ABSTRACT
When it was first released, Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways to Begin, was not considered through the lens of trauma, victimhood, or suffering. McGregor was considered "an omnivorous collector of perception and experience", and it seems as though one of the most recurrent adjectives used to describe his work was "mundane", applied to his mimetic bravura, his "concern to pin down the essence of life through mundane detail". In this chapter the author addresses the novel not so much as an exhibition of the protagonist's ordinary moments and mundane epiphanies, but as an exposure of wound-related instants, or even as a "collaboration of exposures",. Espousing the wound means perceiving vulnerability as a category defining the human, hence becoming attentive to frailty as a condition for the perception. In McGregor's world, attentiveness to the wound becomes the condition for the advent and creation of an ethical and political subject favouring the values of interdependence and vulnerability.
