The Salinger Affair
Julian Barnes, 27 October 1988
Listen to Jeffrey Robinson, American biographer of figures such as Sheikh Yamani, describing how he goes to work:
Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’s novels include Flaubert’s Parrot, Arthur and George and A Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. Keeping an Eye Open, a collection of his essays on art, contains many pieces first published in the LRB.
Diary: Burning Letters
Julian Barnes, 7 July 1988
When policemen first started to look ridiculously young, I can’t say it bothered me (besides, it’s good for them to be younger – fitter, keener, less cynical). I found the problem came when airlines began employing pilots whose voices hadn’t yet broken. There you are, huddled in your seat, trembly with fear and booze, and instead of being greeted by unflappable, grey-haired Captain MacIntyre, noted survivor, you get the reassurances of someone who graduated only last week from Lego to a 747 cockpit simulator. At such moments time moves with a charmless jerk. It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for instance, there was a ‘handsome’ student seeking £1,999 o.n.o.; a ‘desperate’ ex-RN officer wanting £10,000 sponsorship for a degree; a similarly ‘desperate’ Kate also needing £10,000; a ‘good-looking, tall, slim, erudite gentleman, 28’, trying to raise £20,000 to save himself from the effects of the Wall Street Crash; a musician who had fallen over his drums requiring £450 for a ‘new mouth’ (this was the only one that made me feel briefly Gettyish); and £300 wanted – sex and precise reason unstated – to ‘save face’.’
Letter
Hurricane Craig
12 November 1987
SIR: Others before me have known the dubious privilege of being labelled ‘my friend’ by Craig Raine in the correspondence columns of LRB. I name a hurricane after him; he calls me a pisspot. If this is ‘my friend’ Craig Raine’s grasp of proportionate response, then we should all be glad he hasn’t yet acquired a driving licence. And what is to be done about our uprooted friendship now? I...
Diary: On the Booker
Julian Barnes, 12 November 1987
In Madrid the other week a literary journalist told me the following joke. A man goes into a pet shop and sees three parrots side by side, priced at $1000, $2000 and $3000. ‘Why does that parrot cost $1000?’ he asks the owner. ‘Because it can recite the whole of the Bible in Spanish,’ comes the reply. ‘And why does that one cost $2000?’ ‘Because it can recite the whole of the Bible in English and in Spanish.’ ‘And the one that costs $3000, what does he recite?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t say a word,’ explains the pet shop owner: ‘but the other two call him Maestro.’
Philip Roth in Israel
Julian Barnes, 5 March 1987
Philip Roth’s new novel is marvellously rich, boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious. More than with most novels, to review it is to betray it. This isn’t inappropriate, since one of Roth’s abiding themes is fiction’s betrayal of life and the novelist’s treachery to those who surround him. But prudent readers may prefer not to discover The Counterlife’s intricate surprises in advance.
Podcasts & Videos
Podcast
Diary: People Will Hate Us Again
Julian Barnes
19 April 2017
Listen to Julian Barnes read his diary on Georges Simenon and Brexit.
Podcast
Selfie with ‘Sunflowers’
Julian Barnes
29 July 2015
Julian Barnes reads his piece on Van Gogh’s letters.
Pieces about Julian Barnes in the LRB
Dr Love or Dr God? ‘The Man in the Red Coat’
Luc Sante, 5 March 2020
Even among the loudest and most insistent personalities of fin-de-siècle Paris, the mild-mannered Dr Pozzi more than held his own. And he knew everybody, or at least that small segment of the population...
Zanchevsky, Zakrevsky or Zakovsky? Julian Barnes
Sheila Fitzpatrick, 18 February 2016
The two great preoccupations of Barnes’s Shostakovich are his own character weaknesses and his relationship to the Soviet regime.
From a Summer to an Autumn: Julian Barnes
Michael Wood, 9 May 2013
Julian Barnes invites us to visit what he calls a ‘tropic of grief’ that is wilder and bleaker than anything in the pages of Lévi-Strauss’s great memoir. But Barnes does...
Stupidly English: Julian Barnes
Michael Wood, 22 September 2011
Julian Barnes specialises in Englishness the way some doctors specialise in broken bones or damaged nerves. Like many actual English people, he’s not a chronic sufferer from the complaint,...
‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’: Julian Barnes
Thomas Jones, 17 February 2011
The 21-year-old narrator of Julian Barnes’s first novel, Metroland (1980), suggests that ‘everyone has a perfect age to which they aspire, and they’re only truly at ease with...
Twinkly: Beyond the Barnes persona
Theo Tait, 1 September 2005
According to Flaubert’s famous rule, ‘an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ For most of his career, the celebrated...
Like choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato: The Wryness of Julian Barnes
Christopher Tayler, 15 April 2004
Julian Barnes’s new book of short stories is concerned with old age and death. Barnes – who was born in 1946 – should have a few years to go before he experiences either...
Tell us about it: Julian Barnes
Alex Clark, 24 August 2000
Ironies accumulate in the work of Julian Barnes, like – well, perhaps we’d better not attempt to say what they are like, since Love, etc contains several admonitions on the dangers of...
Half-Timbering, Homosexuality and Whingeing: Julian Barnes
Ian Sansom, 1 October 1998
The title of this novel is a contraction (of the famous phrase from W.E. Henley’s ‘Pro Rege Nostro’, ‘What have I done for you,/England, my England’). The...
If the French were shorter in Flaubert’s day, did they need to be less fat in order to be called ‘fat’?
P.N. Furbank, 4 January 1996
It was Wittgenstein’s objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that the procedure might be impressive, but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it...
Sausages and Higher Things
Patrick Parrinder, 11 February 1993
‘It seems to me the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains.’ Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the source for this epigraph to the best-known British novel of the...
Oliver’s Riffs
Charles Nicholl, 25 July 1991
Julian Barnes is a writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny, forensic skill. His style is a model of cool and precision. He is often very funny, and...
Stowaway Woodworm
Frank Kermode, 22 June 1989
About a century ago Henry James remarked sadly that, unlike the French, the English novel was not discutable. It had no theory behind it. Its practitioners were largely unaware that ‘there...
Real Questions
Ian Hamilton, 6 November 1986
Julian Barnes once trained to be a barrister and he’s been asking questions ever since – questions, mostly, about questions. In Before she met me, the hero of the book actually...
Irishtown
D.A.N. Jones, 1 November 1984
These novels, all in the literary-prize-winning league, tell us of areas with which we are probably unfamiliar. William Kennedy’s Ironweed is about Albany, capital of the State of New York....
Submission
Robert Taubman, 20 May 1982
The voices in A Chain of Voices are those of 30 characters, Boer farmers and their hired labourers and slaves, in the Cape in the early 19th century. The voices are ‘all different yet all...
Looking back
John Sutherland, 22 May 1980
The Victorian practice of antedating is enjoying a revival with contemporary English novelists. Every so often, it would seem, fiction becomes broody, retrospective, and responsive to...
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