex game, the unnamed narrator of the novel, died 4 years later, by his own hand, at the age of 40. At the time he was an experimenter in a literary landscape which really didn’t get the experiment. Now, and particularly since Jonathan Coe’s unravelling of Johnson’s complex life in his 2004 Samuel Johnson award winning biography, Like A Fiery Elephant, it’s that experimentation which has made him a figure of increasing renown and interest. In a literary landscape which includes the confessional style of a David Eggers, the obsessive detail of a Nicholson Baker, the psychogeography of an Iain Sinclair, the innovations of The Unfortunates seem less like a challenge and more like a method which might get near to Johnson’s ‘truth’.
Broadcasts
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BBC Radio 3Sun 17 Oct 2010 20:00 BBC Radio 3
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BBC Radio 3Sun 2 Oct 2011 20:30 BBC Radio 3
