Nothing to Be Frightened Of
by Julian Barnes
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Book Reviews of Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Book Review: Safety in Numbers?
Summary: 4 Stars
The success or failure of a memoir really depends upon one thing: its ability to transcend the personal and to speak to the universal. For this alone, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" would score highest marks. Barnes' book is a poignant and humorous mediation on mortality, and in particular upon his inability to come to terms with it. Barnes has read the poets; he's read the psychoanalysts; he's read theologians and philosophers, and still he remains implacable.
Oddly enough, the book is neither morbid nor cynical nor depressing. That is to say, while the tone necessarily reflects some of the author's own dread, that anxiety is never transferred to the reader. I remember feeling a sense of suffocation when reading Kubler-Ross and Irvin D. Yalom, to say nothing of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" or Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture," the latter two representing a sure-fire way to exercise the old tear ducts. Barnes' book doesn't do that to you; instead, he manages to be both intimate and critically distant enough that one actually feels safe contemplating the end with him.
The jokes help too.
Not that we are ever laughing at death. Death is no laughing matter. But how we confront death sometimes is. To that end, the reported exchanges between Julian and his brother (the philosopher Jonathan Barnes) are more than just comic relief; they set the mood while providing the framework of the book, which juxtaposes the thoughts and exchanges of other thinkers, to include famous writers, classical composers and various other pundits---and not just the usual suspects. Those cited are the (primarily) French authors--Jules Renard, Alphonse Daudet, Flaubert, Montaigne--so important to the author himself. At times passages are repeated, but always within a unique context, much like free-association.
Ultimately, Barnes never does find consolation, but he inadvertently offers it. Or at least I found consolation. For while we may all die alone and without answers, it helps to know that so many of us ask the same questions, have the same fears. And while I was pleased that the questioning ended when it did, Barnes' memoir is moving, intelligent, eloquent and (dare I say it?) ... fun.
Book Review: Something to Be Leery of
Summary: 2 Stars
If this book were written by someone other than Barnes, I'd have given it another star or two, perhaps. But I hold Barnes to a higher standard. (I'll never forget restudying Madame Bovary as a grad student, then reading Flaubert's Parrot and being blown away by it in every regard--exquisite literary criticism, intricately fascinating plot, overall brilliance.)
But reading Nothing to Be Frightened Of was akin to being stuck over too many cups of tea with a garrulous old fogey, more self satisfied with his clever reflections than he is interested in the purpose of them--in this case, the theme of his book.
For one thing, I found something extra-literarily embarrassing about the details of his father, his mother, and their deaths. As an author, Barnes abandons these intimacies to the page without taking on their one salient quality--their homely mundanity. (One exception: the leather pouffe brought home from India by his father and subsequently stuffed with the letters--shredded--of his parents' courtship. What a stunning exemplar of the cruel entropy of time--and how Barnesian! (Except, there it lies on page 33, kerplunk.))
To belabor the tea analogy: I have sat at my kitchen table over tea with any number of old fogey friends and listened to their musings on death, replete with their memories and literary correspondences, and have found them as interesting in vivo as Barnes might be, if also in vivo. But a book is not a chat between generous friends. I perked up on page 47 at the introduction of Jules Renard, he who uttered "I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't." By page 52 I was wishing Barnes would dodder off already and leave his seat to Jules while I made a fresh pot.
Here's what it seems to me is going on with this book. Barnes, contemplating his end, is invoking his claim to immortality by publishing NTBFO. But the horrible irony is that this is the most forgettable of his books. Fear of death is perhaps the most mundane human experience of all, and I'd looked to Barnes for some elevation of it. Instead, I got lots of clever nattering. I hope that having vented, he lives long enough to live up to himself on the page again.
Book Review: CONCISION
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm an off and on again admirer of Mr. Barnes' work, having become smitten with "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and then befuddled by "The Porcupine" (yes, the problem is clearly mine, not his). But in "Nothing to be frightened of" Barnes finds a compelling form for the application of his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and life. Great fiction, of course, gets harder and harder to invent as the volumes and ideas pile up. What Barnes does here is to reintroduce the personal essay (in an inventive shape), a form capable of more direct and specific communication than the inherently more meaning-malleable novel. And as such, in but one instance, Barnes provides one of the most concise and comprehensible summaries of the author / audience tangle I have ever read. And after reading it, I felt gratitude for such elegant and direct insight.
That response extends to his handling of the main topic at work here: death. Bringing an intricate and accessible weft to the many impressions, inferences, references and experiences surrounding death, often pivoting on a sort of sentimental peg (recognized as such by the author), that is a longing for the reassurance and comfort of faith set beside the knowledge that such reassurance is objectively unavailable. This results in an engaging argument with himself roughly summarized by "if the universe is so big and we're so close to nothing, what's wrong with a bit of self delusion?" a question that spools out across the 200 pages, down thoughtful and entertaining roads. Free of bile and cliché, open minded and open ended, this is all great stuff.
His emphasis in the last pages on being remembered by future generations, even just one reader among them, and even saluting his "last reader", is a tough thing to make sensible. Even if he today enjoyed an enormous readership of, say, six million, such a number would still only account for one tenth of one percent of the living, let alone past or future dead. My point being that an audience is not the sole measure of worth, and that obscurity does not demand either death or time to bestow its blessing. The weight of numbers takes care of that while we live and as we work -- no wait requir'd.
Book Review: Thoughtful Railing Against Death
Summary: 4 Stars
I've not always liked Barnes's fiction. Staring at the Sun did little for me and Talking It Over was not my cup of tea. I did enjoy A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters. But the book I admired most was his Flaubert's Parrot, a convoluted, sometimes rambling essay on history and writing and Flaubert's life and who knows what else. It was a Diderotian-type essay, than which I can say nothing better. Now Barnes has produced a mate to Parrot, not a match in theme but in approach to writing, and in the quality of his reflections. The theme is the fear of death. Barnes states that he used to be an atheist and is now an agnostic but I can't find the difference between the two in his reflections on life as racing toward (painful, undignified, purposeless and too soon) death. Flaubert wrote (Barnes quotes him): "No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to drop off." That's pretty much the theme of much of this exceptionally thoughtful book. The book drips with zingers gently delivered, some from Barnes's own pen, some from others whom he finds sympathetic. Here's Barnes: "Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly." And I love this one from Richard Dawkins: "When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix." Barnes does not rail against those who disagree with him, as have Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in recent books. He's never strident, but neither does he accept false comfort. For Barnes, life simply ends and on a cosmic or even historic scale, our lives are insignificant. They're only significant to us, and that is what is tragic about being a temporarily living, strong feeling human being. I can't stop myself from adding one more passage from Barnes. It doesn't illuminate the book's principal preoccupation. It's more in the nature of a by-blow, an extraneous thought tossed off en passage. But I love it! "Writers need certain stock replies for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, `It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.'" Now that's fine writing!Book Review: Be frightened. Be very frightened.
Summary: 3 Stars
I hope that no kindhearted person mistakenly picks up Julian Barnes's book of musings on death and gives it to someone either recently bereaved or coping with a fatal illness. There is no human comfort to be had in this book, which weaves anecdotes about the declining years and death of Barnes's family members (the best parts of the memoir) with philosophical musings and a strong dose of Dawkins. "Nothing To Be Frightened Of" is well written, but the effect of reading it is rather like being in a labyrinth; after ten pages of Barnes's steely agnosticism, one wishes the exit would reveal itself. Even Dante's "Inferno" has a way out. But no, this account of the pain of thinking about one's own demise gazes into the pit by circling round it, glancing into it at every possible angle, and ending up pretty much where it begins.
At some point in the reading, there is nothing for it but to put the book down for a while. I did finish, although I can't recall a book in which I've taken so little pleasure. The copywriter who penned the publisher's promise of "hilarious" bits (see the jacket cover) must have written the copy after one too many in the bar. Finally, I asked myself this question: why did I find reading this book such an umpleasant experience when I'll happily read and reread a poem on the same subject, like Keats's sonnet "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" or Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop For Death"? Perhaps it's because lyric poetry--a much shorter form-- is more aesthetically pleasing when one must contemplate the topic of one's inevitable nothingness. One can glance into the pit for a moment and then look away.