Customer Reviews

Nothing to be Frightened Of

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Novelist Julian Barnes thinks a lot about death. And he doesn't like it; he describes himself as "one who wouldn't mind dying as long as I didn't end up dead afterwards." Naturally death has been part of some of his books, but in _Nothing to Be Frightened Of_ (Knopf), death takes center stage in what is a memoir and an essay on a popular subject. Everybody thinks about dying, but Barnes has used his thoughts to power a book that is funny (look at the two meanings in that title), sad, informative, and earnest. Barnes quotes many stars from history about the big subject, like Freud, who said that it was impossible for any of us to imagine our own deaths. Barnes strongly disagrees. He is 62, and does not give any intimation of ill-health, but since adolescence he has been thinking about his own death, and those of others. He isn't morbid. "I am certainly melancholic myself," he writes, "and sometimes find life an overrated way of passing the time; but have never wanted not to be myself anymore, never desired oblivion." The inevitable end is coming, however, so Barnes seems to be saying let's look at it seriously, and learn and laugh, and keep it in mind to season the days of our lives. Just remember, as he says, "that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred per cent."

Barnes's family had a family Bible, but it was someone else's family's, bought at auction, "... and was never opened except when Dad jovially consulted it for a crossword clue." His father was a "death-fearing agnostic", his mother a "fearless atheist", and much of his book has to do with how the two of them interacted, and then, well, died. The other family member frequently consulted in these pages is Barnes's older brother, an analytic philosopher and expert on ancient Greek, who lives in France, teaches, and keeps llamas. The brother has come very close to death, and even breathed out what it seemed were going to be his last words: "Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker's Aristotle." Barnes remarks that the wife of the philosopher found this "insufficiently affectionate." For an unbeliever, Barnes finds God all over the place. Barnes reflects that the important divide may not be between believer or nonbeliever, but between those who fear death and those who don't. He tells us how he conquered his fear of flying; perhaps he will conquer his fear of death, but he admits that even writing about it, which other people would think an exercise "to get it out of your system", does not work.

It doesn't matter. Barnes has a terrific subject, and if he doesn't have firm answers, he has great questions which any reader will enjoy thinking about. After all, as he quotes Montaigne, "The end of our course is death. It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish?" Barnes himself wonders at the beginning, "How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death?" And if we are not writers, how are we to think about death? And as a writer, he wonders about the last person to turn the pages of a Julian Barnes book, ages hence; he is no sentimentalist, cursing such a person for not recommending the book to the next reader. What is the meaning of words carved on a neglected headstone, or a mutilated photo within a family album? If you don't have faith, does this keep you from fully appreciating religious music and paintings? Do we have less fear of death if we consider how insignificant we are in the cosmos, or do we have more? Maybe there is no consolation on offer here: "We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten," he concludes, but if there is no consolation here, there is also little despair, and there are heaping amounts of joviality, sympathy, and curiosity. "For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out forever - including the jug - there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?" Readers with any interest in the subject (and we all are) will find conversational but lucid prose from a writer who has complete engagement and enthusiasm for his subject.

Julian Barnes has long been a novelist preoccupied with death. Every one of his previous books has, I think, contained at least one section featuring ruminations on the inevitable dénouement to life, but never before has he devoted a whole book to the subject.

Nothing to be Frightened of is a book that will appeal mainly to long term Barnes fans. It is a return to the smorgasbord style - part essay, part epistolary debate, part philosophical disquisition, part literary homage that hallmarked his great 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot, and was reprised in his 1989 meditation on history, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. This book is hard to summarize, but the blurb writer has an impressive stab in one sentence: `among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.' That just about does it. It is something of a departure from Barnes's previous novels and essays, a comedown from the lofty heights of intellectual detachment, as he gives the reader an insight into episodes from his own life, particularly his relations with his family, people he has written of very little in the past.

Not that we should read this as his autobiography mind. A scrupulous guarder of his privacy, Barnes is unlikely to rip the lid off and spill everything in a messy reveal all in one go. Rather, he reaches into the pot to reach out carefully chosen morsels, starting with an account of his maternal grandparents who were an arch conservative and communist respectively. He recalls how his grandfather used to let the young Julian and his brother watch while he wrang chicken's necks in the garage. Here, the Barnes brothers' memories diverge over the exact nature of the execution (was there a guillotine mechanism? Was there a bucket to catch the heads?), and a tense dualism between them is set for much of the book.

Barnes, the younger of the brothers, gives us the impression that he is an intuitive, novelist thinker who is interested in things such as whether human life has a narrative, what happens after our death (he contemplates a huge array of options), how to get value out of a life in an age where Darwin and Dawkins have pretty much done for the idea of God - his chosen path, is a devout appreciation, the religion of art as Flaubert called it, even to the extent where he downplays his blood relations and instead considers his genetic lineage as a line of great artists including Renard (a death haunted artist who features prominently in the book), Flaubert, and Stravinsky.

Perhaps this worship of art is a result of his tricky family relations. His older brother, Jonathan, is a remote, fiercely rational Aristotelian philosopher. He features at points throughout the book, hoisted in at carefully chosen moments to illustrate a cold, philosophical angle on life. In an early exchange Barnes recounts a discussion in the car on the way home from their mother's funeral that turned into a stern grammatical debate on the music that should have been played at the service, and whether this construed an inadmissible `hypothetical want of the dead'. Some readers may find this medical gloved dissection of the event appealing in its precision, many more may find the reaction of the Barnes brothers, with their mother's corpse not yet cold, rather sub zero on the emotional scale.

Barnes's pere and mere were a difficult couple too. His father was a quiet, reserved French teacher, frequently overruled by his domineering wife who was frequently damning of her sons' literary talents `one son writes books I can read but can't understand, the other writes books I can understand but can't read'. Parts of the book focus on their respective declines and deaths, Barnes painfully watching as his father suffers a series of strokes, his mother reacting with stern admonishing towards his aphasia.

The deaths of his parents are the way into this book, the gate at the entrance, but most of the short sections feature great artists and their reactions to the inevitable. Philip Larkin, author of the great death angst poem Aubade, we learn would have died gibbering with fear in a Hull hospital were he not heavily sedated. Flaubert maintained stoical impassivity in the face of the void. Renard himself aimed to die a stylish, French death and eventually succumbed to standard emphysema. Barnes himself fears death constantly, waking up in the night pounding his pillow screaming NO, NO, NO at the injustice of it all. He says he expects his departure to be preceded by extreme pain, coupled with extreme frustration at the euphemistic, imprecise language used by those about him. A grammarian to the end.

Coupled with fear of death is fear of God, or rather, wistful unhappiness at the absence of God. `I don't believe in God, but I miss him,' is the first sentence of the book. His brother finds this soppy, but Barnes can't give up so easily. As with his 1986 novel Staring at the Sun he asks a number of questions concerning God - on Pascal's wager: `What if it turns out that God exists but disapprovesof gambling'. He ponders the hypothetical fury of the resurrected atheist and posits a would you rather question (one of many in the book - would you rather be an atheist philosopher who finds a wonderful surprise after your death, or be right after all.

The scale of the philosophising in this book stretches from the solipsistic to the very large. In the worst passages of the book, Barnes engages in self indulgent games, wondering what the last ever reader of his books will be like, or how it would work if he were to die in the middle of writing the book, or a sentence, or a wo (not one of the high points of his normally erudite style). But he can also stretch his mind to contemplate the bigger picture. Towards the end he considers Martin Rees's warning to us that humans are nothing in the scheme of things. By the sun's demise, in 6bn years time, any creatures left will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Yes, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead. So enjoy this witty and contemplative death volume while you can, and try not to worry about it too much.

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.

Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.

Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."

Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."

Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."

When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.

You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.

In NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF, Julian Barnes uses the history of his immediate family and the comments of many writers--who he considers his "true bloodline"--to examine death, as well as its connection to God. Rest assured that this book, like A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, is a primarily an essayist's intellectual journey. The book is never morbid or creepy.

For me, NtbFo was best when Barnes was writing about his biological family. When writing about the death of his parents, for example, he conveyed the weakness and humiliation and rage of the dying, as well as the complex feelings of anger, pity, and responsibility in survivors. Likewise, the book was strong when Barnes wrote about his grandfather. Then, he pondered how little a person leaves after death, with mystery and a few random artifacts all that's left after, say, 50 years pass. These family-based musings are thoughtful and tender. And Barnes's brother, a philosopher who does not allow slack thinking, adds rigor to Julian's thoughts.

On the other hand, the results are mixed when Barnes uses the comments of numerous writers to explore his subjects. Here, the ideas and anecdotes he presents are always interesting, ranging from consoling to depressed, from accepting death to dread. And, his work with this material is a pleasure to read when an essay--few are longer than five pages--starts with the adroit presentation of a concept, moves to a supporting or contrasting idea, and then finishes with revelation or connection.

But occasionally, his short essays develop in an inscrutable and arbitrary fashion, with this reviewer finishing an essay in confusion, not insight. (How the heck did I get here?, was my not infrequent reaction.) Even after rereading, these particular essays struck me as brilliant babbling, not the achievement of sparkling or new connections. This has unfortunate consequences for NtbFo, since Barnes frequently circles back to ideas he has already explored, returning to them to layer or enrich meaning. But, this strategy doesn't work when an idea's original presentation, or new context, lacks clarity.

Nonetheless, Barnes has a very interesting mind. He writes fine prose and this book renewed my interest in his work. Next: Arthur and George.

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!

"In the midst of life we are in death." Julian Barnes has discarded God and religion, albeit admitting that he misses the certainty that religious faith offers. That makes his thoughts on mortality and death particularly intriguing, especially for others who share his lack of religious conviction or who grapple with questions. Death is the central and inevitable fact of our lives; our fear of confronting it means that works like Barnes's are all-too-rare.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have become a tedious and self-indulgent exercise. But Barnes blends memoir, literary reflections and personal philosophy to produce a series of extended essays that should prod the most reluctant baby boomer to re-examine their lives. Ultimately, the value of this eloquent book lies not only in Barnes's own insights about death and life, but in the way that it spurs readers to define for themselves what makes a well-lived life.

Should be mandatory reading for everyoone over the age of 40. And now I'm going back to read some other Barnes, after rediscovery the delights of his prose style and agile intellect.

The good news is that the urbane Mr. Barnes knows his way around the English langauge. Sentence after sentence falls pleasantly on the mind's ear.

The bad news is that his theme -- that he doesn't really believe in God but misses Him anyhow -- is, as his brother describes it, "soppy." And irritating, coming from the comfort and safety of secular Britain. Let Mr. Barnes spend a month in Iran, or among West Bank settlers, or, better yet, let him come to our American Bible Belt and hang out at a megachurch, and see how much he still pines for Santa God and the Big Rock Candy Heaven. Also, there is something evasive about his talk of fearing death as nonbeing, as extinction, while not examing the sordid horror of dying itself. By comparison, mere nothingness seems a paper tiger. For a more trenchant meditation on the loss of faith I would recommend Stevie Smith's poem "How Do You See the Holy Spirit of God?" That said, the book offers entertaining glimpses into the author's personal life, and he's agreeable company, so if you don't set your expectations too high you may well enjoy it.

The truth is, I did not like this book except where it permitted me to escape its main topic. I am not an embracer of death, nor is Barnes, who hates and fears it, as I do. But he wrote a whole book about it. Are his death obsessions rooted in vanity or cowardice or, golly, mortality? Barnes admits to waking up in the dead of night yelling, "No No NO!" as he dreams of being swallowed up into blackness. And death weaves its way into his entire opus of novels because Barnes has always been obsessed with its ultimate appearance for every living thing.

Who can really accept death? Barnes gives us lots of small talk about the topic from such giants as Flaubert, Stendahl, Stravinsky, and Phillip Larkin, all of whom faced that moment in various states of terror. These are the good parts of his ramblings. In fact, when he's off topic, which is rarely, that's when this book is bearable. But I must say, 240 pages of musings, twistings, and turnings from Barnes on the ultimate moment are enough to depress the hell out of anybody, as there is no escape, not even blind, idiotic acceptance, which perhaps a handful of people have achieved. And even though Barnes poo poos the notion of being a father and passing on the genes as being a mild antidote to our shared mortal dilemma, I wonder how his life would have changed had he been one. Not all the moments he's spent dwelling on death, and death dwelling on him, would even have been available to him, as he'd have been changing nappies and going to parent-teacher meetings instead.

I've always admired Barnes, and this book of unpleasant musings only adds to that admiration. As you might tell, I have mixed feelings toward this book and its grisly theme. Hah! What does it really matter what feelings I have toward death, which also holds true for Mr. Barnes. No spiritual transfigurations here. No comforts, not even that of "artistic immortality." In fact, Barnes does not claim that he writes to overcome death. He writes because he writes, as plumbers plumb and butchers butcher. It's his job. It's what he does.

This book has been reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Frank Kermode and in the New York Times book review section, front page, by Garrison Keillor. They found it meritorious. I found it annoying, like a poisonous growth on my lower lip. So why 4 stars? Because poisonous growths are embedded in true art, and Barnes fully understands that. Besides, just about anything Barnes has to say is worth hearing, even if it's poured into your ear like deadly bile.

Julian Barnes is a wonderful essayist. The writing is rich in literary sources and in keen observations. Death has been on the author's mind since at a young age and he thinks about it regularly. The author's subject is the process of his facing the prospect of the time when he ceases to be. This short book is not exactly an autobiography but contains materials from his childhood, youth and his family including his parents' old age and deaths. In spite of the subject, he is not morbid and he is funny and writes about ironic facts or situations with wit. It is a slow read but worth the time to do it.