Julian Barnes is a Genius.

I’m only halfway through Flaubert’s Parrot but have come to the conclusion that Julian Barnes is phenomenal.  I’ve read many authors hoping to be trapped by their literary brilliance only to be disappointed time and again.  Fitzgerald let me down, as did Salinger, even Hemingway.  More recently, Murakami, Kadare, yes, even Kazuo Ishiguro.  I searched back through the authors of children’s books that I remember loving: Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Jacob Have I Loved and was rather disappointed by my inability to focus on what I was reading.  I wanted to be swept off my feet; why didn’t they sweep me off my feet??

I approach the books I read differently now I think.  It’s harder for me to simply enjoy the story, which makes me a little sad.  I analyze.  Reading has long been an analgesic for me; imagine the wrench felt when even the books I’d loved failed to at least momentarily pull me out of my rut.

Chaim Potok comes, I think, closest as an emotional cathartic.  In Davita’s Harp especially, he captures perfectly at times certain human emotions.  I’m deliberately vague.  But back to Julian Barnes, who is a genius.  It’s…refreshing and a relief to chance upon an author that not only unabashedly flaunts his well-endowed capacity to throw together words and ideas in just the perfect way, but also makes such certified-unreadable authors such as Flaubert and Heller, well, tempting.  He’s good and he knows he’s good.  So I’ll let him speak.

Flaubert’s Parrot

In Flaubert’s words:

“When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life.  It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up” (32).

“Deep within me there is a radical, intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which prevents me from enjoying anything and which smothers my soul.  It reappears at any excuse, just as the swollen corpses of drowned dogs pop to the surface despite the stones that have been tied round their necks” (33).

And in Julian Barnes’s:

“Dr. Starkie and her kind [literary critics] are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains.  They become family… They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair…who hadn’t said anything new in years.

Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget, he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again.  Domesticity need never intrude on the relationship; it may be sporadic, but when there it is always intense.” (77)

“I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications.  Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty.  Her eyes are black: passion and depth.  Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy.  Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense.  Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.  How can you escape all this without some haversack of a parenthesis about the lady’s character?  Her eyes are mud-coloured; her eyes changed hues according to the contact lenses she wore; he never looked her in the eye.  Well, take your pick.  My wife’s eyes are greeny-blue, which makes her story a long one.  And so I suspect that in the writer’s moment of candour, he probably admits the pointlessness of describibing eyes.  He slowly imagines the character, moulds her into shape, and then — probably the last thing of all — pops a pair of glass eyes into those empty sockets.  Eyes?  Oh yes, she’d better have eyes, he reflects, with a weary courtesy.” (78-9)

Back to Julian Barnes.  When I find time I’ll pull out some equally sublime passages from Talking It Over.

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.

Obama’s inauguration is tomorrow!  Not going to lie, this feels pretty surreal.  It’s been so long since the last ushering in of a new president– and what’s more, I contributed!

Anyhow, another day at the café.  Mozart’s this time.  I’m facing away from the lake, however, because Mom claims that the lake inspires her.  The bare sliver of lake that is visible from the far table on the left.  I’ve been reading at a rate of a book every one to two days.  Davita’s Harp and History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters are the standouts.

I first came across Julian Barnes in Art History.  We read an except from History of the World, “Shipwreck”.  In this story, he interprets Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” through what is omitted– what decisions were made by the artist to compose this painting in this particular way?

History is a story, pure prose.  Stories can be told in innumerable ways and are dynamic– they depend both on storyteller and audience.  Objectivity is out; what we do not see is quite as important as what we do see.  And those furry details can upend the entire story.  Fabulation is a word that crops up time and again.

Call me a damned sap, but my favorite piece is “Parenthesis” (the 1/2 chapter…what makes a chapter half a chapter?).  This is Barnes’s essay on love.

On the expression “I love you”, Barnes says of the French version, “Je t’aime”: “The grammar is also one of reassurance: with the object positioned second, the beloved isn’t suddenly going to turn out to be someone different.”  So true!  What sensible fellows those Frenchmen are.

This, I think, is my favorite metaphor (for the ephemeral nature of love) because it’s not only so true, but so unexpected.  Bleak.

A photograph develops in a tray of liquid…  We slide the photo quickly into the tray of fixer to secure that clear, vulnerable moment, to make the image harder, unchippable, solid for at least a few years.  But what if you plunge it into the fixer and the chemical doesn’t work?  This progress, this amorous motion you feel, might refuse to stabilize.  Have you seen a picture go on relentlessly developing until its whole surface is black, its celebratory moment obliterated?

Finally, a discussion of the brain v. the heart (rationality v. sentimentality):

Put the heart beside the brain and see the difference…  The brain looks sensible…  You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible.  Whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.