“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse The Lemon Table And: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“I imagine him explaining that he had brought some herbs for her to smell, I imagine him rubbing basil into a roll beneath her nostrils. I imagine him crushing thyme between finger and thumb, then rosemary. I imagine him naming them, and believing she could smell them, and hoping that they would bring her pleasure, would remind her of the world and the delight she had taken in it — perhaps even of some occasion on a foreign hillside or scrubland when their shoes had tramped out a rising scent of wild thyme.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAY 6, 2011)

This lovely passage of a husband at the bedside of his paralyzed wife, who has lost everything except the sense of smell and perhaps hearing, is Barnes at his very best. It is even better in context, for the husband has lost his own sense of smell and cannot even share those memories. It comes from the title story, “Pulse,” printed at the very end of the book, a moving account of a happy marriage contrasted with a troubled one, and one of the very few things in this collection that comes even close to Barnes’ previous volume, The Lemon Table. But that was one of the best books of its kind that I have read in a long time. It contained a brilliant mixture of stories set in other times or cultures and sharp and poignant observations of contemporary life, all silvered over with a tender or wry nostalgia. That is the book I should be recommending, rather than the present volume, which is seldom more than echoes and addenda, though of some interest to Barnes fans.

However, there are a few tales here that are almost as fine as the earlier ones. In “Harmony,” one of Barnes’ historical reconstructions, an eighteenth-century doctor attempts to cure a young musical prodigy of her blindness. Although Barnes uses initials rather than names, this is a true story which he presents as a touching emotional drama with rich philosophical overtones; those wanting to learn more should Google “Maria Theresia Paradis” after reading it. In “The Limner,” another story from an earlier century, he shows the wretched life but inner beauty of an itinerant portrait-painter who also happens to be a deaf-mute. The contemporary “Complicity” shows two damaged people slowly coming together: a divorced man and a doctor, whose sense of touch has been compromised by a rare medical condition; loss of one of the senses is a minor thread tying several of these stories together: sight, hearing, touch, and smell. But many of the stories lack internal connections: “Pulse,” for all its strengths, is very loosely constructed, and “Carcassonne,” his third historical reconstruction, about Garibaldi, breaks into a number of paragraphs with very few sinews to hold them together at all.

The five titles I have mentioned so far come in Part Two of the collection, which is far superior. Part One, which is entirely contemporary, also contains five, but these are separated by four curious items entitled “At Phil & Joanna’s.” These appear to be the sound-track of a weekly get-together of a number of friends around the dinner table. Their conversation, about politics, mores, and sex, is witty and often full of brilliant bons mots, but it is all comment and no substance, entirely devoid of narrative force; it is not even easy to distinguish between the various speakers. All right, so you write four of the stories off; you still have ten left. Yet the trouble is that these four show up the weaknesses of many of the others.

For all his variety, Barnes often follows a pattern in his stories: something happens, the narrator reflects on that something, and moves on. But when nothing much happens to begin with, all that’s left of the story is the author’s reflection. The opening story, for instance, “East Wind,” begins with a romance between a divorced realtor and a waitress from somewhere in Eastern Europe; the place is a windy seaside town, as beautifully-realized as Barnes’ settings generally are. However, the crux of the story does not emerge from the relationship between the two characters, but from something he learns afterwards — on the internet, of all things! Time and again, this tendency to pull away from character-based action to reflection weakens the force of the narrative; there is too much telling, too little showing. Though there are still some very poignant moments amid these reflections, for example in “Marriage Lines,” where a recent widower, hoping to achieve some sense of closure, goes back to the Hebridean island where he and his wife had come annually, only to discover that his memories cannot so easily be laid to rest. Alas, our memories of Barnes’ earlier writing cannot be easily forgotten either.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Lemon Table

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“The day was heavy with clouds, but for once the cranes were flying beneath them. As they approached, one broke from the flock and flew directly towards me. I raised my arms in acclamation as it made a slow circle around me, trumpeting its cry, then headed back to rejoin its flock for the long journey sourh. I watched until my eyes blurred. I listened until I could hear nothing more, and silence resumed.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (MAY 6, 2011)

One of the things I most enjoy about Julian Barnes is his variety. Each of his books questions the conventional idea of a novel, and each does so in a different way. So I open this collection of eleven short stories expecting an intriguing range of subject and technique, united by a humanity that Barnes has never yet failed to provide. I was not disappointed. This book is as wonderfully written as it is pleasant to hold in the hand, in this beautiful Vintage paperback edition. The range of subjects is indeed large, with scenes of contemporary London alternating with historical stories set in France, Sweden, or Russia. Although all the stories are about twenty pages long, some take place in a single hour, others span a lifetime. They are linked by the common theme of aging, but this should not be a deterrent; few are sad, but rather wry, tender, surprising, or even hysterically funny. Barnes’ range of emotion is as great as his range of style.

The stories are technically varied, too. In some, the narrator speaks entirely in the first person: “A Short History of Hairdressing,” the first story, opens in the voice of a fearful young schoolboy; “Hygiene” replays the mental check-list of a retired soldier still locked in army lingo. Others seem written by a dispassionate historian — or not so dispassionate, as when the biographer of Turgenev narrating “The Revival” starts re-examining conventional phrases of 19th-century courtesy in 21st-century four-letter terms. Or the objective and subjective can be mixed, as in “The Things You Know,” where the conversation between two widows sharing a hotel breakfast is intercut with their very different thoughts. Another story, “Knowing French,” is told entirely through correspondence. People who know Barnes from his extraordinary quasi-novels such as  A History of the World in 10½ Chapters or Flaubert’s Parrot will be exhilarated, not surprised; people who enjoy these stories wil
l be encouraged to try the novels.

My favorite contemporary short-story writer up to now has been William Trevor — at his best, I think, in After Rain. The wisdom with which he looks back on the wicked world as an older man has always had something profoundly consoling, and Barnes shares this quality. But the two writers approach their subjects from quite different angles. Trevor is the more straightforward, telling a story straight on in sequence. Barnes stalks his subjects from the side, often ostensibly writing about something quite different, striking his real target only tangentially. We see glimpses of a romantic life-history among the barbershop visits in “Hairdressing”; the old major’s annual visit to a London prostitute in “Hygiene” reveals only his love for his wife; an older man’s diatribe about concert behavior in “Vigilance” turns out to be about the slow deterioration of a gay relationship. Sidelong glances in retrospect.

Barnes’ wonderful tangentiality is shown nowhere more clearly than in my favorite of these tales, “The Story of Mats Israelson.” The irony is that the title story — about a real copper miner in Falun, Sweden, killed in a accident in 1677, whose petrified body turned up 40 years later — is never actually recounted at all. The non-telling of the story becomes only one of many things that do not take place between one upright citizen and the wife of another in a small town in 19th-century Sweden, whether through propriety, shyness, or circumstance. Yet for the rest of their lives, as they continue in their marriages, they each nurse the pain of the unconsummated attraction. Barnes, who loves Flaubert, here writes a beautiful antithesis to Madame Bovary, where heartbreak is only increased by the fact that nothing happens, distilling the lingering essence of what might have been.

The collection ends with an elderly Scandinavian composer watching a flock of cranes disappear into the distance. “I watched until my eyes blurred; I listened until I could hear nothing more, and silence resumed.” The full irony may be lost on readers who do not identify the composer as Jean Sibelius, whose own music had passed into silence some thirty years before. But it remains a touching image of that last transition.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (April 5, 2005)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)