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Julian BarnesJulian Barnes
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
Author statement |
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Biography
Novelist Julian Barnes was born in Leicester on 19 January 1946 and was educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford. After working as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, he began a career as a journalist, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and became a contributing editor for the New Review in 1977. He was assistant literary editor and television critic for the New Statesman magazine (1977-81) and deputy literary editor for the Sunday Times (1980-82), before becoming television critic of The Observer, where he worked until 1986. He was London correspondent for the New Yorker magazine (1990-95). A collection of these articles were published as Letters from London 1990-95 (1995).
Barnes' first novel, Metroland (1980), follows the adventures of a young man escaping English suburbia in Paris in 1968. It was followed by Before She Met Me (1982), a story of jealousy and obsession. His next book, the acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot (1984), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Narrated by a retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, the novel combines literary criticism, biographical digression and a tragic personal narrative as Braithwaite travels through Rouen and Croisset on the trail of the celebrated author of Madame Bovary.
Staring at the Sun (1986) narrates the life story of Jean Sergeant, from the Second World War through to the first decades of the new millennium. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) explores the relationship between art, religion and death, through a number of stories linked by images of shipwreck and survival, while Talking It Over (1991), winner of the French Prix Fémina, is the story of a triangular love affair. The Porcupine, a political novel set in Eastern Europe, was published in 1992. Cross Channel, a collection of short stories about English men and women living in France, was published in 1996 and was followed by a dark satire of contemporary English 'theme-park' culture, England, England (1998), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Arthur and George (2005) is based on the true story of a solicitor in the early 20th century, accused of maiming cattle, and saved by the intervention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Love, etc (2000), continues the stories of the characters he created in Talking It Over. He also used to write a series of detective thrillers under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, featuring the bisexual private-eye, Duffy.
Julian Barnes' work has been successful both commercially and critically on both sides of the English Channel, and Flaubert's Parrot was awarded the Prix Médicis (France). In 1995 he was made Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1986 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the German Shakespeare Prize from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg in 1993.
His book Something to Declare: French Essays (2002), is a series of essays about French life and culture. He has also edited and translated the first English translation of the French 19th-century novelist Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain (2002). The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), was originally a series of articles for The Guardian. The Lemon Table (2004), is his latest collection of short fiction in which the characters are linked by their proximity to old age and death.
Julian Barnes lives in London. His latest book is Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008) - a memoir.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Crime, Essays, Fiction, Non-fiction, Short stories, Translation
Bibliography
Metroland Cape, 1980
Duffy (as Dan Kavanagh) Cape, 1980
Fiddle City (as Dan Kavanagh) Cape, 1981
Before She Met Me Cape, 1982
Flaubert's Parrot Cape, 1984
Putting the Boot In (as Dan Kavanagh) Cape, 1985
Staring at the Sun Cape, 1986
Going to the Dogs (as Dan Kavanagh) Viking, 1987
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters Cape, 1989
Talking It Over Cape, 1991
The Porcupine Cape, 1992
Letters from London 1990-95 Picador, 1995
Cross Channel Cape, 1996
England, England Cape, 1998
Love, etc Cape, 2000
Something to Declare: French Essays Picador, 2002
In the Land of Pain / Alphonse Daudet (editor and translator) Cape, 2002
Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame (contributor) Fourth Estate, 2003
The Pedant in the Kitchen Atlantic Books, 2003
The Lemon Table Cape, 2004
Arthur and George Cape, 2005
Nothing To Be Frightened Of Cape, 2008
Prizes and awards
1981 Somerset Maugham Award Metroland
1984 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Flaubert's Parrot
1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Flaubert's Parrot
1986 E. M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
1986 Prix Médicis (France) Flaubert's Parrot
1987 Gutenberg Prize (France)
1988 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
1988 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) Flaubert's Parrot
1992 Prix Fémina Etranger (France) Talking It Over
1993 Shakespeare Prize (Germany)
1995 Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
1998 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) England, England
2004 Austrian State Prize for European Literature
2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Arthur and George
2006 British Book Awards Best Read of the Year (shortlist) Arthur and George
2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Arthur and George
2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) Arthur and George
Critical Perspective
The 'chameleon of British letters', a brilliant essayist with an engaging ironic touch, the architect of a renaissance in the 'novel of ideas', a conspicuous francophile, and (in the person of his alter-ego, pulp-fiction writer Dan Kavanagh) the master of suspense, Julian Barnes cuts a distinctive figure even within that striking group of gifted British male writers that includes Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd.
After initial success as reviewer and ultimately literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review, then as a freelance television critic and foreign correspondent (in London) for The New Yorker, Barnes published his first novel, Metroland (1980), relatively late in his career, though - as if to make up for lost time - he has been startlingly productive since then, publishing 13 more novels (including the four thrillers published under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh), a book of short stories and a recent collection of essays, Something to Declare (2002). This body of work consistently resists categorization, challenging conventional expectations: the fictions, in particular, are formally reminiscent of the postmodern texts of Italo Calvino or Milan Kundera in their elegance, sophistication, and linguistic playfulness. Unlike these writers, however, Barnes returns repeatedly, seriously, even obsessively (if often also humorously), to a series of key themes connected to the passions and inconsistencies of the human heart, exploring the unsettling nature of love and (in)fidelity, dislocation, the quest for authenticity and truth, and the irretrievability of the past.
Barnes's distinctive blend of narrative experimentation and psychological realism is already apparent in Metroland, a highly intelligent, humorous and touching 'coming of age' novel, a bildungsroman for middle-class suburban London. In his second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), he still more fully deploys the potentialities of a network of themes centred in love, infidelity and jealousy. The work is a compelling study of the complexity of relationships between men and women, of the pervasive sentiments of disturbance, unease and painful longing attendant on commitment and intimacy. Commenting specifically on this novel, Barnes effectively characterizes the thrust of his oeuvre: the effort to capture 'what is constant in the human heart and human passions'.
Barnes's third and most widely acclaimed novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), sets an intricate intertextual web of allusions, references and literary improvisation within the apparently realistic story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor now freely indulging a lifelong interest/obsession with Gustave Flaubert. Beneath this narrative, however, runs a further personal drama, concerning the infidelity and death of the narrator's wife. The search for 'authenticity' - in art as well as in love - thus forms the unifying motif of the work, which evolves in the form of a hybrid, subjective, incomplete and contradictory collage of fiction, literary criticism, satire, biography, as well as medieval bestiary, 'train-spotter's guide' and even examination paper. This medley of prose genres subverts all conventional taxonomic boundaries yet, despite its textbook 'postmodern' techniques ('bricolage,' unreliability of the narrative voice, linguistic self-consciousness), the novel remains relentless in its quest for historical truth, stressing the necessity of both acknowledging the irretrievability of the past and learning to cope with its present effects.
The multiplicity of discursive genres is also the distinguishing feature of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989); so much so that the work generated lively critical controversy as to whether it was actually a novel at all. Despite its looseness of form, the book does cohere around its persistent questioning of our knowledge of the past. Underlying the variety of narrative voices is a gentle, humane, self-reflexive meditation insisting on the necessary preservation of love as the only viable way of coping with the burden of history - there are echoes of the questioning course and gentle envoi of Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb', 'What will survive of us is love'. This theme, and its various unpredictable permutations, returns more overtly in Talking It Over (1991), a novel written as a series of private monologues directed to the reader, in which we are presented the alternative, often contradictory, versions of a love triangle. At the same time, Barnes's capacity for irony receives its most powerful expression to date in the sarcastic figure of Oliver, a character whose outbursts foreshadow in many ways the anger and satire of England, England (1999).
The tripartite structure of England, England allows for a contrastive juxtaposition of tones - the keen, childlike Martha of the first part gradually transformed into the tired figure leading a harsh, uneventful life in a poignantly imagined 'olde' pre-industrial England. In between these passages stretches a dystopian vision - the 'England, England' of the title - in which simulacra have taken the place of reality and copies supplant originals, a Theme Park England. The Isle of Wright now houses all the major touristic and cultural attractions usually associated with 'Englishness' - beefeaters and black cabs, double-deckers and thatched cottages, the Battle of Britain 'reenacted' at regular intervals, Robin Hood and his companions in a miniature Sherwood forest, and even a half-size replica of Buckingham Palace. The satire is ingenious and funny, but behind the lampoons lurks the melancholy paradox of a future condemned to repeat its past, as virtual reality turns into the nightmarish repeat of pre-modern history.
The preoccupation with contemporary life, further evident in the essayistic and philosophical aspects of his work, is a constant point of reference for Julian Barnes. He has declared himself a 'moralist', and there is always in his novels a longing for a territory of the imagination in which love could indeed be an effective remaining hope. Despite the unsettling ambivalences and deconstructive tendencies most powerfully at work in such celebrated 'post-modern' novels as Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World, his is the imagination of a 'quintessential humanist, of the pre-postmodern species' (Joyce Carol Oates) and the voice of one of the most distinguished and refined intellectuals in the literary scene of contemporary Britain.
Cristina Sandru and Sean Matthews, 2002
Bibliography: McGrath, Patrick, Julian Barnes Bomb 21, Fall 1987; Moseley, Merritt, Understanding Julian Barnes, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997; Stout Mira, Chameleon Novelist, New York Times Magazine, 22 November 1992.
For an in-depth critical overview see Julian Barnes by Matthew Pateman (Northcote House, 2002: Writers and their Work Series).
Author statement
'Writers should have the highest ambition: not just for themselves, but for the form they work in. Flaubert once rebuked Louise Colet for having the love of art yet lacking 'the religion of art': she fancied its rituals, the vestments and the incense, but did not finally believe in its revealed truths. I am a writer for an accumulation of lesser reasons (love of words, fear of death, hope of fame, delight in creation, distaste for office hours) and for one presiding major reason: because I believe that the best art tells the most truth about life. Listen to the competing lies: to the tatty rhetoric of politics, the false promises of religion, the contaminated voices of television and journalism. Whereas the novel tells the beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truth. This is its paradox, its grandeur, its seductive dangerousness. Two famous deaths have been intermittently proclaimed for some time now: the death of God and the death of the novel. Both are exaggerated. And since God was one of the fictional impulse's earliest and finest creations, I'll bet on the novel - in however mutated a version - to outlast even God.'
Further reading on this site
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The Man Booker Prize 2005
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Contact information
Related links
http:/ / www.julianbarnes.com
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