The Lemon Table (Paperback)

by Julian Barnes (Author)
Key Phrases: fruit cage, The Fruit Cage, The Story of Mats Israelson, Knowing French (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Polished and classically structured, the 11 exquisite stories in this collection are as stylish as any of Barnes's creations, while also possessed of a pleasing heft. Told from a dazzling array of viewpoints, each is underpinned with a familiar Barnes concern: death. In "The Revival," the Russian writer Turgenev ruminates on lost love at the end of his life (as Tolstoy looks on), while in "Hygiene" a WWII vet revisits more than just his old mates during an annual trip to London for his regimental dinner. The past is seen from the perspective of the barber's chair in "A Short History of Hairdressing," and from two entirely separate angles in "The Things You Know," about a pair of widows who mentally savage each other over the course of a polite breakfast. Fans of Barnes's conversational novels, such as Love, Etc. and Talking It Over, may be nonplussed by the Dinesen-like sonority of the prose in "The Story of Mats Israelson" ("When Havlar Berggren succumbed to akvavit, frivolity and atheism, and transferred ownership of the third stall to an itinerant knife-grinder, it was on Berggren, not the knife-grinder, that disapproval fell, and a more suitable appointment was made in exchange for a few riksdaler"), but readers willing to follow Barnes's imagination will not be disappointed. With the exception of the plodding last story, "The Silence" (in which the title phrase is explained: "Among the Chinese, the lemon is the symbol of death"), the author handles his dark subject matter with grace and humor. This is not a morbid trip. Instead, Barnes always has his eye on something unusual, and the reader is taken for a delightful ride.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
In a suite of 11 impeccable short stories as intricate and polished as lacquered Chinese boxes, Barnes examines the peculiarities of age: the baffling amalgam of memories sharp and vague, the recognition that one has clung to fantasies to cushion the rough ride of existence, the strength derived from finally accepting one's self versus the sorrow of watching one's allure and energy fade. Crisp pacing, keen dialogue, and sudden reversals render Barnes' stories playlike, while he finds just the right object, habit, or myth to embody the aging process and allude to death's encroachment. In nineteenth-century Sweden, a man woos a woman by telling her the legend about a young copper miner whose perfectly preserved body was found 49 years after his death. A Russian composer, as famous in his later years for his silence as he once was for his music, remembers that for the Chinese, "the lemon is the symbol of death." And a woman in an old-folks' home writes piquant letters to a writer named Julian Barnes. What Barnes' virtuoso dramas all slyly suggest is that in the final analysis, the stories we tell ourselves about our lives carry more weight than mere facts. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400076501
• ISBN-13: 978-1400076505
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #134,741 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another elegant collection from Julian Barnes, July 6, 2004

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Lemon Table: Stories (Hardcover)

The eleven stories that comprise THE LEMON TABLE share two things: the theme of growing old and Julian Barnes' trademark wit. These mostly traditional tales explore characters as they age, or come to terms with approaching death, or look back from old age to a younger, more confusing time. In the marvelous "A Short History of Hairdressing," a trilogy of numbered sections lets the reader in on the haircutting sessions Gregory has experienced during three distinct stages of his life, from youthful helplessness to adult insolence to elderly obstinacy. "The Story of Mats Israelson," with its Old World feel, tells of unrequited love and its ultimate disappointment. "Knowing French" is perhaps the most clever and playful of the stories, as an elderly woman in a nursing home, Sylvia, writes to "Julian Barnes" after discovering his book FLAUBERT'S PARROT in the B section of the library. Told only through Sylvia's words, the reader can only guess at the "author's" end of the correspondence, and the result is a fond, often hilarious, exchange that grows in meaning. Likewise "The Silence" has its laugh-out-loud moments in the flash scenes and comments revealed by the aging composer Sibelius: "A French Critic, seeking to loathe my Third symphony, quoted Gounod: 'Only God composes in C major.' Precisely." The only story in this collection that I found lacking was "The Things You Know" where two catty widows try to jockey for mental advantage over the other by what they know. Here, the characters are less distinct and the execution of the premise not as controlled as in the rest of the stories. Despite this lag, this collection shows Barnes at top form.

Barnes' voice is decidedly British, with sentences that harbor both formality and sly wit. "Droll" is an adjective often used to describe Barnes' work, and it is an appropriate one for many of these stories. American readers especially will get a kick out of the British/Barnes colloquialisms in "Hygiene" where there's "no excuse for playing argy-bargy with the kerb."

Lovely, mannered, astute - these stories will not disappoint.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Most Eloquent Collection of Stories About Life's Cycle, September 2, 2004

By	Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Lemon Table: Stories (Hardcover)

Julian Barnes is an elegant, profound, humorous, sensitive, intelligent, and incredibly gifted writer! THE LEMON TABLE is a collection of eleven short stories that probe the concept of aging and death in an endlessly inventive fashion. Each of these well-crafted stories is unique: rarely have the concerns of the elderly been verbalized with such insight. The way these characters who populate this variety of tales embody mental deterioration, illness, frustration of waning body functions, coping with changes imposed by the cycle of friends and loved ones dying - these are the insights that in Barnes capable hands are never cloying but revelatory. In 'Knowing French' an eighty something lady in a 'Old Folkery' corresponds with the author: "Main reasons for dying: it's what others expect when you reach my age; impending decrepitude and senility; waste of money - using up inheritance - keeping together brain-dead incontinent bad of old bones; decreased interest in The News, famines, wars, etc.; fear of falling under total power of Sgt. Major; desire to Find Out about Afterwards (or not?)." Yet a later letter: "I suppose, if you are Mad, and you die, & there is an Explanation waiting, they have to make you unmad first before you can understand it. Or do you think being Mad is just another veil of consciousness around our present world which has nothing to do with any other one?" Or in another story 'The Fruit Cage' a son is trying to understand the problems his aging parents face when after fifty years of marriage the husband wants to live with another woman; "Why make the assumption that the heart shuts down alongside the genitals? Because we want - need - to see old age as a time of serenity? I now think this is one of the great conspiracies of youth. Not just of youth, but of middle age too, of every single year until that moment when we admit to being ourselves. And it's a wider conspiracy because the old collude in our belief."

Even though Barnes' subject of age and death may seem a morbid topic, these beautifully written stories have a wealth of humor and warmth and dreamy substance. The final story relates a composer's inability to finish his 8th symphony (?Sibelius?) and uses symbols of death (the lemon, flying cranes) in a most poetic way. This is one of the finest collections of short stories I've read this year. Highly recommended on every level.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More reflections from a senior impersonator, September 18, 2004

By	Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Lemon Table: Stories (Hardcover)

As in FLAUBERT'S PARROT, the stories in this collection are Barnes's speculations on what someone at the end of his (or her) life might think or do. In "The Things You Know" he presents a pair of rival widows who continue their friendship in spite of what they know and resent about each other. In "The Revival" Barnes speculates on the late-life thoughts of the accomplished novelist, but failed playwright, Ivan Turgenev. In "Vigilance" he slowly reveals the key to the deep remorse (rage?) of a curmudgeony gay man with a personal mission to suppress (or evict) coughers at concert recitals. The scenarios in these eleven stories are diverse, and the characters' dilemmas and their responses to those dilemmas are plausible. It is uncanny that Barnes (who presumably wrote these stories in his early and mid fifties) can project himself so easily forward into old age. Unlike some other reviewers, I don't find these reflections morbid. I find each of his aged characters to have some sort of enobling characteristic. Often, they seem to have an amazing ability to continue to negotiate with life, as when the wife in "Appetite" discovers that she can get some spark of life from her senile (Alzheimer stricken?) husband by reading to him from cook books, in spite of his failing mental abilities and his propensity to break out in obscene ramblings.

Perhaps my personal favorite in the collection is "Knowing French," which consists of putative correspondence to the author from Sylvia Winstanley, an inmate in an "old folkery." It would be easy to enjoy this story for its surface charm, the vanity of an old woman trying to impress a published author, who tosses off French phrases while misspelling simple English words. But the fact that this is one-sided communication gives their progression an eerie quality. It makes one wonder (in an existential sort of way), if our own understanding of our life is enough. Can a life's meaning be discerned by one person's version? The story concludes with two letters to the author from the old folkery's warden, in which he twice calls her "the life and soul of the party," a far cry from her self-perception as a misunderstood and under-appreciated trouble-maker. It is in touches and turns like this that make Barnes's stories so rich and worth reading (and re-reading).