"The English in France" is the theme which links the stories; ten finely crafted episodes whose common setting allows Barnes to examine the various ways in which, over a timescale of centuries, France has provided a stomping ground for foreign armies, a job opportunity for labourers on the emerging railway network, or simply a place in which to pursue a private fantasy, invented or received. We encounter an obsessive Tour de France cyclist and his bemused girlfriend, and an eighteenth century cricketer who later finds himself an ageing prisoner of the Napoleonic war, touchingly drifting into senile nostalgia for a match which was inconveniently cancelled because of the Revolution.
Some exiles adapt less readily than Florence and Emily. In the opening story an ailing composer, isolated by his own assumed genius, interacts with the villagers only when requesting that they cease operating all electrical machinery, so that he may hear BBC concerts without the interruption of static. The story is told with poise and elegance, but Barnes is at his most engaging when he allows his sense of humour to take flight. "Gnossienne" describes a mysterious (and possibly mythical) literary conference where "attendance is performance", while "Experiment" is a particularly fine example of Barnesian wit; the shifting reminiscences of the narrator's uncle Freddy, who claims once to have inadvertently found himself the subject of the Surrealists' researches into sexuality. Provided with two women, a hotel room and a blindfold, Freddy says he was asked to try and distinguish between the English girl and the French. Freddy's bar-room bravado is interspersed with the wonderfully dry minutes of the Surrealists' discussion, but the effect is not merely comic. Like the senile cricketer, Freddy clings to a past whose reality no longer even matters.
In his recent collection of New Yorker essays, Letters From London, Barnes expressed mixed emotions at the advent of the Channel Tunnel; a link which brings closer the country which fascinates him so much, while at the same time eliminating the "sense of transition" which the old cross-channel ferries magically provided. In the concluding story we find a similar unease in the face of impending cultural homogeneity. Set in 2015, it describes a bitter-sweet journey on the Eurostar, in which the narrator, having left his London home, reflects with dismay on "the surprising banality that within his lifetime Paris had become closer than Glasgow." Progress is an erasing of the past, and this narrator of the near future also muses on the proposal to "rationalise" (i.e. dig up) the French war cemeteries. "A century of memory is surely enough."
The reference here is to an earlier story, the most moving of the collection. "Evermore" is about a woman making the annual pilgrimage to her brother's war grave at Cabaret Rouge. He had lasted long enough to send three standard postcards, on which nothing was allowed to be written save a signature; the bland printed statements being deleted as required. "I am quite well/ I have been admitted into hospital/I am being sent down to base." Standing before the memorial arch at Thiepval, she reflects on its purpose: "That reluctant child, whining about the strange food its mother produced from plastic boxes, might receive memory here."
It is this France, battleground and graveyard, which remains the most potent image in the book. Last year's VE-Day celebrations could be construed as a convenient political act of final underlining, and ultimately of forgetting. In a book which so warmly celebrates the past, Barnes provides an important warning for the future.
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Creada: 04/10/2000 Última
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