Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Julian Barnes
Vintage 2009
Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and religion is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and laugh-out-loud funny (yes, really) at times. However, it is also a bit of a trial – both because of its discursive nature and its constant – and to me, being no student of French literature, obscure – references to the life and work of other writers. The fragments of autobiography were the best bits for me: his grandparents, his clearly difficult relationship with his mother, his brother the philosopher. When Barnes strays away from those, it’s all a bit more of a struggle. That’s not to say that he hasn’t got some extremely pertinent things to say of course – especially about the unreliability of memory (“I do not distrust [memories], rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth”). These are the first hints of themes to be explored more fully (and, interestingly, as fiction) in The Sense of an Ending. (Interesting too is here too we find a prototype for the early suicide which dominates that novel, and towards the end, I think, a hint about the subsequent death of Barnes’ wife – a death which, I think, imbues the later work with its profound sense of elegy and mourning.)
7 February 2012
http://www.julianbarnes.com/
See also: Arthur and George
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