The Nature of Things

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes My rating: 5 of 5 stars Julian Barnes takes the well-known facts of Dimitri Shostakovich's life and gives it all back to us in a fictionalized version of the conversations in the composer's own head. In doing this, he manages to give us the debates about the enduring importance of the composer's music and his relationship with the Soviet regime. Was the music worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, or was he merely a second-rater? Was he a coward who caved to Stalin and compromised his artistic principles in order to maintain a comfortable life, or was he a brave dissident, who, even though he lived in constant fear for himself and his family, still managed to communicate his defiance to the world through his music? The Shostakovich that Barnes gives us is, in fact, a complicated human being who comprises both sides of those arguments. He may be one of the great Russian composers of the 20th century who...

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes My rating: 4 of 5 stars What a strange book. How does one even begin to categorize it? Maybe that's the point. Maybe it shouldn't be categorized at all. It is literary criticism, posing as literary biography and meditation on fiction. It is an amalgam of those things and others. But mostly it is a tour de force of writing. This was Julian Barnes' third novel, published in 1984. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short listed for the Booker, the first of several of his books to be so listed. It is a short novel, very experimental in concept and structure. Some would call it plotless. It is certainly nonlinear in its story-telling. Barnes gives us as his main character and narrator English doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite, who is obsessed with Madame Bovary's author, Gustave Flaubert. Braithwaite's conceit is that he will write a biography of Flaubert. and to that end, he pores over Flaubert's correspondence, his ...

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes My rating: 5 of 5 stars I did not grow up in a house full of books. In fact, there were few on our bookshelves other than the ubiquitous King James Bible. I loved comic books, especially the Tarzan of the Apes ones. I read and reread them, and later, when I was around twelve I think, I began to discover REAL books. The first ones that I found on my own were the Sherlock Holmes novels. I was drawn to them because I knew the name Sherlock Holmes. Even virtual illiterates could not escape the name of the great "first consulting detective" or the knowledge of his story. The first book that I bought by myself was a volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. He was my first literary love and I have remained true to him all these years later. He still fascinates me as he still fascinates much of the world, as evidenced by the popularity of modern movies, television shows, and literary pastiches featuring him. What must it have taken to conj...

This slim book by Julian Barnes which won the Man Booker Prize last year was an absolutely mesmerizing read for me. I could have read it in a single sitting, had I not had other things to do. The story of Tony Webster, a man in his 60s looking back over his life and meditating on the mysteries of how memory works and how time changes memory, hit me where I live. Tony had passed through his early life in something of a sleepwalk. He never thought deeply about what he was doing or what was going on around him. He never understood, never bothered to  try  to understand the effect that his words and actions might have on others. He was simply oblivious to everything except his own senses. As a young man, he had a coterie of three friends and a girlfriend but, eventually, the girlfriend broke up with him and as he grew older, he drifted away from all of them, finally losing contact. He went to America for a while, then, returning to England, he met Margaret and they married, had a ...