This was one of the most fascinating, yet one of the most uncomfortable books for me to read in my life. I remember sitting in an old living room chair as a four year, eating plain noodles when it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to die someday, everyone that I loved would someday die too...
This is so short that i read it twice. But its length is not the point of the book, it should be considered as an expresso, a distillation of a longer tome into something that you can consume in a moment.Barnes writes here of his love of the printed book, from the discovery of books on his parent...
The Booker jury sometimes behaves like the Oscar one: how else to explain this-- In the year 1984 the following books were shortlisted:Flaubert's Parrot by Julian BarnesEmpire of the Sun by J.G.BallardIn Custody by Anita DesaiHotel du Lac by Anita BrooknerAccording to Mark by Penelope LivelySmall...
This book of essays covers many of the topics that are recognized as French territory: filmmaker Truffaut and the New Wave, the Tour de France, the singers of the 50's-60's who moaned on finding out that they were sharing their mistresses with others. And then there are the nine, yes nine, chapte...
George Edalji (that’s Ay-dal-ji, by the way, since Parsee names are always stressed on the first syllable) is the son of a Staffordshire vicar of Indian origin and his Scottish wife. George is thus a half-caste, to use the language of his late-Victorian and Edwardian age. He’s a diligent, if not ...
Очень даже неплохо... Главная тема книги - обыденное такое взросление, превращение малчика :) в мужчину. Превращение без каких-либо экстремальных инициаций (войной, зоной и проч.), а, так сказать, спокойное, неспешное, интраспективно углубленное и естественное. Если совсем уж схематизировать, то ...
Julian Barnes has certainly improved a bit in the last 25 years. I recently read his wonderful latest book, The Sense of an Ending (review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), and for my second Barnes, turned to this, one of his earliest, from 1986. Both books document a long life, bu...
Julian Barnes was London correspondent for The New Yorker from 1989 to 1994. This book is a collection of columns written during that period. And it's terrific. Barnes is extraordinarily smart and unfathomably erudite, qualities which - oddly enough - don't always serve him well in his fiction ...
“I think if I’d shown genuine interest at this point, I might have scared him off, but I was slumped in the oppressive reflection that my uncle was not just an old bore, but a parody of an old bore. Why didn’t he strap on a peg-leg and start capering round some inglenooked pub waving a clay pipe?...
Reeditată în urmă cu câteva luni de către Editura Nemira, în traducerea binecunoscutului Radu Paraschivescu (care, de altfel, l-a tot tradus pe Barnes în română), Până când m-a cunoscut este un „clasic” marca Julian Barnes (apărut, în original, în 1982 – cu titlul Before She Met Me), o desfășurar...
Julian Barnes has tremendous ability as a writer, as I discovered in The Sense of an Ending and currently now in The History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters. Unfortunately, I feel this would be one of his weaker novels and would not recommend it to anyone but a completist who loves everything el...
Ok, the first chapter of the book entitled "The Stowaway" is one of the most brilliant things i've ever read. If there ever was a more intriguing hypothetical account of Noah's Ark, I haven't read it. Sadly, the rest of the chapters are not as amazing. They are worth reading and interesting. ...
“His mother had shaken off the effects of her magazine and stood up” (3).“He suspected it was rude. Things you didn’t know abut, or weren’t meant to know about, usually turned out to be rude. Like the barber’s pole. That was obviously rude. The previous place just had an old bit of painted wood w...
'Could a nation lose its capacity for scepticism for useful doubt? What if the muscle of contradiction simply atrophied from lack of exercise?'This is a very short novel, it took me about two hours or so pootling along the Shropshire Union Canal during the break between lifting bridges and one or...