Julian Barnes Confronts Mortality with Savoir Faire.

"For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?"--Julian Barnes

English novelist, Julian Barnes, is best known for his second novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and his more recent novel based on the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur & George (2005). In his superb new memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes confronts the subject of human mortality. Now at age 62, death is something he not only thinks about every day, it sometimes that sometimes roars him awake at night, the effect of which has given Barnes a bittersweet appreciation of life, or as Somerset Maugham might call it, a "humorous resignation" toward life.

Prompted by the wake-up call to the reality of his own certain death ("le réveil mortel"), Barne's memoir is not so much a personal history of his life, as an "amateur" (as he calls it) philosophical meditation on his own inner world in the final act of his life. While there are frequent references to Barnes' friendships (or "memories of friendships") and family (who "are likely to reclaim you in death") along the way, Barnes' memoir is populated to large extent by the French writers and philosphers who have given his life meaning: Jules Renard, Flaubert, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola. For Barnes, religious faith is not an option. The athiest turned agnostic admits he is envious of those with religious faith. "I don't believe in God," he writes, "but I miss Him." More specifically, he misses "the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm," because he considers Christianity a "beautiful lie . . . a tragedy with a happy ending."

Science provides Barnes with little solace either, for "there is no separation between 'us' and the universe," he writes. Scientists have discovered no evidence of individual "self." Barnes insightfully examines the state of modern existence filled with daily reminders (bumper stickers and fridge magnets) reminding us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal; "our chosen myth" that our relationships, jobs, material possessions, property, foreign holidays, savings, sexual exploits, exercise, and consumption of culture equate to happiness; and America's ability to reconcile religion with "frenetic materialism." He reveals his admiration for those who simply remain true to themselves as they approach their inevitable ends, finding sublime pleasure in the world, even as they are leaving it, like the Flaubert scholar who said to his nurse, "You have beautiful hands." Barnes obseves, "wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. . . . And there is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. . . . Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply."

As with all his fiction, Barnes' writing here is a rare pleasure to read. It will remain with the reader long after the book is finished, or as Garrison Keiller has better phrased it in his New York Times review: Barnes' elegant memoir is "a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter" (10/03/08). Highly recommended, and among my favorite books of 2008.

G. Merritt

[Saturday, December 20, 2008]

Always interesting but did not quite fit together....

Barnes is bright, entertaining, reflective, and knowledgable and all those positives come together in this discursive treatise on death and many other not totally aligned subjects. I enjoyed my time with him but I kept expecting just a little bit more insight into the main subject: death or rather the fear of death and dying. And yet...I did feel a bit better after finishing the book. Less alone? More aware of the fact that many other people share the same fear? And that many other people have difficult and strained family relationships and awkward memories of things left unsaid and unresolved? I think so. Somehow we do feel that it is all going to come together by the end, even though we must know that it is unlikely to do so. The book brought that vain yet obviously fairly common hope to our attention and dashed it in a pretty gentle manner. For that I am grateful.

[Monday, December 01, 2008]

CONCISION

I'm an off and on again admirer of Mr. Barnes' work, having become smitten with "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and then befuddled by "The Porcupine" (yes, the problem is clearly mine, not his). But in "Nothing to be frightened of" Barnes finds a compelling form for the application of his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and life. Great fiction, of course, gets harder and harder to invent as the volumes and ideas pile up. What Barnes does here is to reintroduce the personal essay (in an inventive shape), a form capable of more direct and specific communication than the inherently more meaning-malleable novel. And as such, in but one instance, Barnes provides one of the most concise and comprehensible summaries of the author / audience tangle I have ever read. And after reading it, I felt gratitude for such elegant and direct insight.

That response extends to his handling of the main topic at work here: death. Bringing an intricate and accessible weft to the many impressions, inferences, references and experiences surrounding death, often pivoting on a sort of sentimental peg (recognized as such by the author), that is a longing for the reassurance and comfort of faith set beside the knowledge that such reassurance is objectively unavailable. This results in an engaging argument with himself roughly summarized by "if the universe is so big and we're so close to nothing, what's wrong with a bit of self delusion?" a question that spools out across the 200 pages, down thoughtful and entertaining roads. Free of bile and cliché, open minded and open ended, this is all great stuff.

His emphasis in the last pages on being remembered by future generations, even just one reader among them, and even saluting his "last reader", is a tough thing to make sensible. Even if he today enjoyed an enormous readership of, say, six million, such a number would still only account for one tenth of one percent of the living, let alone past or future dead. My point being that an audience is not the sole measure of worth, and that obscurity does not demand either death or time to bestow its blessing. The weight of numbers takes care of that while we live and as we work -- no wait requir'd.

[Monday, December 01, 2008]

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