Post by terefere on Dec 24, 2012 11:50:34 GMT -5
Currently I am reading "The Lemon table." This short stories is a world championship. Start of stories about gay music lovers led me to a laugh attack. I would recommend anyone who has a bad mood.
Today is Christmas Eve, we celebrates with great solemnity. I am sending an Art Nouveau angel that looks like a modern girl, a Polish painter Joseph Mehoffer painted it in 1901.
Unfortunately, for legal reasons (oh, tempora!), the angel won't arrive.
Instead of an angel here Frank Kermode review:
Age has not withered him
Frank Kermode salutes the bleak virtuosity of Julian Barnes's new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table
Frank Kermode
The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2004
Julian Barnes has many interests - France, French, the French; wine, cooking, the life of the artist - and a variety of talents that enable him to manage them all. Many will think with particular affection of Flaubert's Parrot, now 20 years old, a book of exceptional charm and diversity, part biography, part novel, part anything else that moved the writer. A meditation on the colour of Emma's eyes turns into an enraged attack on Enid Starkey for her bad French and the blunders in her book on Flaubert. Progress can be gratuitously halted for a brief Dictionary of Received Ideas; or an Examination Paper of which the rubric facetiously condemns facetious answers; or a list of topics he wants banned from fiction.
Flaubert's Parrot is more a Menippean satire than a novel ("a form of intellectually humorous work characterised by miscellaneous contents, displays of curious erudition, and comical discussions on philosophical topics", says the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms ). Of course Barnes also does novels, essays, comical discussions and other things separately, and lately he has been writing short stories, sometimes comical, sometimes curious, and sometimes notable for the purity with which the prose matches the seriousness of the themes.
Cross Channel, which came out seven years ago, was a collection of stories related in one way or another to France. Some of them have a layer of historical fact, real or invented: the collapse of a French viaduct built by anglophone navvies, an absurd Surrealist experiment, the persecution of the Huguenots. Notable also are studies of a senile general and an anonymous English composer self-exiled in France, gifted men in old age, all suffering in different ways and making others suffer. The author even signs off as "the elderly Englishman".
Not surprisingly, then, the general theme of the new book is old age, mostly represented at or near its worst. The tone is lightened by a sprightly piece about the schemes of a gay concert-goer to put an end to audience noise - coughing, sneezing, rustling, even groping. Another scherzo consists of letters addressed to Barnes, or "Barnes", by an octogenarian lady in an old folks' home who has a passion for French well spoken. We do not have Barnes's letters to her, because she kept them in a refrigerator and they were destroyed when it was defrosted after her death, for the lively old lady dies in the end, like many characters in this book. In one story there are three haircuts, one of a boy by a barber, one of a young man by a hairdresser, and one of an older man by a girl called Kelly in a very posh salon. It is quite funny but not at all cheerful. This is a book about old age and disappointment, among other things.
If one wanted to see how various and how controlled Barnes can be, a good place to look is "The Story of Mats Israelson", set in 18th-century Sweden. To write such a story one would need to know, or seem to know, about life in a small foreign town - what the past was like in a place in every sense remote. How did it cut and mark its timber? How were the principal citizens chosen? Worked in this world, the story delicately treats a love relationship frustrated by time, reticence, misunderstanding and finally death.
Once more concerned with the old age of artists, Barnes tells a story of Turgenev recalling a half-hour or so of happiness years ago. The poignant reminiscences are accompanied by an impatient modern commentary ("Does he mean he almost got an erection?"). Bleaker still is the final story, about Sibelius, drunken, blocked, fiercely opinionated, hating modish contemporaries such as Stravinsky, and particularly fond, like Barnes as it happens, of his Fourth Symphony. As the speaker in a painful story called "Appetite" remarks - also referring to the talk of an old man whose brain has gone - "he invents it, but I know it's true".
One excellent story, left over, as it were, from Channel Crossing , is set in a truly invented small French town and concerns a ruthless old man who will go to any lengths to outlive his fellow-gamblers and so win a tontine. The book being what it is, he doesn't quite make it. This tough peasant is unusual in being sexually active, unlike most of Barnes's other old men in the book, who are daft or incontinent or both.
The Lemon Table leaves one in no doubt as to Barnes's virtuosity. Short stories are notoriously less popular than they once were. We are already beginning to neglect the virtuoso VS Pritchett, the best of his generation. Pritchett died old. Barnes may pass himself off as an "elderly gentleman", but he is still on the right side of 60 and may have the time and the talent to revive the pleasures we associate with Pritchett's prime.
Today is Christmas Eve, we celebrates with great solemnity. I am sending an Art Nouveau angel that looks like a modern girl, a Polish painter Joseph Mehoffer painted it in 1901.
Unfortunately, for legal reasons (oh, tempora!), the angel won't arrive.
Instead of an angel here Frank Kermode review:
Age has not withered him
Frank Kermode salutes the bleak virtuosity of Julian Barnes's new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table
Frank Kermode
The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2004
Julian Barnes has many interests - France, French, the French; wine, cooking, the life of the artist - and a variety of talents that enable him to manage them all. Many will think with particular affection of Flaubert's Parrot, now 20 years old, a book of exceptional charm and diversity, part biography, part novel, part anything else that moved the writer. A meditation on the colour of Emma's eyes turns into an enraged attack on Enid Starkey for her bad French and the blunders in her book on Flaubert. Progress can be gratuitously halted for a brief Dictionary of Received Ideas; or an Examination Paper of which the rubric facetiously condemns facetious answers; or a list of topics he wants banned from fiction.
Flaubert's Parrot is more a Menippean satire than a novel ("a form of intellectually humorous work characterised by miscellaneous contents, displays of curious erudition, and comical discussions on philosophical topics", says the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms ). Of course Barnes also does novels, essays, comical discussions and other things separately, and lately he has been writing short stories, sometimes comical, sometimes curious, and sometimes notable for the purity with which the prose matches the seriousness of the themes.
Cross Channel, which came out seven years ago, was a collection of stories related in one way or another to France. Some of them have a layer of historical fact, real or invented: the collapse of a French viaduct built by anglophone navvies, an absurd Surrealist experiment, the persecution of the Huguenots. Notable also are studies of a senile general and an anonymous English composer self-exiled in France, gifted men in old age, all suffering in different ways and making others suffer. The author even signs off as "the elderly Englishman".
Not surprisingly, then, the general theme of the new book is old age, mostly represented at or near its worst. The tone is lightened by a sprightly piece about the schemes of a gay concert-goer to put an end to audience noise - coughing, sneezing, rustling, even groping. Another scherzo consists of letters addressed to Barnes, or "Barnes", by an octogenarian lady in an old folks' home who has a passion for French well spoken. We do not have Barnes's letters to her, because she kept them in a refrigerator and they were destroyed when it was defrosted after her death, for the lively old lady dies in the end, like many characters in this book. In one story there are three haircuts, one of a boy by a barber, one of a young man by a hairdresser, and one of an older man by a girl called Kelly in a very posh salon. It is quite funny but not at all cheerful. This is a book about old age and disappointment, among other things.
If one wanted to see how various and how controlled Barnes can be, a good place to look is "The Story of Mats Israelson", set in 18th-century Sweden. To write such a story one would need to know, or seem to know, about life in a small foreign town - what the past was like in a place in every sense remote. How did it cut and mark its timber? How were the principal citizens chosen? Worked in this world, the story delicately treats a love relationship frustrated by time, reticence, misunderstanding and finally death.
Once more concerned with the old age of artists, Barnes tells a story of Turgenev recalling a half-hour or so of happiness years ago. The poignant reminiscences are accompanied by an impatient modern commentary ("Does he mean he almost got an erection?"). Bleaker still is the final story, about Sibelius, drunken, blocked, fiercely opinionated, hating modish contemporaries such as Stravinsky, and particularly fond, like Barnes as it happens, of his Fourth Symphony. As the speaker in a painful story called "Appetite" remarks - also referring to the talk of an old man whose brain has gone - "he invents it, but I know it's true".
One excellent story, left over, as it were, from Channel Crossing , is set in a truly invented small French town and concerns a ruthless old man who will go to any lengths to outlive his fellow-gamblers and so win a tontine. The book being what it is, he doesn't quite make it. This tough peasant is unusual in being sexually active, unlike most of Barnes's other old men in the book, who are daft or incontinent or both.
The Lemon Table leaves one in no doubt as to Barnes's virtuosity. Short stories are notoriously less popular than they once were. We are already beginning to neglect the virtuoso VS Pritchett, the best of his generation. Pritchett died old. Barnes may pass himself off as an "elderly gentleman", but he is still on the right side of 60 and may have the time and the talent to revive the pleasures we associate with Pritchett's prime.