Verzameling essays over schrijvers en over literatuur, gepubliceerd in de periode 1996-2011. Barnes is een aandachtig lezer, dat is duidelijk en helemaal niet verrassend. Zijn analyses zijn vooral literair-technisch, maar sommige essays bevatten saillante informatie die me nog niet bekend was. Zoals de belangrijke rol die Rudyard Kipling na de eerste wereldoorlog speelde in de Britse War Graves Commission, een gevolg van de dood van zijn 18-jarige zoon in de loopgraven. En auteurs als Lornie Morre of Penelope Fitzgerald waren me compleet onbekend. Een aardige introductie tot de geweldige verbeeldingskracht en de esthetische vertroosting van fictie. ( )

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.

That bibliophilia shows in this collection of 17 essays (most previously published in the Guardian or New York Review of Books), where Barnes examines some of his favorite writers’ attachments to various countries and some various countries’ attachments to certain writers.

I especially enjoyed getting acquainted with Penelope Fitzgerald, reading about John Updike and the Rabbit books, and Barnes’s comparison of Joan Didion’s and Joyce Carol Oates’s memoirs of grief. He writes that Oates converted her deceased husband’s garden of annual plants into perennials, and draws the metaphor that it’s “…the problem confronting the widow: how to survive that first year, how to turn into a perennial.”

It’s the most accessible and entertaining literary criticism I’ve read -- interesting even about writers that I have little knowledge or interest in.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) ( )

Barnes is always a joy to read. In the opening essay about life with books you’ll find a kindred spirit. And if Ford Maddox Ford or Kipling are your jam, you’ll certainly want to read the essays on them. ( )

"The most misspent day in any life is the one when you've failed to laugh." - Chamfort

Yesterday I first cracked the cover of this in Frankfort Airport, enjoying espresso as I gazed about at the number of beer drinkers at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. As Julian Barnes notes early, his family didn't go to church but they did go to the library. Finally succumbing to slumber, I crashed without finishing Barnes' second examination of Ford Maddox Ford. Replenished, I awoke today before dawn and was off wandering New Belgrade. Pleasantly winded, I returned and read for a hour in a churchyard waiting for the currency exchange to open. Kipling and France were blended in pair of masterful pieces while I waited. It is now nearly noon here and the author closed the collection with a multifaceted reflections on Updike and literary grieving. My own life appears ripe and expanded at the present. ( )

Julian Barnes examines the British, French, and American writers who have shaped his own writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures.