Checking Out
In the folklore of literary
In the past, the talk rarely turned to God or death —
politics and sex seemed much more pressing — but in recent years graver topics
have taken precedence. In some cases, these preoccupations have spilled over
into books. The trend for writing big atheist bestsellers was begun by the
Oxford icon Richard Dawkins, who, though not a member of the lunch group (which
now only meets annually), is in many ways its guiding philosophical light. Both
Hitchens and Amis have subsequently published
book-length condemnations of religion in general and Islamic fundamentalism in
particular. Salman Rushdie, an honorary member of the
lunch group, got his retaliation against God-botherers
in early, and often. It is characteristic of Barnes, the most measured and
stylish writer of that original gang, to arrive late at this party but to bring
a quiet edge of brilliance — and very human uncertainty — to it. "I don't
believe in God," he observes in the opening line of his new memoir,
Nothing To Be Frightened Of (Knopf), "but I miss
him."
Barnes has a greater sense of tact than Amis (with whom
he had a famous falling-out in the nineties), more élan than McEwan, less bombast than Hitchens,
better comic timing than Rushdie. His careful literary output — which includes Flaubert's
Parrot, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and Arthur &
George — has always been marked by that most British of ambitions: never
to put a foot wrong. You can't imagine Barnes writing a full-on autobiography —
not for him lurid self-revelation. But this meditation on doubt and mortality
is a compelling substitute.
Barnes is a product of a particular suburban corner of
We learn that Barnes has always been a doubter, but one
with a paranoid mortal fear and occasional regret for his absence of faith. In
adolescence, his atheism was a relief to him in several ways: For a start, it
meant he could masturbate without the thought of divine retribution to
"put him off his stroke." But not existing for eternity has been a
constant worry, too, an anxiety he shares here in a blackly comic ongoing
debate with his aggressively atheistic (and maddeningly assured) older brother,
the Sorbonne philosopher Jonathan Barnes. The book's title comes from an early
notebook, in which Barnes changed the emphasis of a familiar phrase of
childhood comfort: When it comes to death, there is, in fact, "NOTHING to
be frightened of."
Barnes had always imagined that if a doctor gave him six
months to live, he would write a book that contained all of his accumulated
thoughts on the subject of impending oblivion. Turning 60 (as he did in 2006),
he felt the deadline was probably near enough. With its characteristic
diversions into the perfectly morbid journals of the 19th-century French
novelist Jules Renard, the resulting book is a
brilliant bible of elegant despair. Along the way you get to share Barnes's
thoughts on immortality — if you could live your life all over again, he points
out, you could be free to "discover quite new sorts of
disappointment" — and on what could be the biggest joke in Heaven,
"the fury of the resurrected atheist." Above all, though, Barnes has
written that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one book you must read
before you die.
© 2008 Condé Net
URL:
http://www.mensvogue.com/arts/books/articles/2008/09/julian-barnes
Articles [1]
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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Tirca Mihaela
Universitat de València Press
Creada: 28/10/2008 Última Actualización:
28/10/2008
mitir@alumni.uv.es