The Man in the Red Coat - Julian Barnes

Ok. This one is on me. The other week - short of ideas - I picked the first Julian Barnes book that was available in my Italian e-library. 

I read it was about the life of a doctor (Pozzi) whose portrait had been painted by Sargent and I mistakenly assumed this would be a work of fiction along the lines of Flaubert's Parrot. 

Instead it was a couple of hundred pages of pedantically detailed accounts of the lives of Pozzi, his family, and his circle of posh friends. Even the occasional humorous remarks by Barnes didn't hit the mark with me as I read this book while on auto-pilot, having lost all interest in it after a dozen pages. 

Reminder: maybe don't read reviews beforehand, but at least read a book's synopsis next time...

Elizabeth Finch - Julian Barnes

In a desperate effort to read recent books, I borrow the latest novel by Julian Barnes. 

At first I thought it was a notion-filled hodgepodge of notes that Barnes had lying around and decided to put together in a book (similar to how I felt about Paul Auster's Baugmartner). 

By the end I actually found it a pathetic novel, somehow obsessed with the legacy of Julian the Apostate yet not even coming remotely close to the level of Gore Vidal's Julian (which - despite a literary review spanning centuries and including pretty much anyone who ever thought of Julian - is briefly hinted at and then completely overlooked). 

On the plus side, I finished it in a day (though it's a day-worth of reading that I won't get back). 

The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes

 

Of all the "pet topics" that authors have, I find Barnes's interest in the idiosyncrasies of the Soviet system to be particularly compelling. 

Yet, unlike the reviewers of The Observer I didn't find The Noise of Time to be a masterpiece, but merely a good book. While the first few pages, with Shostakovich waiting for his arrest by spending the night next to the lift by his flat, blew me away, the rest of the book felt relatively flat. 

Perhaps Soviet Russia was just not the best setting for Barnes to showcase his brilliant humour?

The Porcupine - Julian Barnes

  

More enjoyable than Flaubert's Parrot, less enjoyable than most other books by Julian Barnes; for me, at the very least. 

This is another book with which there's nothing wrong: it's well-written, it's interesting (if not excessively original) and it's an easy (though perhaps verging too closely towards the effortless) read. 

But there are plenty of other books dealing with the Soviet bloc and its systems, often written by authors who were on the other side of the Iron Courtain for long parts of the Cold War, a I generally like them better (except for Kundera's novels, but I've already professed my dislike for him).

Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes

  

Had this been a book about a figure that I find more interesting, my opinion of it would most likely be different. My lack of fascination for Maupassant is ultimately mirrored by my lack of fascination for Flaubert, and this no doubt affected my judgement. 

While it's obviously written with the usual inventiveness typical of Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Though, I have to admit that, reading again its synopsis now, I found his invectives against literary critics (and academic literary critics above all) to be pretty much spot on. 

Possibly my least-favourite Barnes novel, but still most likely better than 94% of the things that get published.

Talking It Over - Julian Barnes

  

I don't have much to add to what I wrote about Love, etc. as, after all, they are ultimately one and the same. 

If anything, Talking It Over made me appreciate Love, etc. even more, as the sequel was so well-written that one could read just that as a stand-alone novel without missing out on any of the dynamics between the three main characters and one gets a really good idea of what had happened 10 years before anyway. 

Then again, I'm obviously very happy to have read Talking It Over too, for the obvious reasons, like the fact that Julian Barnes is an incredible writer whose wit always (or at the very least most of the times!) shines through his work.

Love, etc - Julian Barnes

A very solid 30p buy from the Barbican's library. Shame they only appear to have gigantic hardbacks on sale these days...

As a demonstration of the fact that I read (and buy) books more or less at random, I read LOVE, etc without having read its predecessor (Talking It Over). In spite of that, I really rather enjoyed it - the story is very easy to pick up (to be fair, Barnes does offer what I believe is a pretty substantial recap through the words of the three main characters), and the London setting is, as usual, very appealing to me. 

The biggest selling point for me was the decision to allow the characters to "speak for themselves" in an almost theatrical way, something that appears so smart and so simple, and something that surprisingly other authors (to my very limited knowledge!) haven't decided to imitate. 

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Much like with Ali Smith, at some point I just had to read something by Julian Barnes, so I went for the book that got him the Booker Prize. In all honesty I came in with fairly moderate expectations, and I was pretty much blown away.

I normally want books to have an ending that makes sense (what a glorious pun!), or at the very least one that answers roughly the same number of questions that it leaves unanswered, but I didn't have a problem with this one because it's so majestically written and because throughout its chapters it calls into question not just the reliability of the author, but that of all our individual memories.

The jabs at the pretentiousness of some Cambridge students are also something that makes me giggle and doesn't feel (too) gratuitous, and the references to the wobbly Millennium Bridge make me happy as a Londoner.