Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
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Book Reviews of Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Book Review: On Death and Dying
Summary: 5 Stars
Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.
Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."
Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."
Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."
When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.
You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.
Book Review: memoir on mortality
Summary: 5 Stars
Novelist Julian Barnes (b. 1946) was never baptized and has never attended a church service in his life, and so he's never had any faith to lose. He came by this unbelief honestly; his father was an agnostic and his mother said that she didn't want "any of that [religious] mumbo jumbo." But the certainty of total extinction, both personal and cosmic, and the terror which absolute annihilation provokes in him, causes Barnes to admit in the first sentence of his book that while he doesn't believe in God, he misses Him.
The title for his disquisition on death comes from one of his journal entries over twenty years ago: "People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: 'The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is nothing.'" Exactly where the emphasis on nothingness rightly falls is what occupies Barnes' considerable talents. The result is a book characterized by deeply personal candor and broad-ranging critical inquiry that encompasses art, music, philosophy, science, literature, and family memories.
The Christian story claims that Jesus "conquered death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel" (2 Timothy 2:10). This story succeeded, says Barnes, not because people were gullible, because it was violently imposed by throne and altar, because it was a means of social control, or because there were no other alternatives. No, the Christian story succeeded because it was a "beautiful lie" (53) or "supreme fiction" (58). It's the stuff of a great novel, "a tragedy with a happy ending." And good novelists, says Barnes, tell the truth with lies and tell lies with the truth. There's always a "haunting hypothetical" for Barnes: what if this Grand Story is true?
The strictly secular-materialist option is simple enough. When your heart and brain cease to function, your self ceases to exist. But in this view the "self" is nothing more than random neural events. There's no ghost in the machine to begin with, so in fact there's no "self" that ceases to exist. In post-modern parlance, personal identity is a social construction. But Barnes has nagging suspicions about this neat and clean scientific scenario. Even if they are hard to define or describe, a common sense outlook, endorsed by the vast majority of humanity that has ever lived, is that intelligence, aesthetic imagination, our moral impulse, consciousness, love, gratitude, guilt, regret, and the longing for immortality -- all of these seem to point beyond themselves. They have the ring of truth that makes them hard to define by mere biology.
And so Barnes wonders, given his genuine lack of religious faiith, is it proper to seek and to assign any meaning to his personal story? Does his life enjoy a genuine narrative? Or is it only a random sequence of events that ends with total extinction, such that any and all meaning-making is pure "confabulation?" One thing you can be sure of, Barnes reminds us -- in the end, it doesn't matter what you think. The divine reality, or lack thereof, is what it is, and so "the notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque." There's a deep irony here. In his review of The God Delusion by the Oxford atheist Richard Dawkins, Jim Holt observes that if "the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right" (New York Times, October 22, 2006).
Book Review: CONCISION
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Masterful
Summary: 5 Stars
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
This is a masterful set of reflections on death and dying, simultaneously funny and serious, fresh and wise. Barnes compiles relevant and artfully integrated personal ruminations and anecdotes involving his parents, his brother, the French writer Jules Renard, and many other cultural figures. The title comes from Renard, who suggested that when one says of death that "there is nothing to be frightened of," the emphasis belongs on the NOTHING.
Book Review: Truthful, a little rueful.
Summary: 5 Stars
Julian Barnes is the man I most would like to do lunch with!! Everything he writes is a sardonic conversation between our most cherished delusions and our true nature, whether he is musing on God,as in this book, or fictionalizing what has replaced God in his many novels.There is a kind of innate modesty in his writing that makes his words irresistible.