What do you think?
Rate this book
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain's greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career.
In these seventeen essays (plus a short story), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, "Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it."
In these seventeen essays (plus a short story), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, "Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it."
Paperback Bunko
First published August 31, 2012
47 people are currently reading
1239 people want to read
About the author
Julian Barnes
167 books6,722 followersJulian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
March 23, 2018
Life and reading are not separate activities. When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
When I asked my daughter this weekend to make a collage out of the portraits I collected from the writers discussed in this compilation of essays, she rolled her eyes sceptically when she found out I had been reading a book on books, which she took as a symptom her mother has entered another more dangerous stage in her book craziness. Reading books on books, isn’t that just horror incarnate, a terribly nerdy thing to do? Asking why I still didn’t post her work of art (on which she secretly was a little proud), sulking when I disclosed my struggling to word my impressions, she sighed and brazenly summoned me to stop trying and keep it simple: ‘Just say “This is a brilliant book. Highly recommended!” (And please cook dinner mother, now).
By analysing and reflecting on the writing and lives of 5 British, 6 American and 5 French writers, Julian Barnes shares his insights on how fiction works, and why, and rather unsurprisingly to me he turns out not only a stunning fiction writer but also a clever and perceptive reader, maybe the kind of reader which many writers dreams of, an ideal and benevolent reader, considering that in his opinion ‘Reading is a majority skill but a minority art’. A reader who phrases his ruminations on books in an erudite, thoughtful, incisive and witty style, mostly in a mild and sympathetic voice, enlivening his exposé on readers and writers with more juicy or entertaining biographical anecdotes or characterisations – in short, a fellow writer, knowing the secrets of writerly craftsmanship and psychology. While his affection for some of the authors is palpable and infectious (Fitzgerald, Wharton, Ford), others get a more ironic, reserved and ambivalent handling (Orwell, Houellebecq).
One could wonder if it is actually meaningful to read about an author or book one hasn’t read yet, but while at first determined to read only the essays on authors I had at least read a short story of (Penelope Fitzgerald, Orwell, Ford Madox Ford, Chamfort, Flaubert, Houellebecq, Mérimée, Updike, Kipling), in my eagerness and enthusiasm I couldn’t stop myself greedily devouring the whole chocolate box, even the essays on authors entirely obscure to me (Arthur Clough, Félix Féneon, Lorrie Moore) or haven’t yet read anything by (Edith Wharton, Joan Didion, Joyce Oates), taking a singular delight in Barnes’s short story Homage to Hemingway, which is playfully modelled on Hemingway’s story Homage to Switzerland and uses its structure to reflect and comment on Hemingway as a writer in a gently metafictional way.
Besides encountering Barnes’s typical ingredients dispersed throughout the essays (Flaubertophilia, Francophilia), part of the pleasure is that apart from the light Barnes casts on the fiction and authors he discusses, he also obliquely or more directly reveals some of his own preferential techniques as a writer. When talking about unreliable narrators with Ford (‘the novel plays with the reader as it reveals and conceals truth’, ‘Ford plays relentlessly on the reader’s desire to trust the narrative’), or when extolling Ford’s The Good Soldier for ‘its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator, it sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false façade of apparent narrative, its self-reflectingness, its deep duality about human motive, intention and experience' – which all sounds pretty programmatic for his own novel The Sense of an Ending.
Some of his sentences proved quite persistent, popping up in my head again when pondering on friend’s reviews, having to restrain myself from bombarding friends with quotations from this book (‘you marry to continue the conversation'), this sticky effect enforced as they kindled memories on some of his novels, especially the poignant closing essay ‘Regulating sorrow’ on the accounts of bereavement from Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, of which some thoughts return in the last chapter of his later novel Levels of Life - like the unsolicited advice given to a widowed person ‘Foreign travel is advised; so is getting a dog’, or the closing lines of this collection, an excerpt from a letter of consolation by Dr. Johnson on what to expect when mourning one’s wife, which also elucidates the way Barnes as a writer and person is affected and influenced by his reading like his reader in turn is by reading Barnes:
“He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interests; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind his mind at liberty, to retrace the past, or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settle course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.”
As a bonus, there is the fun smuggled into the index (not in the Dutch edition) – Barnes began his writing life as an OED lexicographer in what he called the "sports and dirty words department" and ça se voit:
Ford Madox Ford – compared to a poached egg;
Sex – danger of Belgians; in exchange for an interview?; post-coital harness- mending; post-coital melon-eating;
Wildlife – George Orwell ‘not a parrot’; FM Ford as great auk ; Tietjens compared to entire farmyard; also to lobster; vile thoughts about kittens
The Dutch edition, which was published before the English one, while lacking the playful index, comprises as a consolation prize a lovely additional essay on Barnes’s bibliophilism, which was published separately as a pamphlet A Life with Books to celebrate Independent Booksellers week and which also can be read here.
Alone, and yet in company: that is the paradoxical position of the reader. Alone in the company of a writer who speaks in silence of your mind. And – a further paradox – it makes no difference whether that writer is alive or dead.
A GR friend writes on his profile he prefers his authors dead. This might come across as a somewhat provocatively articulated statement and however I wouldn’t venture to phrase it that boldly, I can relate to it, as most of my favourite authors simply are dead, even if they seem very much present and alive to me when reading them. Although I have only read 4 of his novels so far and not so often read still flourishing authors, by reading this collection of essays it occurred to me that Julian Barnes might have grown into my favourite living author at the moment – and that I am far of alone in adoring his writing. It amuses me to notice a similar keenness with some friends – writing in their reviews that to them Barnes simply can do no wrong, or that they feel smarter by reading him, that they’d read his grocery list, or feel so at ease in his company. Admitting my own almost fangirlish admiration might have gotten in the way of writing a proper review, I blushingly and cheerfully apologize and make it up by referring to the plentiful fine reviews written on this book here, of which Helle's was the one that kindly pointed me to it.
A multifaceted gem and an awesome source of inspiration for further reading., guiding me both into exploring unknown territory as well as enlightening previously roamed paths.
Collage of photos created by Senta - thanks a ton, dearest daughter!
When I asked my daughter this weekend to make a collage out of the portraits I collected from the writers discussed in this compilation of essays, she rolled her eyes sceptically when she found out I had been reading a book on books, which she took as a symptom her mother has entered another more dangerous stage in her book craziness. Reading books on books, isn’t that just horror incarnate, a terribly nerdy thing to do? Asking why I still didn’t post her work of art (on which she secretly was a little proud), sulking when I disclosed my struggling to word my impressions, she sighed and brazenly summoned me to stop trying and keep it simple: ‘Just say “This is a brilliant book. Highly recommended!” (And please cook dinner mother, now).
By analysing and reflecting on the writing and lives of 5 British, 6 American and 5 French writers, Julian Barnes shares his insights on how fiction works, and why, and rather unsurprisingly to me he turns out not only a stunning fiction writer but also a clever and perceptive reader, maybe the kind of reader which many writers dreams of, an ideal and benevolent reader, considering that in his opinion ‘Reading is a majority skill but a minority art’. A reader who phrases his ruminations on books in an erudite, thoughtful, incisive and witty style, mostly in a mild and sympathetic voice, enlivening his exposé on readers and writers with more juicy or entertaining biographical anecdotes or characterisations – in short, a fellow writer, knowing the secrets of writerly craftsmanship and psychology. While his affection for some of the authors is palpable and infectious (Fitzgerald, Wharton, Ford), others get a more ironic, reserved and ambivalent handling (Orwell, Houellebecq).
One could wonder if it is actually meaningful to read about an author or book one hasn’t read yet, but while at first determined to read only the essays on authors I had at least read a short story of (Penelope Fitzgerald, Orwell, Ford Madox Ford, Chamfort, Flaubert, Houellebecq, Mérimée, Updike, Kipling), in my eagerness and enthusiasm I couldn’t stop myself greedily devouring the whole chocolate box, even the essays on authors entirely obscure to me (Arthur Clough, Félix Féneon, Lorrie Moore) or haven’t yet read anything by (Edith Wharton, Joan Didion, Joyce Oates), taking a singular delight in Barnes’s short story Homage to Hemingway, which is playfully modelled on Hemingway’s story Homage to Switzerland and uses its structure to reflect and comment on Hemingway as a writer in a gently metafictional way.
Besides encountering Barnes’s typical ingredients dispersed throughout the essays (Flaubertophilia, Francophilia), part of the pleasure is that apart from the light Barnes casts on the fiction and authors he discusses, he also obliquely or more directly reveals some of his own preferential techniques as a writer. When talking about unreliable narrators with Ford (‘the novel plays with the reader as it reveals and conceals truth’, ‘Ford plays relentlessly on the reader’s desire to trust the narrative’), or when extolling Ford’s The Good Soldier for ‘its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator, it sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false façade of apparent narrative, its self-reflectingness, its deep duality about human motive, intention and experience' – which all sounds pretty programmatic for his own novel The Sense of an Ending.
Some of his sentences proved quite persistent, popping up in my head again when pondering on friend’s reviews, having to restrain myself from bombarding friends with quotations from this book (‘you marry to continue the conversation'), this sticky effect enforced as they kindled memories on some of his novels, especially the poignant closing essay ‘Regulating sorrow’ on the accounts of bereavement from Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, of which some thoughts return in the last chapter of his later novel Levels of Life - like the unsolicited advice given to a widowed person ‘Foreign travel is advised; so is getting a dog’, or the closing lines of this collection, an excerpt from a letter of consolation by Dr. Johnson on what to expect when mourning one’s wife, which also elucidates the way Barnes as a writer and person is affected and influenced by his reading like his reader in turn is by reading Barnes:
“He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interests; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind his mind at liberty, to retrace the past, or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settle course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.”
As a bonus, there is the fun smuggled into the index (not in the Dutch edition) – Barnes began his writing life as an OED lexicographer in what he called the "sports and dirty words department" and ça se voit:
Ford Madox Ford – compared to a poached egg;
Sex – danger of Belgians; in exchange for an interview?; post-coital harness- mending; post-coital melon-eating;
Wildlife – George Orwell ‘not a parrot’; FM Ford as great auk ; Tietjens compared to entire farmyard; also to lobster; vile thoughts about kittens
The Dutch edition, which was published before the English one, while lacking the playful index, comprises as a consolation prize a lovely additional essay on Barnes’s bibliophilism, which was published separately as a pamphlet A Life with Books to celebrate Independent Booksellers week and which also can be read here.
Alone, and yet in company: that is the paradoxical position of the reader. Alone in the company of a writer who speaks in silence of your mind. And – a further paradox – it makes no difference whether that writer is alive or dead.
A GR friend writes on his profile he prefers his authors dead. This might come across as a somewhat provocatively articulated statement and however I wouldn’t venture to phrase it that boldly, I can relate to it, as most of my favourite authors simply are dead, even if they seem very much present and alive to me when reading them. Although I have only read 4 of his novels so far and not so often read still flourishing authors, by reading this collection of essays it occurred to me that Julian Barnes might have grown into my favourite living author at the moment – and that I am far of alone in adoring his writing. It amuses me to notice a similar keenness with some friends – writing in their reviews that to them Barnes simply can do no wrong, or that they feel smarter by reading him, that they’d read his grocery list, or feel so at ease in his company. Admitting my own almost fangirlish admiration might have gotten in the way of writing a proper review, I blushingly and cheerfully apologize and make it up by referring to the plentiful fine reviews written on this book here, of which Helle's was the one that kindly pointed me to it.
A multifaceted gem and an awesome source of inspiration for further reading., guiding me both into exploring unknown territory as well as enlightening previously roamed paths.
Collage of photos created by Senta - thanks a ton, dearest daughter!
January 18, 2025
Greu de spus ce leagă aceste eseuri ocazionale. Sigur, talentul analitic, bunul gust, subtilitatea observației, siguranța judecății de valoare, dorința de a revizui autori uitați / neglijați (de critici, de public: Ford Madox Ford, Penelope Fitgerald) sînt prezente pretutindeni.
Altfel, lista scriitorilor recenzați rămîne pestriță (și bizară). Ce au în comun Chamfort și Joyce Carol Oates? Dar Edith Wharton și John Updike? Dar Houellebecq și Lydia Davis (analizată ca traducătoare a lui Flaubert)? Aproape nimic: sînt scriitori din familii foarte diferite. Aproape totul: sînt scriitori preferați de Julian Barnes.
Cred că eseurile cele mai interesante sînt tocmai acelea în care Julian Barnes încearcă să identifice cauzele care au dus la supra-estimarea unor prozatori (George Orwell, Houellebecq) și la sub-estimarea altora (am numit deja doi). În acest sens, eseurile despre George Orwell, Ford Madox Ford și Penelope Fitzgerald (ați citit Floarea albastră?; dar Librăria?) sînt exemplare.
Înclin să cred că imboldul acestor eseuri a fost (aproape mereu) „revizuirea” judecăților anterioare. Firește, lipsa de unitate a volumului nu anulează eminentele înzestrări ale autorului.
P. S. E ciudat că pînă acum două zile nici nu auzisem de acest volum...
Altfel, lista scriitorilor recenzați rămîne pestriță (și bizară). Ce au în comun Chamfort și Joyce Carol Oates? Dar Edith Wharton și John Updike? Dar Houellebecq și Lydia Davis (analizată ca traducătoare a lui Flaubert)? Aproape nimic: sînt scriitori din familii foarte diferite. Aproape totul: sînt scriitori preferați de Julian Barnes.
Cred că eseurile cele mai interesante sînt tocmai acelea în care Julian Barnes încearcă să identifice cauzele care au dus la supra-estimarea unor prozatori (George Orwell, Houellebecq) și la sub-estimarea altora (am numit deja doi). În acest sens, eseurile despre George Orwell, Ford Madox Ford și Penelope Fitzgerald (ați citit Floarea albastră?; dar Librăria?) sînt exemplare.
Înclin să cred că imboldul acestor eseuri a fost (aproape mereu) „revizuirea” judecăților anterioare. Firește, lipsa de unitate a volumului nu anulează eminentele înzestrări ale autorului.
P. S. E ciudat că pînă acum două zile nici nu auzisem de acest volum...
January 29, 2023
I’m tempted to say that this collection is worth reading for the Updike pieces alone (“Remembering Updike, Remembering Rabbit”) but then I wouldn’t be doing justice to the rest of the essays. So, I’ll add “George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant”, “The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald”, “Kipling’s France” &”France’s Kipling”, “Michel Houellebecq and the Sin of Despair” and “Translating Madame Bovary”, to name a few.
I’m stopping here, not because the rest aren’t worth mentioning but because there’s no point in citing the whole list of contents. All those above, and a few more (including the story that served as an imaginative tribute to Hemingway), I very much enjoyed. Julian Barnes is the happy combination of a bibliophile and a craftsman himself. Therefore, his presentation of a book is bound to be more of an enticing invitation into the author’s world than just a plain review. In that context, each piece is not only about the book examined but about a broader subject matter. In “The Wisdom of Chamfort”, for example, Barnes doesn’t only write about the 18th century French writer but also about the philosopher’s ambivalence about society that leads to withdrawal and seclusion.
There is a Francophile angle to most of the stories, but just as I started wondering if this book serves, more than anything else, its author’s adulation to the country and its culture, a smooth editorial maneuver changed its course to English-speaking writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore. The last essay (titled “Regulating Sorrow”) features the combination of Oates, Didion and Dr Johnson, whose respective works on the subject of grief over the loss of a beloved partner was the linchpin between theirs and Barnes’s own preferred theme.
Apart from his unquestionable skill at painting vivid portraits of his fellow writers, I further appreciated how he delicately expressed his criticism without ever failing to convey his respect for the pains taken in writing by anyone worth their salt.
Reading this together with Charles only enhanced the pleasure. Barnes’s insights served as starting points for conversations that kept spreading out in all kinds of directions. Many thanks to Ilse for putting this book on our radar and to both the author and my reading companion for their inspired stories and opinions. These last months would have been poorer without them.
From the preface, titled “A Life with Books”: When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape but what you’re essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
I’m stopping here, not because the rest aren’t worth mentioning but because there’s no point in citing the whole list of contents. All those above, and a few more (including the story that served as an imaginative tribute to Hemingway), I very much enjoyed. Julian Barnes is the happy combination of a bibliophile and a craftsman himself. Therefore, his presentation of a book is bound to be more of an enticing invitation into the author’s world than just a plain review. In that context, each piece is not only about the book examined but about a broader subject matter. In “The Wisdom of Chamfort”, for example, Barnes doesn’t only write about the 18th century French writer but also about the philosopher’s ambivalence about society that leads to withdrawal and seclusion.
There is a Francophile angle to most of the stories, but just as I started wondering if this book serves, more than anything else, its author’s adulation to the country and its culture, a smooth editorial maneuver changed its course to English-speaking writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore. The last essay (titled “Regulating Sorrow”) features the combination of Oates, Didion and Dr Johnson, whose respective works on the subject of grief over the loss of a beloved partner was the linchpin between theirs and Barnes’s own preferred theme.
Apart from his unquestionable skill at painting vivid portraits of his fellow writers, I further appreciated how he delicately expressed his criticism without ever failing to convey his respect for the pains taken in writing by anyone worth their salt.
Reading this together with Charles only enhanced the pleasure. Barnes’s insights served as starting points for conversations that kept spreading out in all kinds of directions. Many thanks to Ilse for putting this book on our radar and to both the author and my reading companion for their inspired stories and opinions. These last months would have been poorer without them.
From the preface, titled “A Life with Books”: When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape but what you’re essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
January 25, 2023
Did you know that Prosper Mérimée, whose writing inspired the words to Bizet’s Carmen, was also Inspector General of Historic Monuments in France in the 19th century, at a time when heritage preservation wasn’t yet a thing?
“What Mérimée discovered, as he went on his annual rounds, was that much of France’s monumental patrimony was in a state of near-collapse. The roof of Chartres Cathedral was on the point of falling in; the wall paintings at Saint-Savin – the largest array of medieval frescoes in France, and possibly Europe – had been crudely obliterated with whitewash; a few days after Mérimée had inspected the Vice-Regent’s tower, ‘one of the most ancient edifices in Avignon’, it simply fell down.”
Stories like the one above carried me throughout this collection, although it has to be said that Mérimée’s chapter evoked a sense of adventure and discovery all its own.
Before this book, in Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, Julian Barnes had collected an impressive selection of his pre-published essays on 19th- and 20th-century painters, often French but not exclusively. The year was 2011. What opened with an inspired piece on The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, hooking me from the very beginning, went on captivating me further with the lives and times of Gustave Courbet, Pierre Bonnard, Lucian Freud and several other legendary artists.
In Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story, Barnes did it again, this time with authors, and with most pieces once more featuring strong ties with France. The year was 2012. Some favorite writers of mine are in there, including John Updike, Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore, who happen in their case to have precious little linking them to the Hexagon – except for Wharton – but then Houellebecq, Flaubert and others are on hand to save the day.
In both books, Julian Barnes shines as a gifted storyteller, not just a Gallophile. I have come to prefer his nonfiction to his fiction over the years, and books like these two collections can be credited for it. Aside from his essays being graced with a voice I only generally encounter outside the genre, there also seems to be no end to the delightful anecdotes Barnes manages to weave into each piece. I’m unsure how he does it, forever digging up so many gems.
I had read Keeping an Eye Open in 2018 and will likely read it again, one day. I just finished Through the Window now, in 2023. I’m walking away from this one with perhaps the most enjoyable portrait of John Updike that I have ever read, in some part because I agree with everything that was said, but not only.
Special shout-out to Violeta for taking the time to savor this collection with me and making the experience even richer with stories than it originally would have been, which amounts to no small feat in this case.
“What Mérimée discovered, as he went on his annual rounds, was that much of France’s monumental patrimony was in a state of near-collapse. The roof of Chartres Cathedral was on the point of falling in; the wall paintings at Saint-Savin – the largest array of medieval frescoes in France, and possibly Europe – had been crudely obliterated with whitewash; a few days after Mérimée had inspected the Vice-Regent’s tower, ‘one of the most ancient edifices in Avignon’, it simply fell down.”
Stories like the one above carried me throughout this collection, although it has to be said that Mérimée’s chapter evoked a sense of adventure and discovery all its own.
Before this book, in Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, Julian Barnes had collected an impressive selection of his pre-published essays on 19th- and 20th-century painters, often French but not exclusively. The year was 2011. What opened with an inspired piece on The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, hooking me from the very beginning, went on captivating me further with the lives and times of Gustave Courbet, Pierre Bonnard, Lucian Freud and several other legendary artists.
In Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story, Barnes did it again, this time with authors, and with most pieces once more featuring strong ties with France. The year was 2012. Some favorite writers of mine are in there, including John Updike, Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore, who happen in their case to have precious little linking them to the Hexagon – except for Wharton – but then Houellebecq, Flaubert and others are on hand to save the day.
In both books, Julian Barnes shines as a gifted storyteller, not just a Gallophile. I have come to prefer his nonfiction to his fiction over the years, and books like these two collections can be credited for it. Aside from his essays being graced with a voice I only generally encounter outside the genre, there also seems to be no end to the delightful anecdotes Barnes manages to weave into each piece. I’m unsure how he does it, forever digging up so many gems.
I had read Keeping an Eye Open in 2018 and will likely read it again, one day. I just finished Through the Window now, in 2023. I’m walking away from this one with perhaps the most enjoyable portrait of John Updike that I have ever read, in some part because I agree with everything that was said, but not only.
Special shout-out to Violeta for taking the time to savor this collection with me and making the experience even richer with stories than it originally would have been, which amounts to no small feat in this case.
February 21, 2016
I basked delightedly in Julian Barnes’s writing in this book and realized, once again, that I feel so at ease in his company; he is intelligent, astute, eloquent, pleasant and often quite funny. In this collection of essays (and one short story), he pays homage to and analyses (works by) some of his favourite authors. (See chapter headings at the end of this review).
He begins with a charming portrait of Penelope Fitzgerald, which made it clear to me that I need to get to her novels soon. He delivers a frank portrayal of Orwell (a one-man, truth-telling awkward squad), an intriguing (and thorough) one of Ford (Ford has never lacked supporters, but he has always lacked readers. Clough I didn’t know, nor Chamfort, whom Barnes notes is not well-known in our day or outside France, so those two chapters were less interesting to me than the others. He carries on a bit about Kipling and about a novel about Kipling written by someone else. His scope is quite wonderful of course; having delved into the works of some classic authors he proceeds to discuss Michel Houllebecq. (Barnes’s Francophilia is nearly always present).
After these chapters he goes into a fascinating riff on the art of translation, dealing with the micro-pedantry of solving certain French phrases in Madame Bovary and showing how different translators have dealt with these lexical conundrums since the novel was first translated into English. (I would say that you need to know French to get the benefit of this chapter, but if you do, it’s delightfully word-nerdy).
The one short story in the collection was modelled on one of Hemingway’s short stories. Like Barnes (I humbly write), I’ve always preferred Hemingway’s short stories to his novels: his minimalistic form lends itself perfectly to a genre which requires less of a flourish. A character in Barnes’s own short story has this thought:
In his view, the Hemingway method worked better over the shorter distance. Well, it was the same with James Joyce. ‘Dubliners’ was a masterpiece, but ‘Ulysses’, for all its opening brilliance, was essentially a short story on steroids, grotesquely bulked up. If ‘Ulysses’ were entered for the Olympics, it would fail a drugs test.
He also covers Felix Fénéon, Edith Wharton, Lorrie Moore and John Updike, and towards the end there is a chapter which is ostensibly about Joyce Carol Oates but is really (and characteristically) about death and how different authors have dealt with the death of their spouse.
I have underlined many gems in this collection, such as this poignant truth from one of the essays:
Wisdom is more likely to arise from a familiarity with weakness, failure and misery than with strength and wealth.
If anyone is interested, here are the chapter headings:
The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald
The ‘Unpoetical’ Clough
George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant
Ford’s The Good Soldier
Ford and Provence
Ford’s Anglican Saint
Kipling’s France
France’s Kipling
The Wisdom of Chamfort
The Man Who Saved Old France
The Profile of Félix Fénéon
Michel Houllebecq and the Sin of Despair
Translating Madame Bovary
Wharton’s The Reef
Homage to Hemingway: a Short Story
Lorrie Moore Takes Wing
Remembering Updike, Remembering Rabbit
Regulating Sorrow
He begins with a charming portrait of Penelope Fitzgerald, which made it clear to me that I need to get to her novels soon. He delivers a frank portrayal of Orwell (a one-man, truth-telling awkward squad), an intriguing (and thorough) one of Ford (Ford has never lacked supporters, but he has always lacked readers. Clough I didn’t know, nor Chamfort, whom Barnes notes is not well-known in our day or outside France, so those two chapters were less interesting to me than the others. He carries on a bit about Kipling and about a novel about Kipling written by someone else. His scope is quite wonderful of course; having delved into the works of some classic authors he proceeds to discuss Michel Houllebecq. (Barnes’s Francophilia is nearly always present).
After these chapters he goes into a fascinating riff on the art of translation, dealing with the micro-pedantry of solving certain French phrases in Madame Bovary and showing how different translators have dealt with these lexical conundrums since the novel was first translated into English. (I would say that you need to know French to get the benefit of this chapter, but if you do, it’s delightfully word-nerdy).
The one short story in the collection was modelled on one of Hemingway’s short stories. Like Barnes (I humbly write), I’ve always preferred Hemingway’s short stories to his novels: his minimalistic form lends itself perfectly to a genre which requires less of a flourish. A character in Barnes’s own short story has this thought:
In his view, the Hemingway method worked better over the shorter distance. Well, it was the same with James Joyce. ‘Dubliners’ was a masterpiece, but ‘Ulysses’, for all its opening brilliance, was essentially a short story on steroids, grotesquely bulked up. If ‘Ulysses’ were entered for the Olympics, it would fail a drugs test.
He also covers Felix Fénéon, Edith Wharton, Lorrie Moore and John Updike, and towards the end there is a chapter which is ostensibly about Joyce Carol Oates but is really (and characteristically) about death and how different authors have dealt with the death of their spouse.
I have underlined many gems in this collection, such as this poignant truth from one of the essays:
Wisdom is more likely to arise from a familiarity with weakness, failure and misery than with strength and wealth.
If anyone is interested, here are the chapter headings:
The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald
The ‘Unpoetical’ Clough
George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant
Ford’s The Good Soldier
Ford and Provence
Ford’s Anglican Saint
Kipling’s France
France’s Kipling
The Wisdom of Chamfort
The Man Who Saved Old France
The Profile of Félix Fénéon
Michel Houllebecq and the Sin of Despair
Translating Madame Bovary
Wharton’s The Reef
Homage to Hemingway: a Short Story
Lorrie Moore Takes Wing
Remembering Updike, Remembering Rabbit
Regulating Sorrow
December 26, 2022
Collection of essays on writers and literature, published in the period 1996-2011. Barnes is an attentive reader, that's not at all surprising. His analysis mainly is literary-technical, but some essays contain salient information that was not yet known to me. Such as the important role that Rudyard Kipling played in the British War Graves Commission after the First World War, a result of the death of his 18-year-old son in the trenches. And authors like Lornie Morre or Penelope Fitzgerald were completely unknown to me. A nice illustration of the great imaginative power and aesthetic delight of fiction.
February 24, 2018
Upon immediately finishing this book last night, I'd decided to write only a succinct review, something like:
'I enjoyed this collection of essays, even the ones about authors I'd never heard of (i.e., all the French ones excluding Flaubert) and of books I haven't read (e.g. Parade's End). Even without having read Hemingway's Homage to Switzerland, I perceived and appreciated the layers in the one short story included here.'
The End
Instead I had trouble sleeping while sentences flowed through my head, as they did the night before when I'd finished reading Barnes' critique of Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary. (My dreamed-sentences that night kept ending inexplicably on the word 'Spain.') This all reminded me of how I felt while reading The Sense of an Ending and how just about anything I read of Barnes gets to me like this, even apparently his nonfiction here that elucidates by placing the reviewed author in his own time period clearly and without pseudo-academic jargon (reminding me of the main character in the short story who mentions that he is not an academic, though he is teaching). I also enjoyed reading of the tensions between English and French literature.
The ending of that short story, "Homage to Hemingway," had me paging backwards, a sure sign of a good story for me, as I realized why Barnes used a certain technique, thus another layer. The story also includes the theme of not judging a work based on biography, which leads to a thought on the last essay: Though nowhere in his review of Oates' A Widow's Story does he mention his own loss, anyone who knows of his wife's death will know where his empathy comes from and will feel for him.
As I said of The Pedant in the Kitchen, I'd read his grocery list.
'I enjoyed this collection of essays, even the ones about authors I'd never heard of (i.e., all the French ones excluding Flaubert) and of books I haven't read (e.g. Parade's End). Even without having read Hemingway's Homage to Switzerland, I perceived and appreciated the layers in the one short story included here.'
The End
Instead I had trouble sleeping while sentences flowed through my head, as they did the night before when I'd finished reading Barnes' critique of Lydia Davis' translation of Madame Bovary. (My dreamed-sentences that night kept ending inexplicably on the word 'Spain.') This all reminded me of how I felt while reading The Sense of an Ending and how just about anything I read of Barnes gets to me like this, even apparently his nonfiction here that elucidates by placing the reviewed author in his own time period clearly and without pseudo-academic jargon (reminding me of the main character in the short story who mentions that he is not an academic, though he is teaching). I also enjoyed reading of the tensions between English and French literature.
The ending of that short story, "Homage to Hemingway," had me paging backwards, a sure sign of a good story for me, as I realized why Barnes used a certain technique, thus another layer. The story also includes the theme of not judging a work based on biography, which leads to a thought on the last essay: Though nowhere in his review of Oates' A Widow's Story does he mention his own loss, anyone who knows of his wife's death will know where his empathy comes from and will feel for him.
As I said of The Pedant in the Kitchen, I'd read his grocery list.
May 26, 2018
Deneme okumaktan keyif alıyorsanız hele bir de edebiyatla ilgili denemeleri arıyorsanız tam hedeften vuran bir kitap. Julian Barnes’in zeki ve kıvrak kaleminden çıkma 17 denemenin biri hariç hepsi edebiyat ve edebiyatçılarla ilgili. Bir de kısa hikaye var, o da çok iyi.
Kitabı bitirince çok net fikirler edindim. Örneğin, Penelope Fitzgerald’dan mutlaka bir roman okuyacağım, beğenirsem arkası gelir. Okuma listemde yok ama okunmayacaklar listesine Ford Madox Ford’u koydum bile. R. Kipling’in, oğlu John’u gözünden çürük olmasına rağmen nüfuzunu kullanarak 17 yaşında askere aldırıp savaşmak için 1915’de Fransa’ya göndermesini ve orada muharebede ölümüne neden olmasını, araba merakı ve Fransa sevgisini bir edebiyatçı duyarlılığıyla hiç bağdaştıramadım.
G. Orwell’ın milliyetçi duygularının yüksekliğini hatta bu nedenle asıl ismi olan “Eric”i İngiliz Kralları’ndan esinlenerek George olarak değiştirmesini, ahlakçı ve püriten kişiliği ile Yahudi karşıtlığını da hayretle ve üzülerek öğrendim, bundan sonra Orwell’i daha dikkatle okumaya karar verdim. Ayrıca Michel Houllebecq ve John Updike’yi de kesinlikle okumalıyım.
Bir denemesinde de Madam Bowary çeviri örnekleri üzerinden çevirinin ne denli önemli olduğunu, keşke her kitabı kendi öz dilinden okumak için üstün insan olunsaydı diye hayal ettim.
Kitabı bitirince çok net fikirler edindim. Örneğin, Penelope Fitzgerald’dan mutlaka bir roman okuyacağım, beğenirsem arkası gelir. Okuma listemde yok ama okunmayacaklar listesine Ford Madox Ford’u koydum bile. R. Kipling’in, oğlu John’u gözünden çürük olmasına rağmen nüfuzunu kullanarak 17 yaşında askere aldırıp savaşmak için 1915’de Fransa’ya göndermesini ve orada muharebede ölümüne neden olmasını, araba merakı ve Fransa sevgisini bir edebiyatçı duyarlılığıyla hiç bağdaştıramadım.
G. Orwell’ın milliyetçi duygularının yüksekliğini hatta bu nedenle asıl ismi olan “Eric”i İngiliz Kralları’ndan esinlenerek George olarak değiştirmesini, ahlakçı ve püriten kişiliği ile Yahudi karşıtlığını da hayretle ve üzülerek öğrendim, bundan sonra Orwell’i daha dikkatle okumaya karar verdim. Ayrıca Michel Houllebecq ve John Updike’yi de kesinlikle okumalıyım.
Bir denemesinde de Madam Bowary çeviri örnekleri üzerinden çevirinin ne denli önemli olduğunu, keşke her kitabı kendi öz dilinden okumak için üstün insan olunsaydı diye hayal ettim.
Read
October 20, 2022Before becoming a writer, Julian Barnes was, is, and will be a great reader. A curious, lively, ironic, and penetrating one, as the writer who became.
Barnes' refinement extends to the whole of this demonstration of erudition - which is Through the Window. The author tells us here about English, French, and American writers who marked him throughout his entire life. Reflecting on Penelope Fitzgerald's slippery style, Hemingway's brutal sincerity, Madame Bovary's translations of the novel, or Houellebecq's despair, ( delicious chapter) - Barnes wonders what fiction is, and what effect it has on our lives.
" The novels tell us most of the truths about life : what it is, how we live it, what it could do for us, how we can enjoy it, and how we lose it ".
Barnes practices a complex writing, a narrative art that combines fiction and non-fiction, story and reflection, all filtered by a proverbial finesse - from what I've read so far, at least, and especially from this book, I did not notice any moment when B would have crossed the barrier of this finesse of expression, even when he has critical opinions about other writers.
" The masterpieces must not be explained in words, the paintings must be contemplated in silence, Braque was convinced. But we, humans, like to look for meanings, to express opinions, to contradict each other. "
From the search for meanings, and from the love of reading, in fact, this book was born.
As a short personal parenthesis, I think B is a writer who had his explosion especially after the loss of his wife, so pathetic transposed into " Levels of Life " - which changed forever his position on everything human. The creation of the man Barnes is under the sign of inventing reality, and one of the most visible products of his imagination, in my view, is his country of adoption, France. French culture, as he sees it, is not necessarilly a real one, but a model of intellectual refinement built through writing.
Barnes' France is that invented space we all need, on which we can project our romanticism and idealism, rather than on our own country, which should instead be " examined with scrupulousness and skepticism. "
In the absence of God, in whom B does not believe, but whom he misses, death is the only argument. The only force that can oppose it is reason, and its most suitable weapon is Memory. Because Barnes is not so much afraid of death, as of the mental degradation which represents the antechamber of death, and of forgetfulness, aware that in the end, his books will have one last reader.
Barnes' refinement extends to the whole of this demonstration of erudition - which is Through the Window. The author tells us here about English, French, and American writers who marked him throughout his entire life. Reflecting on Penelope Fitzgerald's slippery style, Hemingway's brutal sincerity, Madame Bovary's translations of the novel, or Houellebecq's despair, ( delicious chapter) - Barnes wonders what fiction is, and what effect it has on our lives.
" The novels tell us most of the truths about life : what it is, how we live it, what it could do for us, how we can enjoy it, and how we lose it ".
Barnes practices a complex writing, a narrative art that combines fiction and non-fiction, story and reflection, all filtered by a proverbial finesse - from what I've read so far, at least, and especially from this book, I did not notice any moment when B would have crossed the barrier of this finesse of expression, even when he has critical opinions about other writers.
" The masterpieces must not be explained in words, the paintings must be contemplated in silence, Braque was convinced. But we, humans, like to look for meanings, to express opinions, to contradict each other. "
From the search for meanings, and from the love of reading, in fact, this book was born.
As a short personal parenthesis, I think B is a writer who had his explosion especially after the loss of his wife, so pathetic transposed into " Levels of Life " - which changed forever his position on everything human. The creation of the man Barnes is under the sign of inventing reality, and one of the most visible products of his imagination, in my view, is his country of adoption, France. French culture, as he sees it, is not necessarilly a real one, but a model of intellectual refinement built through writing.
Barnes' France is that invented space we all need, on which we can project our romanticism and idealism, rather than on our own country, which should instead be " examined with scrupulousness and skepticism. "
In the absence of God, in whom B does not believe, but whom he misses, death is the only argument. The only force that can oppose it is reason, and its most suitable weapon is Memory. Because Barnes is not so much afraid of death, as of the mental degradation which represents the antechamber of death, and of forgetfulness, aware that in the end, his books will have one last reader.
April 16, 2018
The one lesson I can best take away from some of my recent readings is that I should let things simmer for a while before giving a rating. The usual Julie-knee-jerk reaction hasn't been working well, as is evidenced by this one. When I closed the book on it last night, I thought, that was a very good book; yet when I came to pen these lines this morning, I had to say, that was an exceptionally good book -- from which I took away many important things, not the least of which is how to read differently. So, overnight, it soared from 4 to 5 stars, hitting its zenith while working its sinuous way deep into my psyche while I slept.
I knew Barnes was my-kind-of-writer by his opening sentence: I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; That's all I needed to read before I settled that I was his-kind-of-reader. In the most understated fashion, the preface is an ode to the written word -- an absolutely exquisite long paragraph of affirmations of bookdom, bookhood, bookness. And so the epode comes:
The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: "Some people think that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it -- as I do many aphorisms -- a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines the writer's choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work'). When you read a great book you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape -- into different countries, mores, speech patterns -- but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains, and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
With such an auspicious start, I was horrified that his first essay should be on the perceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald. I groaned inwardly and thought I just might skip that one. (Admittedly, the only P Fitz I've read is Offshore, but that was seemingly enough to scar me for life, and which I put in my execrable list here on GR.) What a surprise to find that P Fitz is not at all who I thought her to be, based on my one reading experience. (I will not comment further on the humour, or irony, of that statement.)
Quite apart from her writing, Fitzgerald sounds like the kind of woman I would have liked to have had over for tea, discussing all manner of things; and in the end, she sounds so much more perceptive about life than I could have ever imagined. In effect, she is my-kind-writer, judging by Barnes's essay. Why did I hate her so much? Did I have my blinkers on that day? Was it an anti-P-Fitz kind of day? ... for certainly, I have those. Just like Eeyore, I have my anti days, in which everything is bleak and everything is execrable.
I pride myself on being perceptive and open minded about the books I read, but it seems not quite as much as I thought. [And of course, we all know what happens when pride comes into the picture. You tend to fall and twist your ankle on the cobblestones.] Since Barnes could presumably read my mind on the idea of 'bookdom', in his preface, I gave him the benefit of acquired knowledge and determined that I should give P Fitz another try. From his point of view, she is positively delightful. I'll have to find out how I could have been so wrong.
My mental re-alignment made this book a joy to get through. It's almost like he knew P Fitz would be my stumbling block; as if he were saying, If I can get through to her on this one, the rest is smooth sailing. And it was. For I connected with him absolutely on Clough and Orwell; on FMF and Kipling; on the art of translation and on Wharton and Updike. Others I didn't know like Fénéon and Moore. Chamfort is tangential and Houllebecq doesn't interest me in the least, but that's only a minor digression. And I recognized, just like Barnes did, the importance and magic of Hemingway's shorter fiction.
Throughout these essays, I was recognizing the touchstones of my life, and measuring them against what Barnes was saying. I was realizing that Barnes was quite a perceptive reader, and writer, much like the afore-mentioned P Fitz, whom I had avoided for no other reason than perhaps it was an Eeyore kind of reading day.
After reading The Sense of an Ending for instance, I had avoided him even though, quite unlike P Fitz's rating of execrable, I had given him four glowing stars for his novel. What I had found problematic with his work was that it said nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to me, but that he wrote beautifully. What was the value in that? So, I gave him 4 happy stars and went merrily on my way, not thinking about him again.
But it turns out that Barnes has indeed a lot to say:
Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. ... Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes diffiuclt to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as [she] is.
Perhaps I have been too used to reading those novels with the "readable routes". (One of my favourite souvenirs from my travels still remains the colourful London Tube map from the early 90s, for its depiction of transportation-nirvana.) Perhaps I'm not used to immersing myself in the "little nothings" of such novels, which in the end are the "little nothings" which make up the bigger part of life.
I'm not being coy or saying I don't understand those novels, and gee-whiz what a dunderhead I am; I'm simply saying that too often, I dismiss them with an almost contrived stubbornness, because they are too simple in presentation. There is that pride sneaking in again, that says, "Pshaw, I already know this. And someone has written an entire novel about it. Well, what a waste of time that was." When I should be saying ... Ah, stop for a moment, and listen to your heart beat. The rhythm is beautiful. Its simplicity is obvious ... but my god, isn't it magnificent?"
All this and more can be gleaned, through Mr. Barnes's window.
I knew Barnes was my-kind-of-writer by his opening sentence: I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; That's all I needed to read before I settled that I was his-kind-of-reader. In the most understated fashion, the preface is an ode to the written word -- an absolutely exquisite long paragraph of affirmations of bookdom, bookhood, bookness. And so the epode comes:
The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: "Some people think that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it -- as I do many aphorisms -- a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines the writer's choice between 'perfection of the life, or of the work'). When you read a great book you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape -- into different countries, mores, speech patterns -- but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains, and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
With such an auspicious start, I was horrified that his first essay should be on the perceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald. I groaned inwardly and thought I just might skip that one. (Admittedly, the only P Fitz I've read is Offshore, but that was seemingly enough to scar me for life, and which I put in my execrable list here on GR.) What a surprise to find that P Fitz is not at all who I thought her to be, based on my one reading experience. (I will not comment further on the humour, or irony, of that statement.)
Quite apart from her writing, Fitzgerald sounds like the kind of woman I would have liked to have had over for tea, discussing all manner of things; and in the end, she sounds so much more perceptive about life than I could have ever imagined. In effect, she is my-kind-writer, judging by Barnes's essay. Why did I hate her so much? Did I have my blinkers on that day? Was it an anti-P-Fitz kind of day? ... for certainly, I have those. Just like Eeyore, I have my anti days, in which everything is bleak and everything is execrable.
I pride myself on being perceptive and open minded about the books I read, but it seems not quite as much as I thought. [And of course, we all know what happens when pride comes into the picture. You tend to fall and twist your ankle on the cobblestones.] Since Barnes could presumably read my mind on the idea of 'bookdom', in his preface, I gave him the benefit of acquired knowledge and determined that I should give P Fitz another try. From his point of view, she is positively delightful. I'll have to find out how I could have been so wrong.
My mental re-alignment made this book a joy to get through. It's almost like he knew P Fitz would be my stumbling block; as if he were saying, If I can get through to her on this one, the rest is smooth sailing. And it was. For I connected with him absolutely on Clough and Orwell; on FMF and Kipling; on the art of translation and on Wharton and Updike. Others I didn't know like Fénéon and Moore. Chamfort is tangential and Houllebecq doesn't interest me in the least, but that's only a minor digression. And I recognized, just like Barnes did, the importance and magic of Hemingway's shorter fiction.
Throughout these essays, I was recognizing the touchstones of my life, and measuring them against what Barnes was saying. I was realizing that Barnes was quite a perceptive reader, and writer, much like the afore-mentioned P Fitz, whom I had avoided for no other reason than perhaps it was an Eeyore kind of reading day.
After reading The Sense of an Ending for instance, I had avoided him even though, quite unlike P Fitz's rating of execrable, I had given him four glowing stars for his novel. What I had found problematic with his work was that it said nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to me, but that he wrote beautifully. What was the value in that? So, I gave him 4 happy stars and went merrily on my way, not thinking about him again.
But it turns out that Barnes has indeed a lot to say:
Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. ... Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes diffiuclt to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as [she] is.
Perhaps I have been too used to reading those novels with the "readable routes". (One of my favourite souvenirs from my travels still remains the colourful London Tube map from the early 90s, for its depiction of transportation-nirvana.) Perhaps I'm not used to immersing myself in the "little nothings" of such novels, which in the end are the "little nothings" which make up the bigger part of life.
I'm not being coy or saying I don't understand those novels, and gee-whiz what a dunderhead I am; I'm simply saying that too often, I dismiss them with an almost contrived stubbornness, because they are too simple in presentation. There is that pride sneaking in again, that says, "Pshaw, I already know this. And someone has written an entire novel about it. Well, what a waste of time that was." When I should be saying ... Ah, stop for a moment, and listen to your heart beat. The rhythm is beautiful. Its simplicity is obvious ... but my god, isn't it magnificent?"
All this and more can be gleaned, through Mr. Barnes's window.
October 2, 2021
Perhaps my favourite book of author's (any author's) essays—well, after those of this author's erstwhile friend, Martin Amis. Like that writer Barnes excels at two things here: (1) entering so deeply into the fictional worlds of his subjects (e.g. and especially those of Ford Maddox Ford, Penelope Fitzgerald, and John Updike) that, if, like this reader, you are either inexperienced with them or have certain preconceptions which have prevented you from reading them in the past, well, now you not only feel compelled to spend time with them, but you also feel well-prepared for doing so, for Barnes gives you just the right amount of biographical and historical context to his subjects' work while largely getting out of the way of their their texts.
(2) By virtue of the artists and texts he has chosen, and via the evident sympathy he has for almost all of them (even some of the works of Michel Houellebecq), Barnes here thereby assembles a circumlocutory Apologia pro Vita Scripturam Sua (and please accept my apologies for Google Translate if we've got that wrong). More highlights that give the reader a glimpse of the author's own aesthetic commitments surface in such gems as "Lorrie Moore Takes Wing" and an essay on a writing about grief.
Finally, a few categorical declaratives:
a) Barnes has even convinced me to give Rudyard Kipling a try—no mean feat.
b) His essay comparing various translations of Madam Bovary is a small miracle.
c) His one short story included in this essay collection, "Homage to Hemingway", should send you scurrying back to Barnes' own novels. It certainly will me.
(2) By virtue of the artists and texts he has chosen, and via the evident sympathy he has for almost all of them (even some of the works of Michel Houellebecq), Barnes here thereby assembles a circumlocutory Apologia pro Vita Scripturam Sua (and please accept my apologies for Google Translate if we've got that wrong). More highlights that give the reader a glimpse of the author's own aesthetic commitments surface in such gems as "Lorrie Moore Takes Wing" and an essay on a writing about grief.
Finally, a few categorical declaratives:
a) Barnes has even convinced me to give Rudyard Kipling a try—no mean feat.
b) His essay comparing various translations of Madam Bovary is a small miracle.
c) His one short story included in this essay collection, "Homage to Hemingway", should send you scurrying back to Barnes' own novels. It certainly will me.
April 22, 2013
"The most misspent day in any life is the one when you've failed to laugh." - Chamfort
Yesterday I first cracked the cover of this in Frankfort Airport, enjoying espresso as I gazed about at the number of beer drinkers at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. As Julian Barnes notes early, his family didn't go to church but they did go to the library. Finally succumbing to slumber, I crashed without finishing Barnes' second examination of Ford Maddox Ford. Replenished, I awoke today before dawn and was off wandering New Belgrade. Pleasantly winded, I returned and read for a hour in a churchyard waiting for the currency exchange to open. Kipling and France were blended in pair of masterful pieces while I waited. It is now nearly noon here and the author closed the collection with a multifaceted reflections on Updike and literary grieving. My own life appears ripe and expanded at the present.
Yesterday I first cracked the cover of this in Frankfort Airport, enjoying espresso as I gazed about at the number of beer drinkers at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. As Julian Barnes notes early, his family didn't go to church but they did go to the library. Finally succumbing to slumber, I crashed without finishing Barnes' second examination of Ford Maddox Ford. Replenished, I awoke today before dawn and was off wandering New Belgrade. Pleasantly winded, I returned and read for a hour in a churchyard waiting for the currency exchange to open. Kipling and France were blended in pair of masterful pieces while I waited. It is now nearly noon here and the author closed the collection with a multifaceted reflections on Updike and literary grieving. My own life appears ripe and expanded at the present.
July 26, 2023
I always find that when reading Julian Barnes’ essays I am inclined to read the works of the old and new authors he is writing about. Why? It’s not just the depth that he discusses but the enthusiasm that he projects. Humble to his own fame, he writes with such conviction that my curiosity is peaked.
For example, I have never read Kipling (The Jungle Book) but Kipling’s love for France, detailed in his essays and a travel diary, makes me want to read the man. Or the Frenchman Prosper Mérimée (Carmen) was the Inspector of Monuments and his quest to save Old France. There is an amusing and gossipy tale on George Orwell and his F-ing Elephant and a delightful, if not enlightening story on “The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald. Plus essays on Edith Wharton, John Updike, Michel Houellebecq and Ford Maddox Ford. I have only read two of this group.
Recently I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion but didn’t know that Carol Joyce Oates wrote a similar book called, A Widow’s Story, also about the loss of her husband. Of course, Barnes himself lost his wife Pat in 2008. His aptly titled essay “Regulating Sorrow” deals masterfully with grief (see his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 2008).
Speaking of masterfully,his essay “Translating Madame Bovary” is a classic to be read if you have ever read Flaubert’s classic. I heard him speak on this subject, and even though he has only translated two books, Daudet from French and Kreigel from German, I think he knows his Flaubert and would make a great version. Or perhaps he would decline citing Lydia David took three years, and besides, do we need another translation?
Of course, in this package of 17 essays we have a short story, “Homage to Hemingway.” This is the story in three parts/places of a “mid level” author who gives writing work shops to inspiring authors. His model is a man he met on the island of Naxos who styled himself in the bravura of the “Old Man.” He uses a short story called Homage to Hemingway, also divided in three parts/places and uses it as a teaching guide. A reflective story one might say?
A chock full book and my to read list got even bigger. Plus there is wonderful Raoul Dufy gracing the cover. Always a treat to read Barnes.
A big thank you to Ilse whose delightful review made me realize that I needed to read this collection.
For example, I have never read Kipling (The Jungle Book) but Kipling’s love for France, detailed in his essays and a travel diary, makes me want to read the man. Or the Frenchman Prosper Mérimée (Carmen) was the Inspector of Monuments and his quest to save Old France. There is an amusing and gossipy tale on George Orwell and his F-ing Elephant and a delightful, if not enlightening story on “The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald. Plus essays on Edith Wharton, John Updike, Michel Houellebecq and Ford Maddox Ford. I have only read two of this group.
Recently I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion but didn’t know that Carol Joyce Oates wrote a similar book called, A Widow’s Story, also about the loss of her husband. Of course, Barnes himself lost his wife Pat in 2008. His aptly titled essay “Regulating Sorrow” deals masterfully with grief (see his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 2008).
Speaking of masterfully,his essay “Translating Madame Bovary” is a classic to be read if you have ever read Flaubert’s classic. I heard him speak on this subject, and even though he has only translated two books, Daudet from French and Kreigel from German, I think he knows his Flaubert and would make a great version. Or perhaps he would decline citing Lydia David took three years, and besides, do we need another translation?
Of course, in this package of 17 essays we have a short story, “Homage to Hemingway.” This is the story in three parts/places of a “mid level” author who gives writing work shops to inspiring authors. His model is a man he met on the island of Naxos who styled himself in the bravura of the “Old Man.” He uses a short story called Homage to Hemingway, also divided in three parts/places and uses it as a teaching guide. A reflective story one might say?
A chock full book and my to read list got even bigger. Plus there is wonderful Raoul Dufy gracing the cover. Always a treat to read Barnes.
A big thank you to Ilse whose delightful review made me realize that I needed to read this collection.
November 9, 2021
Another excellent set of essays from Julian Barnes. I love Barnes' essays because I always learn something from them, even if I disagree with his opinions on some authors or artists. I was not familiar with Penelope Fitzgerald, but I may now read some of her books thanks to Barnes. I appreciated his evaluation of Ford Maddox Ford, even if it does not incline me to want to read Ford. I liked his essays on Kipling very much, and I was unaware of Rudyard's love for France. Kipling has suffered from criticism of his imperial leanings, as Barnes acknowledges, but there was much more to the man than that, and he was in fact a literary genius. Kipling's personal suffering was the same as that of his friend's, Theodore Roosevelt; they both lost a son in the Great War, and Kipling had the added pain of not being able to recover his son's body. This turned him into the leading proponent of the maintenance of British war dead cemeteries in France, and he was also a prime mover in the establishment of monuments to the Unknown Soldiers.
I had heard the name Prosper Merimee, but I did not understand his role in saving the historical buildings of France; he was just in time, because in the Nineteenth Century ideas of progress (and ignorance) started the long process of clearing away old buildings to make way for train tracks, roads, and newer buildings. Barnes likes Michel Houellebecq; I do not, and that's okay, but at least I know a bit more about the author now.
Barnes is a considerable expert on Flaubert, so his essay on the various translations of Madame Bovary is well worth reading, and his general concept of translation, the idea of the impossibility of an exact translation, is well-informed by his fluency in French. We also hear from him about Edith Wharton, Hemingway (he's not a hater), Updike, and grief, a subject he has explored at length.
Barnes is such a good writer, such a pleasure to read, that this book was a page-turner for me, and it kept sending me to Google to investigate references in the essays. I do disagree with some of his opinions, as noted above, but he is always interesting.
I had heard the name Prosper Merimee, but I did not understand his role in saving the historical buildings of France; he was just in time, because in the Nineteenth Century ideas of progress (and ignorance) started the long process of clearing away old buildings to make way for train tracks, roads, and newer buildings. Barnes likes Michel Houellebecq; I do not, and that's okay, but at least I know a bit more about the author now.
Barnes is a considerable expert on Flaubert, so his essay on the various translations of Madame Bovary is well worth reading, and his general concept of translation, the idea of the impossibility of an exact translation, is well-informed by his fluency in French. We also hear from him about Edith Wharton, Hemingway (he's not a hater), Updike, and grief, a subject he has explored at length.
Barnes is such a good writer, such a pleasure to read, that this book was a page-turner for me, and it kept sending me to Google to investigate references in the essays. I do disagree with some of his opinions, as noted above, but he is always interesting.
May 24, 2013
Lurid post-it notes jostle pink-yellow-red-blue-green post-it flags at the page edges. I think only the five-star ones merit this number of flags. And — (sigh) — Barnes’s essays on writers and their books has bumped up my TBR count. At least I can re-use the post-it flags for those new ones.
Preface: A Life with Books (5*) — This eleven-page essay was one of my favourites. I love reading about other people’s love affairs with books, about how and what they read as children, what ensared them, about how they grew up in their reading tastes, about their influences and favourite authors.
He starts with, ”I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer’s voice gets inside a reader’s head.”
His book world began to expand at age 17, when he got to choose his book for a school prize. He chose Ulysses: “I can still see the disapproving face of the Lord Mayor as his protectively gloved hand passed over to me this notoriously filthy novel.”
He describes his phase of being a “furious book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate which far exceeded any possible reading speed.” He collected first editions, complete sets, and just random books to justify otherwise fruitless expeditions.
"The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like, and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date was rarely distinct."
Barnes still buys books faster than he can read them, and his defense is one of my favourite quotes in the book: “But this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.”
Indeed.
Most of the essays were previously published in Guardian, NYRB, LRB, New Yorker, or as forewords. About half of them are related to french authors or to France.
It was fascinating to read "Translating Madame Bovary", in which he discusses the Lydia Davis translation in the context of her predecessors, especially since I am (still!) reading her translation of Proust’s “The Way by Swann’s”. He is politely disapproving of her work, describing it as a “linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English.” Ouch.
Davis says that past translations “that are written with some flair and some life to them are not at all that close to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of clunky.” Barnes comments that “This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be ‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is language whose every sentence, word, syllable has been tested aloud again and again.” I so wish I knew French…
He admires Penelope Fitzgerald’s work. They are examples of the subtler wiser type of novel, in which the “structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent…Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure.”
“George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant” is about class, ideologies, Being a Great Writer, and moral ambiguities. He reports, via Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick, on a restaurant meeting between Crick and Orwell’s widow Sonia. “Crick dared to doubt the utter truthfulness of one of Orwell’s most celebrated pieces of reportage, ‘Shooting an Elephant’. Sonia ‘screamed’ at him across the table, ‘Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!’ Crick had discovered that in fact no one had been killed by the elephant, although Orwell did kill the elephant, angering the owners and resulting in a form of disgraceful internal exile.
He writes a graceful literary eulogy of John Updike, and is particularly fond of the Rabbit books, calling Rabbit at Rest “the greatest post-war American novel.” This makes me want to re-read them again, twenty years later.
Three of the essays were about Ford Maddox Ford. In “Ford’s the Good Soldier” he gives a master class in literary criticism. He discusses the opening sentence…’This is the saddest story I have ever heard.“, and at the end of the paragraph provides this most memorable description: “And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable — if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it— then we must be prepared to treat every line as warily; we must prowl soft-footed through the text, alive for every board’s moan and plaint.” Love it. Wonderful.
The last belongs to Mr. Barnes:
“Nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.”
Preface: A Life with Books (5*) — This eleven-page essay was one of my favourites. I love reading about other people’s love affairs with books, about how and what they read as children, what ensared them, about how they grew up in their reading tastes, about their influences and favourite authors.
He starts with, ”I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer’s voice gets inside a reader’s head.”
His book world began to expand at age 17, when he got to choose his book for a school prize. He chose Ulysses: “I can still see the disapproving face of the Lord Mayor as his protectively gloved hand passed over to me this notoriously filthy novel.”
He describes his phase of being a “furious book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate which far exceeded any possible reading speed.” He collected first editions, complete sets, and just random books to justify otherwise fruitless expeditions.
"The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like, and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date was rarely distinct."
Barnes still buys books faster than he can read them, and his defense is one of my favourite quotes in the book: “But this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.”
Indeed.
Most of the essays were previously published in Guardian, NYRB, LRB, New Yorker, or as forewords. About half of them are related to french authors or to France.
It was fascinating to read "Translating Madame Bovary", in which he discusses the Lydia Davis translation in the context of her predecessors, especially since I am (still!) reading her translation of Proust’s “The Way by Swann’s”. He is politely disapproving of her work, describing it as a “linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English.” Ouch.
Davis says that past translations “that are written with some flair and some life to them are not at all that close to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of clunky.” Barnes comments that “This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be ‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is language whose every sentence, word, syllable has been tested aloud again and again.” I so wish I knew French…
He admires Penelope Fitzgerald’s work. They are examples of the subtler wiser type of novel, in which the “structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent…Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure.”
“George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant” is about class, ideologies, Being a Great Writer, and moral ambiguities. He reports, via Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick, on a restaurant meeting between Crick and Orwell’s widow Sonia. “Crick dared to doubt the utter truthfulness of one of Orwell’s most celebrated pieces of reportage, ‘Shooting an Elephant’. Sonia ‘screamed’ at him across the table, ‘Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!’ Crick had discovered that in fact no one had been killed by the elephant, although Orwell did kill the elephant, angering the owners and resulting in a form of disgraceful internal exile.
He writes a graceful literary eulogy of John Updike, and is particularly fond of the Rabbit books, calling Rabbit at Rest “the greatest post-war American novel.” This makes me want to re-read them again, twenty years later.
Three of the essays were about Ford Maddox Ford. In “Ford’s the Good Soldier” he gives a master class in literary criticism. He discusses the opening sentence…’This is the saddest story I have ever heard.“, and at the end of the paragraph provides this most memorable description: “And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable — if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it— then we must be prepared to treat every line as warily; we must prowl soft-footed through the text, alive for every board’s moan and plaint.” Love it. Wonderful.
The last belongs to Mr. Barnes:
“Nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.”
March 16, 2018
While reading this book, I was (and it seemed the most natural thing to do) composing my own essay. On Barnes, of course. Unfortunately, we don’t have any mutual friends (as far as I’m concerned anyway), we didn’t go to the same school, we don’t visit the same restaurant, we don’t share a passion for cooking, we don’t even live in the same city – thus the chances we ever meet are slim to none. On the one hand, it means I cannot write an essay on Barnes with funny stories or shared memories in it, on the other hand, it means, I can write whatever I want and however I see fit not feeling ashamed afterwards. Perks of being just-an-ordinary-avid-reader, you see.
In this collection of essays, reintroducing a few well-known writers, Barnes, too, acts like an avid erudite reader, and very often as an admirer of someone else’s genius – a rare gift of regarding with respect other people’s exceptional creative and intellectual power and talent. Paying homage to others, though, Barnes reveals himself as well as he reveals some little details and fact about his subjects. There’s something strangely intimate in reading someone’s thoughts on books – how telling the way a person grasps a novel or a poem might be! How telling is our choice of favourite writers and poets once we start talking about their lives and personalities! Probably, that’s why I love reading Barnes’s essays so much, as they are the closest I can get to a ‘conversation’ with him and having my questions about his novel answered. Answers are all there, if you look closely, between the lines.
Now forget my shameless fangirling moment. On the more serious note, I should say, this collection is a fantastic source of further reading – I bet having read the essays, you’ll discover or rediscover many gems as Barnes is very convincing when talking about, say, Penelope Fitzgerald or Rudyard Kipling.
Someday I’ll write my essay on Julian Barnes instead of this little unworthy review, but for now I leave you with a link, as some of these essays may be found on The Guardian website (for example, here’s a fascinating tribute to Ford Madox Ford).
In this collection of essays, reintroducing a few well-known writers, Barnes, too, acts like an avid erudite reader, and very often as an admirer of someone else’s genius – a rare gift of regarding with respect other people’s exceptional creative and intellectual power and talent. Paying homage to others, though, Barnes reveals himself as well as he reveals some little details and fact about his subjects. There’s something strangely intimate in reading someone’s thoughts on books – how telling the way a person grasps a novel or a poem might be! How telling is our choice of favourite writers and poets once we start talking about their lives and personalities! Probably, that’s why I love reading Barnes’s essays so much, as they are the closest I can get to a ‘conversation’ with him and having my questions about his novel answered. Answers are all there, if you look closely, between the lines.
Now forget my shameless fangirling moment. On the more serious note, I should say, this collection is a fantastic source of further reading – I bet having read the essays, you’ll discover or rediscover many gems as Barnes is very convincing when talking about, say, Penelope Fitzgerald or Rudyard Kipling.
Someday I’ll write my essay on Julian Barnes instead of this little unworthy review, but for now I leave you with a link, as some of these essays may be found on The Guardian website (for example, here’s a fascinating tribute to Ford Madox Ford).
June 17, 2018
Living in Literature
"If you go to the web page of the restaurant L'Huîtrière (3 rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on 'translate', the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as '3 street cats humped'. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to?This opening paragraph of Julian Barnes' essay "Translating Madame Bovary" is typical of his approach: a witty, modern man who lives in literature and for whom literature is a part of life. Ostensibly a review of the 2010 translation by Lydia Davis, it is in effect a lecture-demonstration on the principles and pitfalls of translation, with examples taken from five previous versions. He also speculates on the lost translation by the English governess to Flaubert's children (and possibly the author's mistress), Julia Herbert; with Barnes, there will always be a story in it somewhere. Indeed, two of Barnes' best-known novels are effectively stories about writers—Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and Arthur and George (2005, Conan Doyle)—and real-life writers, artists, and musicians crop up frequently in his short fiction. Barnes admires a lot of things about Lydia Davis' work, but fails her in the end because she admits that she doesn't love Flaubert. Which for Barnes is a cardinal sin, because everything he writes comes out of love, most especially his love for all things French.
About half the essays in the book have a French connection. In addition to Flaubert, he has pieces on Michel Houellebecq, Félix Féneon, Prosper Mérimée, and an 18th-century philosopher named Chamfort. His essay on Edith Wharton concentrates on her novel The Reef, written in and about France; this is also a fascinating examination of approaches to reading. A pair of essays, "Kipling's France" and "France's Kipling," show the British Imperial Author in an unexpected and surprisingly sympathetic sidelight; with a few tweaks, either of them could easily stand among Barnes' short stories, especially the second, which is a retelling of a now-forgotten French roman à clef whose protagonist, Dingley, is clearly intended for Kipling. His other subjects include Penelope Fitzgerald, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Orwell, Ford Maddox Ford (three essays, one with a French seting), Lorrie Moore, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates. There is also a story, "Homage to Hemingway," which examines the relationship between an author's reputation and his actual writing in terms of a modern novelist (Barnes himself perhaps?) teaching summer seminars in three different countries at three stages in his life. It is good, but Barnes' essays read almost as stories anyhow, and vice-versa.
You pick up a book of literary essays by a contemporary figure whom you admire and immediately thumb through the table of contents, thinking "I wonder what he has to say about so-and-so?" But Barnes' index may disappoint you: a list of mostly secondary figures, unknown names, and occasional pieces. I started it with the full intention of skipping and skimming, but I was hooked. Even so, I omitted the three essays on Ford Maddox Ford, an author I hadn't read and didn't think I wanted to. But I was wrong; I went back at the end and read them eagerly. And now I have another must-read book at the top of my list, Ford's The Good Soldier.* Barnes can do that to you!
*Since read and reviewed.
February 8, 2013
Francophile lit crit
I’m a Barnes fan so please forgive my fawning. This is not your stand literary criticism. Barnes focuses on less well known writers with some exceptions such as Updike, Orwell, and Flaubert though I wonder how often even they are read now. You will, however, recognize all or most of the names and hopefully have read something from them so you won’t feel at sea. There’s almost always a tie in with France. I suppose this is to be expected from someone who’s most recognized book is “Flaubert’s Parrot” (shortlisted for the Booker in 1984). Sometimes Barnes can almost lose his audience by being too arch but he always has a purpose for this. He’s laughing at himself as much if not more than at his readers. He’s at his best when dissecting the differences between the English and French worldviews. The one short story he includes in this collection is about Hemingway’s influence on writing and by extension America. Again he seems to be laughing more at a writer’s and the periscoped writing and publishing world than at his readers, in fact he’s inviting us to laugh at the absurdity of the writing/publishing process. Which leads to one of his funniest pieces; “George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant”. The piece is ostensibly about George Orwell but its really poking fun at how a writer achieves a knighthood. News Flash: It’s not all about the writing. You’ll laugh out loud. Barnes includes two of my favorite little read or little known authors…Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore. He also includes folks like Updike who I’ve never enjoyed but he still manages to make fascinating points about the writing. This collection is as much about the politics and philosophy of writing as it is about the writing itself.
This review is based on an advanced reading copy provided by the publisher.
I’m a Barnes fan so please forgive my fawning. This is not your stand literary criticism. Barnes focuses on less well known writers with some exceptions such as Updike, Orwell, and Flaubert though I wonder how often even they are read now. You will, however, recognize all or most of the names and hopefully have read something from them so you won’t feel at sea. There’s almost always a tie in with France. I suppose this is to be expected from someone who’s most recognized book is “Flaubert’s Parrot” (shortlisted for the Booker in 1984). Sometimes Barnes can almost lose his audience by being too arch but he always has a purpose for this. He’s laughing at himself as much if not more than at his readers. He’s at his best when dissecting the differences between the English and French worldviews. The one short story he includes in this collection is about Hemingway’s influence on writing and by extension America. Again he seems to be laughing more at a writer’s and the periscoped writing and publishing world than at his readers, in fact he’s inviting us to laugh at the absurdity of the writing/publishing process. Which leads to one of his funniest pieces; “George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant”. The piece is ostensibly about George Orwell but its really poking fun at how a writer achieves a knighthood. News Flash: It’s not all about the writing. You’ll laugh out loud. Barnes includes two of my favorite little read or little known authors…Edith Wharton and Lorrie Moore. He also includes folks like Updike who I’ve never enjoyed but he still manages to make fascinating points about the writing. This collection is as much about the politics and philosophy of writing as it is about the writing itself.
This review is based on an advanced reading copy provided by the publisher.
December 28, 2022
"Bizler, en derin benliklerimizde, birer anlatı hayvanıyız; aynı zamanda da, yanıt arayan insanlar. En iyi kurmaca nadiren yanıtlar verir ama gerçekte, soruları çok iyi formüle eder."
Tam da bu, tam da bu. Julian Barnes'ın denemelerini okurken sanki o konuşuyor ben dinliyorum gibi değil de, sohbet ediyoruz gibi hissediyorum ve bayılıyorum bu hisse. Barnes'ın "Penceremden"i, edebiyata dair 17 deneme ve Hemingway'i onurlandırmak üzere yazdığı tatlı 1 adet öyküden müteşekkil. Bildiğim yazarlara dair yazdığı şeyleri okumaktan çok haz aldım, çok hakim olmadığım yazarlarla ilgili metinlerde biraz zorlandım açıkçası ama tabii Barnes'dan öğrenilecek çok şey var ve ben de pür dikkat dinledim kendisini.
Tuhaf şey; Barnes okurken kendimi konforlu hissediyorum. Karşımda çok zeki ve entelektüel birisi var, üstelik epey de sarkastik ama bana kendimi iyi hissettirmeyi de başarıyor, kendisine dair en sevdiğim şeylerden biri bu sanırım.
Özellikle çeviriye dair denemesi "Madame Bovary'yi Çevirmek" ve yasa dair olan son metin "Kederle Baş Etmek" enfesti. Ölüm yıldönümlerinde kendimize "kendimi hayatta tutum" dememiz, bunu hatırlamamız gerektiğine dair bir alıntı vardı o metinde, her sene içimde hissettiğim şey öyle güzel dile getirilmiş ki, bayıldım.
Kendisini pür dikkat dinlerken öğrendiğim şeylerden biri de Kipling'e yöneltilen şu suçlama oldu: "Pitoresk olma tutkusu insani duygudaşlık hissini boğmuştu" - benzer bir yakınmayı annesi de Flaubert'e yöneltmiş: "Senin bu cümle kurma düşkünlüğün kalbini kuruttu."
Ah dedim, evet yahu. Flaubert ve Kipling için bence bunlar haksız eleştiriler ama bazı yazarları sevmeme sebebim tam da bu işte. Kelimelerin ihtişamına kapılıp duygudan kopmaları. Ama hem ihtişamlı, hem hissi kuvvetli metinler yazabilenler var bir de ki işte sevdiğim şey tam da o, dedim kendi kendime. (Evet senden bahsediyorum Lawrence Durrell.)
Sonuçta Barnes yine bana bir sürü şey öğretti, bir sürü şeyi adlandırmamı sağladı, bir dolu fikir verdi, ne güzel. Edebiyata dair derinlemesine kafa yormak isterseniz kendisi size de bu kitabıyla eşlik edebilir.
Tam da bu, tam da bu. Julian Barnes'ın denemelerini okurken sanki o konuşuyor ben dinliyorum gibi değil de, sohbet ediyoruz gibi hissediyorum ve bayılıyorum bu hisse. Barnes'ın "Penceremden"i, edebiyata dair 17 deneme ve Hemingway'i onurlandırmak üzere yazdığı tatlı 1 adet öyküden müteşekkil. Bildiğim yazarlara dair yazdığı şeyleri okumaktan çok haz aldım, çok hakim olmadığım yazarlarla ilgili metinlerde biraz zorlandım açıkçası ama tabii Barnes'dan öğrenilecek çok şey var ve ben de pür dikkat dinledim kendisini.
Tuhaf şey; Barnes okurken kendimi konforlu hissediyorum. Karşımda çok zeki ve entelektüel birisi var, üstelik epey de sarkastik ama bana kendimi iyi hissettirmeyi de başarıyor, kendisine dair en sevdiğim şeylerden biri bu sanırım.
Özellikle çeviriye dair denemesi "Madame Bovary'yi Çevirmek" ve yasa dair olan son metin "Kederle Baş Etmek" enfesti. Ölüm yıldönümlerinde kendimize "kendimi hayatta tutum" dememiz, bunu hatırlamamız gerektiğine dair bir alıntı vardı o metinde, her sene içimde hissettiğim şey öyle güzel dile getirilmiş ki, bayıldım.
Kendisini pür dikkat dinlerken öğrendiğim şeylerden biri de Kipling'e yöneltilen şu suçlama oldu: "Pitoresk olma tutkusu insani duygudaşlık hissini boğmuştu" - benzer bir yakınmayı annesi de Flaubert'e yöneltmiş: "Senin bu cümle kurma düşkünlüğün kalbini kuruttu."
Ah dedim, evet yahu. Flaubert ve Kipling için bence bunlar haksız eleştiriler ama bazı yazarları sevmeme sebebim tam da bu işte. Kelimelerin ihtişamına kapılıp duygudan kopmaları. Ama hem ihtişamlı, hem hissi kuvvetli metinler yazabilenler var bir de ki işte sevdiğim şey tam da o, dedim kendi kendime. (Evet senden bahsediyorum Lawrence Durrell.)
Sonuçta Barnes yine bana bir sürü şey öğretti, bir sürü şeyi adlandırmamı sağladı, bir dolu fikir verdi, ne güzel. Edebiyata dair derinlemesine kafa yormak isterseniz kendisi size de bu kitabıyla eşlik edebilir.
March 5, 2019
A carefully, concisely, well written, thoughtful, interesting, reflective collection of seventeen essays and one short story. These 18 writing pieces were published over the period 1996 to 2011. The book is about fiction. The author comments on the works of Penelope Fitzgerald, Arthur Clough, George Orwell, Ford Maddox Ford, Kipling's journey through France, Roch de Chamfort, Merimee, Felix Feneon, Houellebecq, the difficulties of translating Madame Bovary - providing examples of six different English translations, Wharton's 'The Reef', Lorrie Moore's 'Birds of America' short story collection, John Updike's 'Rabbit' series, and the autobiographies on grief by Didion and Oates. There is also a short story about a writing professor discussing Hemingway with his students.
Barnes makes some interesting observations and gave me a greater appreciation of the authors discussed. A very worthwhile read.
Barnes makes some interesting observations and gave me a greater appreciation of the authors discussed. A very worthwhile read.
December 26, 2021
Some people think that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. from the preface xviii
We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library. p1x
It was quite some while ago that I had put in a library request for this, but my delight to finally have it in my hands was marred by the timing. It seemed a remnant from the recent past. Why read again about all these long passed writers when there is so much exciting new material, less inhibited and out from under the thumb of colonial thinking? Kipling? And a story about Hemmingway? Ho hum.
Plus, there is a bit of odd guilt about the fact that I never finished Flaubert's Parrott, failing to replace the copy I lost in the metro. I am still planning to read it next, before the later work. But I've liked other of his books, and thought I might read the intro and the few essays that interested me, about Houellebecq definitely and maybe Oates. And I seemed to remember that Fionnuala is very fond of this one which prompted me to give at least give it a few moments.
The dividing line between books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like, and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date, was barely distinct. pxiv
In that crabby mood I finally picked it up, and soon all that nonsense was dispensed with. Julian Barnes charmed me again, right from the first sentence from the preface. If there is indeed an invisible ribbon connecting an author with their readers, than perhaps this links readers too. JB is both reader and writer, and through his sensitive perception, his readers come to a deeper, richer, understanding of both the material and the reading experience.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. xviii
The way our lives overlapped with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit.
from the short story Homage to Hemmingway p185
Yes I did read the Hemmingway story and only skipped the Wharton essay, which in the end I was grateful that there was one more essay left.
This is how, reading through the whole collection, I came to understand of how important it is not to relegate these modern classics to a musty wing in the archives. Their voices assure us that not everything about the establishment is tainted. JB reminds us not just to preserve but consider the evidence acquired here by all those passionate people who strove to expose reality in their writing.
We live not just in the present indicative but also in the passive, the conditional, and the subjunctive..... how unexpectedly some things still move us, while others trigger nothing; and how far can we admit that our deepest and most companionable certainties were often wrong. from the essay Laurie Moore Takes Wing p202
We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library. p1x
It was quite some while ago that I had put in a library request for this, but my delight to finally have it in my hands was marred by the timing. It seemed a remnant from the recent past. Why read again about all these long passed writers when there is so much exciting new material, less inhibited and out from under the thumb of colonial thinking? Kipling? And a story about Hemmingway? Ho hum.
Plus, there is a bit of odd guilt about the fact that I never finished Flaubert's Parrott, failing to replace the copy I lost in the metro. I am still planning to read it next, before the later work. But I've liked other of his books, and thought I might read the intro and the few essays that interested me, about Houellebecq definitely and maybe Oates. And I seemed to remember that Fionnuala is very fond of this one which prompted me to give at least give it a few moments.
The dividing line between books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like, and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date, was barely distinct. pxiv
In that crabby mood I finally picked it up, and soon all that nonsense was dispensed with. Julian Barnes charmed me again, right from the first sentence from the preface. If there is indeed an invisible ribbon connecting an author with their readers, than perhaps this links readers too. JB is both reader and writer, and through his sensitive perception, his readers come to a deeper, richer, understanding of both the material and the reading experience.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. xviii
The way our lives overlapped with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit.
from the short story Homage to Hemmingway p185
Yes I did read the Hemmingway story and only skipped the Wharton essay, which in the end I was grateful that there was one more essay left.
This is how, reading through the whole collection, I came to understand of how important it is not to relegate these modern classics to a musty wing in the archives. Their voices assure us that not everything about the establishment is tainted. JB reminds us not just to preserve but consider the evidence acquired here by all those passionate people who strove to expose reality in their writing.
We live not just in the present indicative but also in the passive, the conditional, and the subjunctive..... how unexpectedly some things still move us, while others trigger nothing; and how far can we admit that our deepest and most companionable certainties were often wrong. from the essay Laurie Moore Takes Wing p202
March 9, 2013
Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his book The Sense of an Ending which has sparked a huge increase in this man’s popularity. To follow up (cash in) on the buzz the release of Through the Window followed soon after, which holds Seventeen Essays (and a Short Story) on the books and authors that have meant the most to him over his career.
I remember reading Julian Barnes’ essay A Life with Books, which really was just a look at his reading history and I absolutely loved it. So I was eager to read this collection to learn more about this wonderful author. What I found was this collection was very dry and this made it difficult to read. Barnes is a very intelligent man and he flexed his intellectual muscles to the point where it back very difficult to read for a pseudo intellectual like me.
While I found it interesting to read this author’s thoughts on Penelope Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kipling, Madame Bovary, Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell I tend to think Barnes wasn’t connecting to the reader like he did with his novels or the essay A Life with Books. It felt more like reading an academic essay more than just someone’s passion for these authors and books.
This is a difficult collection to get through, but people interested in learning more about Julian Barnes or these topics might find something in this book for them. I read this book as soon as I finished Ramona Koval’s By the Book, A Reader’s Guide to Life so it was difficult to go from a book with so much passion for reading to something so dry.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...
I remember reading Julian Barnes’ essay A Life with Books, which really was just a look at his reading history and I absolutely loved it. So I was eager to read this collection to learn more about this wonderful author. What I found was this collection was very dry and this made it difficult to read. Barnes is a very intelligent man and he flexed his intellectual muscles to the point where it back very difficult to read for a pseudo intellectual like me.
While I found it interesting to read this author’s thoughts on Penelope Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kipling, Madame Bovary, Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell I tend to think Barnes wasn’t connecting to the reader like he did with his novels or the essay A Life with Books. It felt more like reading an academic essay more than just someone’s passion for these authors and books.
This is a difficult collection to get through, but people interested in learning more about Julian Barnes or these topics might find something in this book for them. I read this book as soon as I finished Ramona Koval’s By the Book, A Reader’s Guide to Life so it was difficult to go from a book with so much passion for reading to something so dry.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...
January 14, 2013
I read this book of 17 essays and one short story because I was swept off my feet by The Sense of an Ending. I thought, whatever Julian Barnes writes next, I will read (never mind his many previous novels). His essays, covering subjects from Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier to the many translations of Madame Bovary, were hardly familiar (to me) but I ate them up. I am determined to figure out how Barnes did what he did in The Sense of an Ending, and Through the Window provided a view, despite my (complete) ignorance of his subjects. With that disclaimer, I add the following: there was something freshly authentic about his essays.
I was amazed by his (obsessively careful) word choice, the flow of the material, his ability to strip things down, add flare (the man has an impressive vocabulary), educate and entertain. There isn't a condescending tone in his body. And even though the published word might always be tainted by politics, something Barnes addresses in one of his essays via Felix Feneon (my favorite essay), it seemed this work was (mostly) pure. I should have been bored but I wasn't. His art form is so tight, (I was convinced) his subject was of little importance. Plus, he loves to use parenthesis and I appreciate that.
I was amazed by his (obsessively careful) word choice, the flow of the material, his ability to strip things down, add flare (the man has an impressive vocabulary), educate and entertain. There isn't a condescending tone in his body. And even though the published word might always be tainted by politics, something Barnes addresses in one of his essays via Felix Feneon (my favorite essay), it seemed this work was (mostly) pure. I should have been bored but I wasn't. His art form is so tight, (I was convinced) his subject was of little importance. Plus, he loves to use parenthesis and I appreciate that.
July 11, 2022
Although I wasn’t initially interested in all the author subjects of these essays, I read them anyway and was charmed and intrigued.
Penelope Fitzgerald, one of my favourites, was first followed by a varied smorgasbord … along with Orwell, Wharton, Updike, three French authors I’d not heard of, one that I had (note to self – don’t bother with any more Houellebecq!) there were three essays on Ford Madox Ford alone and two on Kipling. (Slightly unbalanced I thought - were these two so much more significant than the others?)
The Flaubert essay, focussing on Madame Bovary, was an insightful piece about translating, and there was a final rather moving one about grief. Even the preface A life with books surely counts as another enjoyable essay.
But the star was the short story Homage to Hemingway, written in the style of Hemingway’s Homage to Switzerland. A delightfully self-referential three-part work, each one building on and referring to the previous part: but where Hemingway’s has vignettes of three men waiting for the same train in different stations, here there is a single author at three stages in his life.
First, as a novelist at a creative writing workshop in the countryside where he describes a holiday in Greece, encountering someone who (he thought) was modelling himself on Hemingway; next, as an English professor at an Alpine retreat where he relates the Greece incident as a lead-in to the Hemingway story, and the distinction between an author’s personality and the work they create; and finally at an American Midwest university where the writer, now “the maestro”, again gives out the story for discussion and is challenged about Hemingway’s hostility to women and the namelessness of the female characters in the story.
I hadn’t actually read Hemingway’s story until now
(here is Julian Barnes reading it) and I think Barnes’ version is superior and far more nuanced. It’s an absolute gem. But here it is in
The NewYorker and you can decide for yourself.
Penelope Fitzgerald, one of my favourites, was first followed by a varied smorgasbord … along with Orwell, Wharton, Updike, three French authors I’d not heard of, one that I had (note to self – don’t bother with any more Houellebecq!) there were three essays on Ford Madox Ford alone and two on Kipling. (Slightly unbalanced I thought - were these two so much more significant than the others?)
The Flaubert essay, focussing on Madame Bovary, was an insightful piece about translating, and there was a final rather moving one about grief. Even the preface A life with books surely counts as another enjoyable essay.
But the star was the short story Homage to Hemingway, written in the style of Hemingway’s Homage to Switzerland. A delightfully self-referential three-part work, each one building on and referring to the previous part: but where Hemingway’s has vignettes of three men waiting for the same train in different stations, here there is a single author at three stages in his life.
First, as a novelist at a creative writing workshop in the countryside where he describes a holiday in Greece, encountering someone who (he thought) was modelling himself on Hemingway; next, as an English professor at an Alpine retreat where he relates the Greece incident as a lead-in to the Hemingway story, and the distinction between an author’s personality and the work they create; and finally at an American Midwest university where the writer, now “the maestro”, again gives out the story for discussion and is challenged about Hemingway’s hostility to women and the namelessness of the female characters in the story.
For a moment, he thought of telling them the story of his life: how Angie had left him because he was a success, and then Lynn had left him because he was a failure. But he didn’t tell them that. Instead, he turned to Kate, in a final attempt at something—he wasn’t even sure what—and asked,
“What if I wrote about this and gave my name and didn’t give yours, would that really be bad?”
“Yes,” she replied, and it seemed to him that she now thought the less of him.
“And if I left out my own name and gave yours, would that make it better?”
“Yes,” she said.
And so he did. He tried to write it all down, simply and honestly, with clean moral lines.
But, still, nobody wanted to publish it.
I hadn’t actually read Hemingway’s story until now
(here is Julian Barnes reading it) and I think Barnes’ version is superior and far more nuanced. It’s an absolute gem. But here it is in
The NewYorker and you can decide for yourself.
October 27, 2012
A Bibliophile Reflects
Julian Barnes is an astonishingly fine writer. After reading his last book - THE SENSE OF AN ENDNG which won the Man Booker Prize - this reader wrote, `the miracle of Julian Barnes' writing is the fact that once the book cover is opened he is able to not only retain our attention but also compel us to read on to discover how this strangely ordinary man will show us through his sifted memories how life is after all what we do not what we plan. It is brilliant writing, contagiously so.' He is a person about whom we known very little: he maintains a high level of privacy with regard to his personal life, though he is often very candid in interviews. His brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specializing in ancient philosophy. Julian Barnes is a patron of human rights organization Freedom from Torture, for which he has sponsored several fundraising events. He lives in London.
What Barnes delivers here in his own inimitable eloquent, quiet fashion is a look into the lives of authors who have influenced his writing. In his preface he states, `I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a readers head.' And it is this profound appreciation for his fellow writers that he offers the essays about those who made the strongest mark on his career.
The seventeen essays include discussions of various books of writers such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Orwell, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nicholas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1741 - 1794), Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870), Félix Fénéon (1861 - 1944), Michel Houellebecq, a fascinating essay `Translating Madame Bovary', Edith Wharton, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, and ultimately an appreciation for Ernest Hemingway in the form of a short story written by Barnes himself about teaching writers and the influence of Hemingway.
Julian Barnes, then, in this essay collection teaches the reader about writers and those who influenced writers of the past as well as the writers who have help design Barnes style and subject matter for his many successful books. It is an exercise that in another's hands might become pedantic or self-serving, but in Barnes luminous writing these are windows into the mystery of creativity. And again, `it is brilliant writing, contagiously so.'
Grady Harp
Julian Barnes is an astonishingly fine writer. After reading his last book - THE SENSE OF AN ENDNG which won the Man Booker Prize - this reader wrote, `the miracle of Julian Barnes' writing is the fact that once the book cover is opened he is able to not only retain our attention but also compel us to read on to discover how this strangely ordinary man will show us through his sifted memories how life is after all what we do not what we plan. It is brilliant writing, contagiously so.' He is a person about whom we known very little: he maintains a high level of privacy with regard to his personal life, though he is often very candid in interviews. His brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specializing in ancient philosophy. Julian Barnes is a patron of human rights organization Freedom from Torture, for which he has sponsored several fundraising events. He lives in London.
What Barnes delivers here in his own inimitable eloquent, quiet fashion is a look into the lives of authors who have influenced his writing. In his preface he states, `I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a readers head.' And it is this profound appreciation for his fellow writers that he offers the essays about those who made the strongest mark on his career.
The seventeen essays include discussions of various books of writers such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Orwell, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nicholas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort (1741 - 1794), Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870), Félix Fénéon (1861 - 1944), Michel Houellebecq, a fascinating essay `Translating Madame Bovary', Edith Wharton, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, and ultimately an appreciation for Ernest Hemingway in the form of a short story written by Barnes himself about teaching writers and the influence of Hemingway.
Julian Barnes, then, in this essay collection teaches the reader about writers and those who influenced writers of the past as well as the writers who have help design Barnes style and subject matter for his many successful books. It is an exercise that in another's hands might become pedantic or self-serving, but in Barnes luminous writing these are windows into the mystery of creativity. And again, `it is brilliant writing, contagiously so.'
Grady Harp
June 28, 2016
Sözü Türkçe edebiyatın sağlam bellekli, safalı dilli, edalı sözlü ve şen şakrak denemecisi Salâh Birsel’le açmak isterim. Bir tür olarak denemenin hor görülüp ders kitaplarına hapsedilmesi, hele hele Türkçede deneme yazarı yetişmemesi, doğrusu ahlanıp vahlanacak bir meseledir. Öyle ki, iyi bir deneme okumak insanı krallar katına yükseltir, başına taç bile koyar. Salâh Birsel’in denemeleri öyledir mesela: Türkçenin en civcivli, en alacalı kelimelerini bulabilirsiniz onda. Hele Ahmet Rasim’den miras rindlik kemerini de kuşandı mı, demeyin denemenin keyfine. Salâh Birsel’in bir diğer cilvesi de, sözü sık sık Fransız edebiyatından, Fransız yazarlardan, düşünürlerden, sinemacılardan açmasıdır.
Julian Barnes’ın Penceremden nam deneme kitabıyla karşılaşınca akla Salâh Birsel’in gelmesine şaşmamalı. Barnes da, İngiliz dilinin yazarı olsa da, ebeveyninin Fransız olmasından mütevellit, Fransız edebiyatına pek meftun. Aksi takdirde, Madame Bovary’nin çevirileri hakkında bir deneme kaleme almanın külfetine pek yanaşmazdı herhalde. Hatırlayalım, Barnes’ın dikkatlere şayan kurgu eserlerinden pek meşhur Flaubert’in Papağanı da odağına bir Fransız romancısını alır. Penceremden’de Barnes’ın marifetleri bundan ibaret değil: Gözden kaçtığını, hak ettiği değeri göremediğini düşündüğü Amerikan, İngiliz ve Fransız yazarlar üzerinde kurguluyor denemelerini. Hemingway’e bir saygı namında, üç parçalı bir öyküsünü de derç etmiş bu seçkiye.
Barnes’ın ender görülen bir zekası ve içgüdüsel bir nüktedanlığı olduğunu düşündüğü Penelope Fitzgerald, sanata yaklaşımdaki dolaysızlığıyla Orwell, ismiyle müsemma bir edebi talihe sahip olduğunu düşündüğü En Acıklı Öykü’sü ile Ford Madox Ford, Fransa’yla ilişkisi bağlamında Kipling, tavşanıyla Updike, sivri dilli ve alaycılığını nüktedan bir öykü diline dönüştüren Lorrie Moore, entelektüelik ile erotizmi harmanlamasıyla tam bir Fransız olan Michel Houellebecq ve dulluğunun güncesini yazmasıyla Oates bu denemeler toplamında boy gösteren yazarlardan.
Edebiyat üzerine edebi bir düşünme
Julian Barnes’ın Penceremden’de toplanan denemeleri bize edebiyat eleştirisi üzerine düşündürecek cinsten. Barnes, yalnız bir eserde değil, ele aldığı kişinin tüm yazın hayatında odaklanması, bakışlarını parçaya değil de bütüne yönelterek çıkarımlarda bulunması ile dikkat çekiyor. İyi düşünülmüş ve yer yer provokatif çıkarımlar, ele alınan meselenin aceleye getirilmediğini, üzerinde sıkı çalışıldığını gösteriyor. Bu çıkarımlar da doğrudan eserler üzerine değil, kurgunun ne’liği, edebiyatın işlevi, yazarın, insanın ve kurgu karakterin insan olmak bakımından ortaklığına karşın edebiyatta bu üçlü ayrışmanın bizi nasıl bir pozisyonda bırakacağı, yazarın mizacı ile eserin karakteri arasındaki ilişkiler üzerine. Bu haliyle denemeler, edebiyat üzerine edebi bir düşünme olarak görülebilir. Bu meta-edebiyat diyebileceğimiz edebi düşünme, edebiyat hakkında hem teorik hem de eserlere dair birçok ayrıntıyı bilmeyi gerektirdiği için, Barnes’ın denemeleri daha ziyade sahih okura hitap ediyor. Sahih okurdan kastımız yalnız iyi edebiyatı değil, bizatihi edebiyatı seven, onun üzerine düşünen, araştıran ve meraklanan okur. O zaman soralım: Sahih okur musunuz?
http://www.sabitfikir.com/elestiri/sa...
Julian Barnes’ın Penceremden nam deneme kitabıyla karşılaşınca akla Salâh Birsel’in gelmesine şaşmamalı. Barnes da, İngiliz dilinin yazarı olsa da, ebeveyninin Fransız olmasından mütevellit, Fransız edebiyatına pek meftun. Aksi takdirde, Madame Bovary’nin çevirileri hakkında bir deneme kaleme almanın külfetine pek yanaşmazdı herhalde. Hatırlayalım, Barnes’ın dikkatlere şayan kurgu eserlerinden pek meşhur Flaubert’in Papağanı da odağına bir Fransız romancısını alır. Penceremden’de Barnes’ın marifetleri bundan ibaret değil: Gözden kaçtığını, hak ettiği değeri göremediğini düşündüğü Amerikan, İngiliz ve Fransız yazarlar üzerinde kurguluyor denemelerini. Hemingway’e bir saygı namında, üç parçalı bir öyküsünü de derç etmiş bu seçkiye.
Barnes’ın ender görülen bir zekası ve içgüdüsel bir nüktedanlığı olduğunu düşündüğü Penelope Fitzgerald, sanata yaklaşımdaki dolaysızlığıyla Orwell, ismiyle müsemma bir edebi talihe sahip olduğunu düşündüğü En Acıklı Öykü’sü ile Ford Madox Ford, Fransa’yla ilişkisi bağlamında Kipling, tavşanıyla Updike, sivri dilli ve alaycılığını nüktedan bir öykü diline dönüştüren Lorrie Moore, entelektüelik ile erotizmi harmanlamasıyla tam bir Fransız olan Michel Houellebecq ve dulluğunun güncesini yazmasıyla Oates bu denemeler toplamında boy gösteren yazarlardan.
Edebiyat üzerine edebi bir düşünme
Julian Barnes’ın Penceremden’de toplanan denemeleri bize edebiyat eleştirisi üzerine düşündürecek cinsten. Barnes, yalnız bir eserde değil, ele aldığı kişinin tüm yazın hayatında odaklanması, bakışlarını parçaya değil de bütüne yönelterek çıkarımlarda bulunması ile dikkat çekiyor. İyi düşünülmüş ve yer yer provokatif çıkarımlar, ele alınan meselenin aceleye getirilmediğini, üzerinde sıkı çalışıldığını gösteriyor. Bu çıkarımlar da doğrudan eserler üzerine değil, kurgunun ne’liği, edebiyatın işlevi, yazarın, insanın ve kurgu karakterin insan olmak bakımından ortaklığına karşın edebiyatta bu üçlü ayrışmanın bizi nasıl bir pozisyonda bırakacağı, yazarın mizacı ile eserin karakteri arasındaki ilişkiler üzerine. Bu haliyle denemeler, edebiyat üzerine edebi bir düşünme olarak görülebilir. Bu meta-edebiyat diyebileceğimiz edebi düşünme, edebiyat hakkında hem teorik hem de eserlere dair birçok ayrıntıyı bilmeyi gerektirdiği için, Barnes’ın denemeleri daha ziyade sahih okura hitap ediyor. Sahih okurdan kastımız yalnız iyi edebiyatı değil, bizatihi edebiyatı seven, onun üzerine düşünen, araştıran ve meraklanan okur. O zaman soralım: Sahih okur musunuz?
http://www.sabitfikir.com/elestiri/sa...
December 6, 2023
СТУКАЧ ОРУЭЛЛ, ФРАНКОФИЛ КИПЛИНГ, РУСОФИЛ МЕРИМЕ И ДРУГИЕ
«Художественная проза в большей степени, чем любой другой жанр письменного творчества, объясняет жизнь и раздвигает ее границы. Романы полнее всего раскрывают правду жизни: о том, что она собой представляет, как мы ее проживаем, чему она может служить. Как мы ею наслаждаемся и как ее ценим, как она рушится и как мы ее теряем. Романы говорят от имени и для пользы разума, сердца, глаз, чресл, кожи; сознательного и подсознательного.»
Барнс
Да, и снова Барнс, ну вот таков сей автор, вызывает привыкание и зависимость, ничего уж тут (уж простите за невольный каламбур) не попишешь. «За окном» - это сборник рецензий Барнса на книги и, не побоюсь сказать, жизнь великих писателей, от века XVIII до наших дней. Интересно получается, да? Рецензия на сборник рецензий. Но, мне кажется, эта книга ценна и сама по себе, и в силу упоминаемых в ней незаурядных литераторов. Вы прекрасно знаете, как я отношусь к «профессиональным критикам», умничающим чмошникам в маминых кофтах и козыряющим «типа умными» терминами вроде «катарсис» или «пост-структурализм». Сразу могу сказать, что Барнс отнюдь не таков. Во-первых, сам он - блестящий писатель, написавший не один великолепный роман. Это сразу отличает его от комплексующих критиков, не способных достичь чего бы то ни было в творчестве и сублимирующих эти комплексы в своих опусах (помните, как тот ямщик в анекдоте сказал Белинскому: «Ишь ты, говна какая!»). И, во-вторых, пишет Барнс абсолютно простым и доступным языком, не перегруженным псевдонаучной терминологией. Конечно, пишет, о том, что ему лично близко и интересно, более того, сам признается: «Склонность дружески расположенных собратьев по перу одобрять те черты творчества, которые кажутся им наиболее близкими к собственным.» Само собой, вряд ли заурядные произведения могут привлечь внимание такого мастера, как Барнс.
На обложке книги - знаменитая карикатура Жана-Жака Семпе, где изображен букинистический магазин, справа и слева - полки с трудами по истории и философии, а посередине - художественная литература и окно, в которое видна улица и приближающиеся друг к другу мужчина и женщина, как намек на продолжение и развитие сюжета.
Начинается книга с главы «Обманчивость Пенелопы Фицджеральд». И действительно, как свидетельствует Барнс, находясь под впечатлением личных встреч с этой писательницей, она, по крайней мере, внешне, ну никак не соответствовала своим произведениям. Очередной высоколобый критик назвал ее «бабушкой». И Пенелопа Фицджеральд действительно была бабушкой - варила варенье и готовила чатни (могу подтвердить это на примере моей мамы, как истинная бабушка она тоже варит варенье и готовит чатни*). У нас Фицджеральд косвенно известна по экранизации ее романа «Книжная лавка» (автобиографического, кстати) с блестящими работами Эмили Мортимер и Билла Найи (https://www.chitalnya.ru/work/3601969/ )
. Барнс отдает должное глубине и таланту «бабушки», вступая в резкую полемику с представителями книжного истеблишмента, долго попросту не замечавшими прекрасных работ Фицджеральд. Барнс приводит интересную мысль Фицджеральд: «В целом мне кажется, что героями биографических произведений следует делать людей, которые вызывают у тебя уважение и восхищение, а героями художественных произведений - тех, кто, по твоему мнению, глубоко заблуждается». Собственно, на том и строится большинство романов этого автора, которые безусловно достойны более пристального внимания.
Несколько глав книги посвящены Форду Мэдоксу Форду, писателю, опять же известному у нас благодаря экранизации его эпопеи «Конец парада» с Бенедиктом нашим, понимаешь, Камбербэтчем в главной роли. Как отмечали литературные обозреватели: «Конец парада» - один из десяти или двадцати величайших англоязычных романов нашего века. Строго говоря, это не один роман, а тетралогия - четыре романа, действие которых происходит до и во время Первой Мировой войны. Барнс очень тщательно анализирует романы, психологию и мотивацию их героев. И хотя четвертый роман, непосредственно военную историю, Барнс считает не самой удачной, в целом становится понятно, что Форду удалось очень точно отразить нравы, повадки и проблемы Англии того времени. Мне кажется, цитата Форда, которую приводит Барнс, в полной мере относится и к собственным произведениям автора рецензии: «Искусство должно быть «демократичным», поскольку любой мог творить его и любой мог наслаждаться им; но сам процесс был «аристократичным», а именно сложным и требующим высокого мастерства, мало кому доступного.» Еще раз подчеркну, что эссе Барнса полностью соответствуют этим определениям.
Одна из глав посвящена Джорджу Оруэллу. Ну да, мы, конечно, сразу вспоминаем «1984» и «Скотный двор», Большого Брата и т.п. Но здесь Барнс рассматривает не эти ставшие каноническими романы, а сборники эссе Оруэлла, носящие в том числе и автобиографический характер. Начинается все с истории воспитаннику школы святого Киприана (заведения с очень неоднозначной репутацией) Эрика Блэра, который потом взял псевдоним Джордж Оруэлл. Малоприятная, конечно, картина, впрочем, типичная для многих английских школ такого типа. И еще одно эссе - «О смертной казни через повешение», Оруэлл утверждает, что он был свидетелем таковой. Хотя это (как и многие другие истории Оруэлла) не раз подвергалось сомнению. Барнс отдает должное писателю, Оруэлл «интерпретируем, гибок, репрезентативен, патриотичен». «Он - нескладный правдолюб, а что (любят притворно вопрошать англичане) может быть более английским?» Но, с другой стороны, Барнс упоминает о том, что автор «1984» очень негативно высказывался о своей Родине. А слова «эрудит», «интеллектуал», «интеллигенция» использовал исключительно как нелицеприятные характеристики. Более того, во время Второй Мировой Войны «анти-тоталитарист» Оруэлл исправно доносил в полицию на «неблагонадежных» знакомых.
Совершенно неожиданная глава - «Киплинг и Франция». Казалось бы, такой непоколебимый британский империалист - и Франция. Однако, как писала дочь писателя Элси Киплинг, «Во Франции ему всегда нравилось». Как и многие другие франкофилы, он «поддался ее невероятной и изумительной красоте». Барнс очень тщательно изучает феномен привязанности Киплинга к Франции, чему много причин - от кухни до того факта, что ту же «Книгу джунглей» во Франции прочитало гораздо больше людей, чем в самой Англии. Киплинг посвятил Франции свои путевые заметки. Долгое время (с перерывом на войну) автор «маугли» практиковал автомобильные поездки по Франции, причем исключительно на «Роллс-Ройсах» (он так и не изменял этой марке до конца жизни). Здесь же Барнс анализирует роман французов Жерома и Жана Таро «Дингли, знаменитый писатель». В главном герое, маститом английском писателе Дингли, без труда узнается Редьярд Киплинг.
«Человек, спасший французскую старину» - глава, посвященная Просперо Мериме (кстати, вы знали, что на исходе лет Мериме стал истым русофилом и переводил Пушкина, Тургенева и Гоголя?). Но не его новеллам, а, скажем так, его общественно-государственной деятельностью. Ведь Мериме долгое время возглавлял Комитет по спасению культурных ценностей Франции. На этой должности автор «Кармен» снискал славу компетентного (еще его отец был тонким знатоком искусства), дотошного и (в отличие от наших насквозь продажных и сервильных ОКНщиков) абсолютно неподкупного чиновника. Барнс говорит, что масса памятников архитектуры так и канула бы в небытие, не прими Мериме участие в их судьбе. Ведь кроме безжалостного разрушителя - времени Мериме приходилось бороться с «вычурным декоративным вандализмом неучей и жадным до земель духовенством». Знакомо, правда? Меняем «духовенство» на «удащливых» - и прямо картина моего родного города. И таким вот образом Просперо Мериме смог войти в историю не только как литератор, но и как хранитель истории.
Особенно интересно было прочитать главу, посвященную Мишелю Уэльбеку и сравнить впечатления Барнса со своими собственными.
(https://www.chitalnya.ru/work/3514094/). Барнс несколько снисходительно, что в его положении вполне естественно, говорит о «дерзости» Уэльбека и его мизантропии и презрении к литературному официозу. Барнс возглавлял жюри Ноябрьского литературного конкурса, когда главный приз был присужден Уэльбеку, после чего произошел громкий скандал, конкурс покинул спонсор и пришлось даже запускать его заново как Декабрьский. Ведь в упомянутом произведении автор обрушивается на всех: Форсайта, Гришэма, Ширака, на Францию, на художников, мусульман, женщин, на самого себя. «Именно в отношениях с другими людьми мы получаем ощущение самих себя, и именно это в основном делает наши отношения с другими невыносимыми» (Уэльбек). Барнс делает вывод, что это - следствие греха отчаяния - который усугубляется, когда грешник - гедонист. «Уэльбек - умный человек, но далеко не умный писатель» - неожиданно заявляет Барнс. Возможно, но сам Барнс признает, что в «Платформе» Уэльбек задает массу серьезных и трудных вопросов: «Таков ли на самом деле секс? Такова ли любовь? Таковы ли мусульмане? Таково ли человечество? Депрессия у Мишеля или ею полон мир?» Каждый читатель, наверное, отвечает по-своему.
«О переводах мадам Бовари» - ну какой же Барнс без Флобера? Еще со времен «Попугая». Но здесь Барнс сосредотачивается на одном аспекте - трудностях литературного перевода, приводя в пример отрывки из шести (!) разных англоязычных переводов самого известного романа французского гения. И возникают резонные вопросы: что нужно для хорошего литературного перевода? Только ли отличное знание языка? Нужно ли быть современником автора или досконально знать детали эпохи? Должен ли сам переводчик быть хорошим писателем? Вопросы, на которые, наверное, нет однозначных ответов. Да Барнс их и не дает, просто размышляет о том, что же такое перевод литературного произведения. А иллюстрирует он это стихотворением Набокова «К переводу Онегина»:
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet
Into my honest roadside prose
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.*
Интересна глава о папе Хэме. Причем Барнс сосредотачивается на коротких рассказах Хэмингуэя. Интересны кулинарные аналогии, которые приводит Барнс: «Романисты, с их склонностью к долгой, кропотливой работе, склонны тушить и томить; у поэтов должно лучше получаться жарить. Мастера коротких рассказов? - Стейк и картофель фри. Драматурги - о, драматурги вальяжно смешивают коктейли, оставляя стряпню кухаркам.» «Эта древняя прекрасная материя, которую мы называем рассказом», - говорит Барнс (что ж, как автор рассказов, не могу не согласиться). Забавна отсылка к Джойсу: «Дублинцы» - шедевр, «Улисс» - рассказ, накачанный стероидами. Как мне кажется, Барнс смог уловить то скрытое, что двигало Папой при творчестве: «Окружающие думали, что над ним властвуют мужской кураж, брутальность и пенис. Они не видели, что зачастую его темой выступают крах и слабость. Не герой-торреро, а никому не известный честолюбец, заколотый насмерть быком, сделанным из кухонных ножей, прибитых к стулу». Не могу не согласиться.
В книге есть еще статьи об авторах, которые нам менее известны: Артур Хью Клаф и его путешествия по Европе времен революций XIX века; Николя-Себастьен Рош-де-Шамфор, которого читал Пушкин, «заставляя Онегина делать то же самое»; Феликс Фенеон, писавший «романы в три строки»; Эдит Уортон и ее роман «Риф»; Лорри Мур, «Птицы Америки», автор парадоксальной цитаты «Пустота так же соотносится с душевными муками, как лес - со скамейкой»; Джейн Кэрол Уотс и ее размышления о скорби. Что ж, мастерство Барнса в том и состоит, что он умеет заинтересовать новым автором или показать автора уже известного с неожиданной стороны.
Безусловно «в суждениях о литературе не может быть истины в последней инстанции». Но лично мне было безумно интересно прочитать эссе одного из моих любимых английских авторов о собратьях-литераторах, что и вам настоятельно рекомендую.
P.S.«Самые грустные истории» в наши дни редко бывают радостными. Они действительно оказываются очень грустными, если не смертельно жестокими, и любая радость является, скорее всего, следствием непонимания и самообмана.»
* Британская пикантная приправа, происходящая из Индии. Соус готовят из фруктов, овощей и/или трав с добавлением уксуса, сахара и специй.
** Взрастил затем я свой росток,
Который рос и превращался
В соцветие тернистых проз—
Сестер твоих сонетов-роз.
(перевод М. Блюмина)
«Художественная проза в большей степени, чем любой другой жанр письменного творчества, объясняет жизнь и раздвигает ее границы. Романы полнее всего раскрывают правду жизни: о том, что она собой представляет, как мы ее проживаем, чему она может служить. Как мы ею наслаждаемся и как ее ценим, как она рушится и как мы ее теряем. Романы говорят от имени и для пользы разума, сердца, глаз, чресл, кожи; сознательного и подсознательного.»
Барнс
Да, и снова Барнс, ну вот таков сей автор, вызывает привыкание и зависимость, ничего уж тут (уж простите за невольный каламбур) не попишешь. «За окном» - это сборник рецензий Барнса на книги и, не побоюсь сказать, жизнь великих писателей, от века XVIII до наших дней. Интересно получается, да? Рецензия на сборник рецензий. Но, мне кажется, эта книга ценна и сама по себе, и в силу упоминаемых в ней незаурядных литераторов. Вы прекрасно знаете, как я отношусь к «профессиональным критикам», умничающим чмошникам в маминых кофтах и козыряющим «типа умными» терминами вроде «катарсис» или «пост-структурализм». Сразу могу сказать, что Барнс отнюдь не таков. Во-первых, сам он - блестящий писатель, написавший не один великолепный роман. Это сразу отличает его от комплексующих критиков, не способных достичь чего бы то ни было в творчестве и сублимирующих эти комплексы в своих опусах (помните, как тот ямщик в анекдоте сказал Белинскому: «Ишь ты, говна какая!»). И, во-вторых, пишет Барнс абсолютно простым и доступным языком, не перегруженным псевдонаучной терминологией. Конечно, пишет, о том, что ему лично близко и интересно, более того, сам признается: «Склонность дружески расположенных собратьев по перу одобрять те черты творчества, которые кажутся им наиболее близкими к собственным.» Само собой, вряд ли заурядные произведения могут привлечь внимание такого мастера, как Барнс.
На обложке книги - знаменитая карикатура Жана-Жака Семпе, где изображен букинистический магазин, справа и слева - полки с трудами по истории и философии, а посередине - художественная литература и окно, в которое видна улица и приближающиеся друг к другу мужчина и женщина, как намек на продолжение и развитие сюжета.
Начинается книга с главы «Обманчивость Пенелопы Фицджеральд». И действительно, как свидетельствует Барнс, находясь под впечатлением личных встреч с этой писательницей, она, по крайней мере, внешне, ну никак не соответствовала своим произведениям. Очередной высоколобый критик назвал ее «бабушкой». И Пенелопа Фицджеральд действительно была бабушкой - варила варенье и готовила чатни (могу подтвердить это на примере моей мамы, как истинная бабушка она тоже варит варенье и готовит чатни*). У нас Фицджеральд косвенно известна по экранизации ее романа «Книжная лавка» (автобиографического, кстати) с блестящими работами Эмили Мортимер и Билла Найи (https://www.chitalnya.ru/work/3601969/ )
. Барнс отдает должное глубине и таланту «бабушки», вступая в резкую полемику с представителями книжного истеблишмента, долго попросту не замечавшими прекрасных работ Фицджеральд. Барнс приводит интересную мысль Фицджеральд: «В целом мне кажется, что героями биографических произведений следует делать людей, которые вызывают у тебя уважение и восхищение, а героями художественных произведений - тех, кто, по твоему мнению, глубоко заблуждается». Собственно, на том и строится большинство романов этого автора, которые безусловно достойны более пристального внимания.
Несколько глав книги посвящены Форду Мэдоксу Форду, писателю, опять же известному у нас благодаря экранизации его эпопеи «Конец парада» с Бенедиктом нашим, понимаешь, Камбербэтчем в главной роли. Как отмечали литературные обозреватели: «Конец парада» - один из десяти или двадцати величайших англоязычных романов нашего века. Строго говоря, это не один роман, а тетралогия - четыре романа, действие которых происходит до и во время Первой Мировой войны. Барнс очень тщательно анализирует романы, психологию и мотивацию их героев. И хотя четвертый роман, непосредственно военную историю, Барнс считает не самой удачной, в целом становится понятно, что Форду удалось очень точно отразить нравы, повадки и проблемы Англии того времени. Мне кажется, цитата Форда, которую приводит Барнс, в полной мере относится и к собственным произведениям автора рецензии: «Искусство должно быть «демократичным», поскольку любой мог творить его и любой мог наслаждаться им; но сам процесс был «аристократичным», а именно сложным и требующим высокого мастерства, мало кому доступного.» Еще раз подчеркну, что эссе Барнса полностью соответствуют этим определениям.
Одна из глав посвящена Джорджу Оруэллу. Ну да, мы, конечно, сразу вспоминаем «1984» и «Скотный двор», Большого Брата и т.п. Но здесь Барнс рассматривает не эти ставшие каноническими романы, а сборники эссе Оруэлла, носящие в том числе и автобиографический характер. Начинается все с истории воспитаннику школы святого Киприана (заведения с очень неоднозначной репутацией) Эрика Блэра, который потом взял псевдоним Джордж Оруэлл. Малоприятная, конечно, картина, впрочем, типичная для многих английских школ такого типа. И еще одно эссе - «О смертной казни через повешение», Оруэлл утверждает, что он был свидетелем таковой. Хотя это (как и многие другие истории Оруэлла) не раз подвергалось сомнению. Барнс отдает должное писателю, Оруэлл «интерпретируем, гибок, репрезентативен, патриотичен». «Он - нескладный правдолюб, а что (любят притворно вопрошать англичане) может быть более английским?» Но, с другой стороны, Барнс упоминает о том, что автор «1984» очень негативно высказывался о своей Родине. А слова «эрудит», «интеллектуал», «интеллигенция» использовал исключительно как нелицеприятные характеристики. Более того, во время Второй Мировой Войны «анти-тоталитарист» Оруэлл исправно доносил в полицию на «неблагонадежных» знакомых.
Совершенно неожиданная глава - «Киплинг и Франция». Казалось бы, такой непоколебимый британский империалист - и Франция. Однако, как писала дочь писателя Элси Киплинг, «Во Франции ему всегда нравилось». Как и многие другие франкофилы, он «поддался ее невероятной и изумительной красоте». Барнс очень тщательно изучает феномен привязанности Киплинга к Франции, чему много причин - от кухни до того факта, что ту же «Книгу джунглей» во Франции прочитало гораздо больше людей, чем в самой Англии. Киплинг посвятил Франции свои путевые заметки. Долгое время (с перерывом на войну) автор «маугли» практиковал автомобильные поездки по Франции, причем исключительно на «Роллс-Ройсах» (он так и не изменял этой марке до конца жизни). Здесь же Барнс анализирует роман французов Жерома и Жана Таро «Дингли, знаменитый писатель». В главном герое, маститом английском писателе Дингли, без труда узнается Редьярд Киплинг.
«Человек, спасший французскую старину» - глава, посвященная Просперо Мериме (кстати, вы знали, что на исходе лет Мериме стал истым русофилом и переводил Пушкина, Тургенева и Гоголя?). Но не его новеллам, а, скажем так, его общественно-государственной деятельностью. Ведь Мериме долгое время возглавлял Комитет по спасению культурных ценностей Франции. На этой должности автор «Кармен» снискал славу компетентного (еще его отец был тонким знатоком искусства), дотошного и (в отличие от наших насквозь продажных и сервильных ОКНщиков) абсолютно неподкупного чиновника. Барнс говорит, что масса памятников архитектуры так и канула бы в небытие, не прими Мериме участие в их судьбе. Ведь кроме безжалостного разрушителя - времени Мериме приходилось бороться с «вычурным декоративным вандализмом неучей и жадным до земель духовенством». Знакомо, правда? Меняем «духовенство» на «удащливых» - и прямо картина моего родного города. И таким вот образом Просперо Мериме смог войти в историю не только как литератор, но и как хранитель истории.
Особенно интересно было прочитать главу, посвященную Мишелю Уэльбеку и сравнить впечатления Барнса со своими собственными.
(https://www.chitalnya.ru/work/3514094/). Барнс несколько снисходительно, что в его положении вполне естественно, говорит о «дерзости» Уэльбека и его мизантропии и презрении к литературному официозу. Барнс возглавлял жюри Ноябрьского литературного конкурса, когда главный приз был присужден Уэльбеку, после чего произошел громкий скандал, конкурс покинул спонсор и пришлось даже запускать его заново как Декабрьский. Ведь в упомянутом произведении автор обрушивается на всех: Форсайта, Гришэма, Ширака, на Францию, на художников, мусульман, женщин, на самого себя. «Именно в отношениях с другими людьми мы получаем ощущение самих себя, и именно это в основном делает наши отношения с другими невыносимыми» (Уэльбек). Барнс делает вывод, что это - следствие греха отчаяния - который усугубляется, когда грешник - гедонист. «Уэльбек - умный человек, но далеко не умный писатель» - неожиданно заявляет Барнс. Возможно, но сам Барнс признает, что в «Платформе» Уэльбек задает массу серьезных и трудных вопросов: «Таков ли на самом деле секс? Такова ли любовь? Таковы ли мусульмане? Таково ли человечество? Депрессия у Мишеля или ею полон мир?» Каждый читатель, наверное, отвечает по-своему.
«О переводах мадам Бовари» - ну какой же Барнс без Флобера? Еще со времен «Попугая». Но здесь Барнс сосредотачивается на одном аспекте - трудностях литературного перевода, приводя в пример отрывки из шести (!) разных англоязычных переводов самого известного романа французского гения. И возникают резонные вопросы: что нужно для хорошего литературного перевода? Только ли отличное знание языка? Нужно ли быть современником автора или досконально знать детали эпохи? Должен ли сам переводчик быть хорошим писателем? Вопросы, на которые, наверное, нет однозначных ответов. Да Барнс их и не дает, просто размышляет о том, что же такое перевод литературного произведения. А иллюстрирует он это стихотворением Набокова «К переводу Онегина»:
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet
Into my honest roadside prose
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.*
Интересна глава о папе Хэме. Причем Барнс сосредотачивается на коротких рассказах Хэмингуэя. Интересны кулинарные аналогии, которые приводит Барнс: «Романисты, с их склонностью к долгой, кропотливой работе, склонны тушить и томить; у поэтов должно лучше получаться жарить. Мастера коротких рассказов? - Стейк и картофель фри. Драматурги - о, драматурги вальяжно смешивают коктейли, оставляя стряпню кухаркам.» «Эта древняя прекрасная материя, которую мы называем рассказом», - говорит Барнс (что ж, как автор рассказов, не могу не согласиться). Забавна отсылка к Джойсу: «Дублинцы» - шедевр, «Улисс» - рассказ, накачанный стероидами. Как мне кажется, Барнс смог уловить то скрытое, что двигало Папой при творчестве: «Окружающие думали, что над ним властвуют мужской кураж, брутальность и пенис. Они не видели, что зачастую его темой выступают крах и слабость. Не герой-торреро, а никому не известный честолюбец, заколотый насмерть быком, сделанным из кухонных ножей, прибитых к стулу». Не могу не согласиться.
В книге есть еще статьи об авторах, которые нам менее известны: Артур Хью Клаф и его путешествия по Европе времен революций XIX века; Николя-Себастьен Рош-де-Шамфор, которого читал Пушкин, «заставляя Онегина делать то же самое»; Феликс Фенеон, писавший «романы в три строки»; Эдит Уортон и ее роман «Риф»; Лорри Мур, «Птицы Америки», автор парадоксальной цитаты «Пустота так же соотносится с душевными муками, как лес - со скамейкой»; Джейн Кэрол Уотс и ее размышления о скорби. Что ж, мастерство Барнса в том и состоит, что он умеет заинтересовать новым автором или показать автора уже известного с неожиданной стороны.
Безусловно «в суждениях о литературе не может быть истины в последней инстанции». Но лично мне было безумно интересно прочитать эссе одного из моих любимых английских авторов о собратьях-литераторах, что и вам настоятельно рекомендую.
P.S.«Самые грустные истории» в наши дни редко бывают радостными. Они действительно оказываются очень грустными, если не смертельно жестокими, и любая радость является, скорее всего, следствием непонимания и самообмана.»
* Британская пикантная приправа, происходящая из Индии. Соус готовят из фруктов, овощей и/или трав с добавлением уксуса, сахара и специй.
** Взрастил затем я свой росток,
Который рос и превращался
В соцветие тернистых проз—
Сестер твоих сонетов-роз.
(перевод М. Блюмина)
October 2, 2014
The essay on George Orwell gets five stars. A brilliant essay, Julian Barnes is a brilliant writer. The essay's title refers to Orwell's essay 'Shooting an Elephant' and relates to the reply by 'Orwell's widow, Sonia, to interviewer Bernard Crick asking Sonia if Orwell really did shoot the Elephant. 'Sonia 'screamed' at him across the table, "Of course he shot the fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his word!." The widow, you feel was screaming for England'. The essay first covers Orwell's early school years experience that Orwell recollects in 'Such, Such Were The Joys'. Julian Barnes clearly lays out the background of the reasons why Orwell and fellow pupil Cyril Connolly settled accounts on the punishment score with that boarding school. Cyril Connolly published Enemies of Promise.
Julian Barnes explains, 'Ten years after Enemies of Promise was published, Eric Blair, by then George Orwell wrote his essay, 'Such, Such Were The Joys', as a pendent to Connolly's account, which was never published in Britain during Orwell's lifetime.' This essay is a must for Orwell fans, 'the same typist who produced the final, fair copy of 'Such, Such', also typed a draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' Another piece of trivia, 'Cecil Beaton had been at St. Cyprian's at the same time as Connolly and Blair.' Beaton applauded Connolly for having written Enemies of Promise. Then Julian Barnes looks at what determines National Treasure status. This is an intriguing insight into how and why and to the type of character that gravitates to NT status.
The essays on Felix Feneon, Penelope Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford are great also. I wasn't that interested in the essay on Michel Houellebecq. I've still to read 'Wharton's The Reef' and essays on Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, John Updike.
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story was the first book I've read by Julian Barnes, who gets a good rap in 501 Great Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of Literature.
Julian Barnes explains, 'Ten years after Enemies of Promise was published, Eric Blair, by then George Orwell wrote his essay, 'Such, Such Were The Joys', as a pendent to Connolly's account, which was never published in Britain during Orwell's lifetime.' This essay is a must for Orwell fans, 'the same typist who produced the final, fair copy of 'Such, Such', also typed a draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' Another piece of trivia, 'Cecil Beaton had been at St. Cyprian's at the same time as Connolly and Blair.' Beaton applauded Connolly for having written Enemies of Promise. Then Julian Barnes looks at what determines National Treasure status. This is an intriguing insight into how and why and to the type of character that gravitates to NT status.
The essays on Felix Feneon, Penelope Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford are great also. I wasn't that interested in the essay on Michel Houellebecq. I've still to read 'Wharton's The Reef' and essays on Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, John Updike.
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story was the first book I've read by Julian Barnes, who gets a good rap in 501 Great Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of Literature.
March 6, 2020
A really well narrated set of witty essays with an entertaining short story tossed in for good measure. All centre around a literary theme and tend to talk about one particular author. Each essay takes a tangential approach to the author's life and work. Many of the authors were unknown to me. Many are French or spent time in France. Rudyard Kipling, for example, spent quite a bit of time in France after his son was killed in WWI. He kept a detailed journal of that time, he was inspecting war cemeteries to ensure their upkeep. Gives an insight to the man and his later work.
The short story centres around a creative writing teacher and his adult students, reminded me a lot of Brian Bilston's poetry in the Pub in "Diary of a Somebody" (listened to that on audio earlier in the year, another I'd recommend).
Looking forward to reading one of Julian Barnes' novels, hopefully later in the year.
The short story centres around a creative writing teacher and his adult students, reminded me a lot of Brian Bilston's poetry in the Pub in "Diary of a Somebody" (listened to that on audio earlier in the year, another I'd recommend).
Looking forward to reading one of Julian Barnes' novels, hopefully later in the year.
September 13, 2015
Boeken
Julian Barnes schrijft schitterende boeken en prachtige essays over boeken. Dat laatste blijkt uit het werk 'Uit het raam', dat beschouwingen bevat van Updike tot Houellebecq. Zijn leven met boeken heeft hij op de volgende wijze verwoord: 'Ik heb geleefd in boeken, voor boeken, door en met boeken; de afgelopen jaren heb ik zelfs het geluk dat ik kan leven van boeken. En via boeken kwam ik tot de ontdekking dat er andere werelden bestonden dan die waarin ik leefde, dat ik voor het eerst fantaseerde hoe het was om iemand anders te zijn, dat ik voor het eerst deel werd van die uiterst intieme band die ontstaat als de stem van een schrijver doordringt in het hoofd van een lezer.' Ik (her)lees 'Uit het raam' om die stem te laten resoneren.
Julian Barnes schrijft schitterende boeken en prachtige essays over boeken. Dat laatste blijkt uit het werk 'Uit het raam', dat beschouwingen bevat van Updike tot Houellebecq. Zijn leven met boeken heeft hij op de volgende wijze verwoord: 'Ik heb geleefd in boeken, voor boeken, door en met boeken; de afgelopen jaren heb ik zelfs het geluk dat ik kan leven van boeken. En via boeken kwam ik tot de ontdekking dat er andere werelden bestonden dan die waarin ik leefde, dat ik voor het eerst fantaseerde hoe het was om iemand anders te zijn, dat ik voor het eerst deel werd van die uiterst intieme band die ontstaat als de stem van een schrijver doordringt in het hoofd van een lezer.' Ik (her)lees 'Uit het raam' om die stem te laten resoneren.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews