Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and one short story)
Julian Barnes
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and one short story)
Julian Barnes
From one of Britain’s greatest writers comes a brilliant collection of essays on the writers that have meant the most to him
In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling’s view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes in his preface, ‘Novels tell us the most truth about life- what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.'When his Letters from London came out in 1995, the Financial Times called him 'our best essayist’. This wise and deft collection confirms that judgment.
Review
Imogen Dewey
[[julian-barnes-rev]]The Sense of an Ending took out the 2011 Booker Prize around this time last year. For me, this elegant, witty collection thus marks something of an anniversary, and a wonderful starting place for encountering Julian Barnes.
These 17 essays (and one short story) taken from various points between 1996 and 2012 are devoted to fiction ‘and its associated forms’. Barnes is a prolific and critically acclaimed writer, but chiefly a mad bibliophile (one might get a hint of this in his very short and popular essay, A Life With Books).
He is also a poet of the normal and the everyday, although he focuses really, as readers of both his novels and short fiction will know, on the thoroughly extraordinary currents that lie beneath. The heroes of Through the Window are his kindred spirits – those who sing the tragic and terrible adventures of quotidian life: Penelope Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Lorrie Moore, Rudyard Kipling and John Updike (everyone seems to like Updike). Barnes celebrates the forgotten protectors and preservers of art – translators, travellers, restorers and cataloguers. And every essay, meticulously informed and well read, is a little story in itself.
The writing is occasionally academic to the point of dryness and the odd section may leave you a little cold (I found his reflection on Houellebecq a little too convenient), but never for too long. The essays are friendly, chatty, a book club chaired by a retired professor. Hemingway, Wharton and Flaubert may still be on my ‘to read’ list, but in Barnes’ hands, unfamiliarity – quickly made short-term – is no barrier to appreciation and enjoyment. And the final essay, ‘Regulating Sorrow’, is a quietly magnificent meditation on death, that most and least literary event of all.
Barnes observes that ‘the best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well’. Here, within the essay, he matches the feat.
[[imogen-dewey-pic]] Imogen Dewey
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