Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
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Book Reviews of Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Book Review: Something to Be Leery of
Summary: 2 Stars
If this book were written by someone other than Barnes, I'd have given it another star or two, perhaps. But I hold Barnes to a higher standard. (I'll never forget restudying Madame Bovary as a grad student, then reading Flaubert's Parrot and being blown away by it in every regard--exquisite literary criticism, intricately fascinating plot, overall brilliance.)
But reading Nothing to Be Frightened Of was akin to being stuck over too many cups of tea with a garrulous old fogey, more self satisfied with his clever reflections than he is interested in the purpose of them--in this case, the theme of his book.
For one thing, I found something extra-literarily embarrassing about the details of his father, his mother, and their deaths. As an author, Barnes abandons these intimacies to the page without taking on their one salient quality--their homely mundanity. (One exception: the leather pouffe brought home from India by his father and subsequently stuffed with the letters--shredded--of his parents' courtship. What a stunning exemplar of the cruel entropy of time--and how Barnesian! (Except, there it lies on page 33, kerplunk.))
To belabor the tea analogy: I have sat at my kitchen table over tea with any number of old fogey friends and listened to their musings on death, replete with their memories and literary correspondences, and have found them as interesting in vivo as Barnes might be, if also in vivo. But a book is not a chat between generous friends. I perked up on page 47 at the introduction of Jules Renard, he who uttered "I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't." By page 52 I was wishing Barnes would dodder off already and leave his seat to Jules while I made a fresh pot.
Here's what it seems to me is going on with this book. Barnes, contemplating his end, is invoking his claim to immortality by publishing NTBFO. But the horrible irony is that this is the most forgettable of his books. Fear of death is perhaps the most mundane human experience of all, and I'd looked to Barnes for some elevation of it. Instead, I got lots of clever nattering. I hope that having vented, he lives long enough to live up to himself on the page again.
Book Review: Still Frightened
Summary: 1 Stars
Although there were interesting issues discussed about death and dying, Barnes also included a great deal of space to his childhood and memories about his parents with no particular relevance to what I thought was his central theme: reflections on death. The book lacked focus and an overall sense of direction. Barnes relied heavily on his own experience with the death of his parents and a number of French writers of the 18th and 19th century who wrote about this subject. In between writing about death and dying, he would bring up an incident from his youth (for example) when he was pushed by his brother on tricycle into a wall and how different people had different memories of what actually happened. This occurred a number of times and always left me puzzled as to why it was included in the book. Did he not have an editor to keep him on task? I can't really recommend this book and in the end it left me still frightened.Book Review: Could not even finish
Summary: 1 Stars
I am in a book club. And we choose this book for last month's read. We all agreed, we hated this book. The writing did not flow well, and it was very random. The "story" (if you can even call it that) jumped around a lot and made it difficult to follow. I am not sure how this book managed to get such good reviews. I read a lot, and even if I am not enjoying the book, I rarely do not finish. This book, just got added to that very short list.