Julian Barnes, one of the United Kingdom's foremost men of letters, visits the Shorewood Harry W. Schwartz bookstore next weekend to read from his latest novel, "Arthur & George. The book, shortlisted for England's 2005 Man Booker Prize, captures the era of Empire late-Victorian Britain through the lives of two boys, one of whom is celebrated internationally while the other is forgotten. George is the son of a Midlands vicar; Arthur lives in shabby, genteel Edinburgh. One falls prey to a series of pranks on his way to a legal vocation; the other starts out studying medicine and then veers into another calling. Their destinies entwine years later.
Early in Julian Barnes' novel "The Sense of an Ending," a teacher asks, "What is history?" London teenager Tony Webster answers, "History is the lies of the victors." Tony's brilliant friend, Adrian Finn, "a tall, shy boy," answers the same question with "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. Adrian's answer is the leitmotif of this deliciously intriguing novel, as Tony, now a 60-year-old retiree, recalls the events of his life, only to discover that what he remembers and what actually happened are not one and the same.
The British poet Philip Larkin said that for him deprivation is what daffodils were to Words-worth. "The Sense of An Ending" - Julian Barnes' 14th work of fiction, which won this year's prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker Prize - populates Larkin's diminished world. The novella takes its title from that of Frank Kermode's 1967 classic study of the theory of fiction. Barnes borrows more than the title, however. As Kermode observes, we enter life in the middle of things, and we die in the same state, part of a longer, ongoing history. In an effort to make sense of our span of time, we need "fictive concords" or narratives with beginnings and endings. We accept these fictions as truths until for some reason they decay. Barnes explores the process of creating "stor...
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Knopf, 163 pages ($25.95). They love him in France. But then British novelist and critic Julian Barnes is the author of the near universally revered "Flaubert's Parrot," so his repute is natural in the land of reverence for Jerry Lewis (which convinced almost no one) and Edgar Allan Poe (which once changed the minds of everyone). On the other extreme, when this novel by the 65-year-old Julian Barnes won England's coveted Man Booker prize a couple weeks ago (on publication here, it merely said on the cover "short-listed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize"), smart alecks at USA Today complained of the prize being given to a novel so short and yet so tedious. In the middle, somewhere between the French and the snark attacks from USA Today, you...
By Julian E. Barnes Chicago Tribune
By Julian E. Barnes LOS ANGELES TIMES
By Julian E. Barnes LOS ANGELES TIMES
PARIS - The Paris Public Library recently added the following books to its collection:Adult fiction Cecelia Ahern, "If You Could See Me Now;" David Albahari, "Gotz and Meyer;" Robert Alexander, "Rasputin's Daughter;" Suzanne Arruda, "Mark of the Lion;" Paul Auster, "Brooklyn Follies;" Kevin Baker, "Strivers Row;" Mary Balogh, "Christmas Keepsakes;" Mary Balogh, "Secret Pearl;" Julian Barnes, "Arthur and George;" Max Barry, "Company.
By Julian E. Barnes and Christi Parsons Chicago Tribune
At university, I used to assume the scientists were keeping an eye on reality at one end of campus, while the artists were playing with paint swirls at the other end. What could they possibly have to do with one another? After visiting the Sun Valley Center for the Arts exhibition, "Biodiversity: Order, Consumption and Man," I'm glad to see they have been comparing notes. Even as scientific "facts" become subjected to politics (think global warming), we can at least find beauty and pathos in the ensuing collapse of primordial ecosystems, as the work of painters Isabella Kirkland and Walton Ford and photographer Julian Barnes demonstrate. "Biodiversity" carries a heavy dose of irony to the calamity of species extinction, and even offered a glimmer of hope during biodiversity scholar and ...
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