Speaking of London Bookstores, which of course I mean the
bookstores I painstakingly gave you a glimpse of in the last blog. What?
Haven’t read it yet? Fie on thee!
For my loyal followers (those that have read at least one of
my blogs), I offer a book I picked up at South
Kensington Books.
A disquieting book, The
Lemon Tree, a grouping of stories.
Not disquieting because Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, The Sense of
an Ending) tosses out porno-erotic words like fuck and cunt – which one would
think reasonably go together – but because the stories dissect one of life’s
great mysteries and tragedies, growing old.
Life slipping over the edge.
There’s love, of course, sweet days of
splendor-in-the-grass, as Wordsworth put it.
There’s also rapturous sex and promises of wondrous days to come, promises
that slowly fade with the seasons of life, so slowly that no one notices until
the promise has passed and winter is upon us.
Love. Barnes relishes
the stages of love in ways you may or may not find comfortable. Fresh blooms
morphing into limp petals, petals floating idly in a last attempt to live. The water in the bowl, a tepid, malodorous
mix of the dead and dying, until the stench is poured down the drain and all
that remains is a white residue of that which has passed.
Getting old. A
collection of things we did, no longer do, or no longer can do. Ah, the pity, the depth of anguish these
stories evoke. And yet, some of them rise
above the fading light and fog-like gloom.
“A Short History of Hairdressing dances in the delight of
every age. “Hygiene” sparkles with
wit. “Knowing French” sports a lyrical
attitude in the face of the fading light.
I don’t often read a book of individual stories. Not sure why.
Perhaps a book, be it novel or non-fiction, lends itself to dreams that
put us aside from our selves. Stories
are a jazz riff to a novel’s concert.
When I say stories, I’m talking about short stories and short, short
stories, all the way up to short novellas. An odd thing about stories is that
they lend themselves to movies more readily than a book of say five hundred
pages. With a book, a writer and
director are compelled to trim and chop, to turn a tree into a single branch,
or even a toothpick.
Some of the tales in The Lemon Table run to twenty pages or
more, some stretch to only a few pages.
With one reading you can easily imagine a movie. A story allows you to build, to amplify
instead of chop. A good story is
distilled, almost like poetry.
No matter the length, Barnes does a superb rendition of
character construction. In ‘The
Revival,’ a tale of unrequited love, the description is so often simple, “But
thirty miles was all they travelled together.”
And yet, you feel the aging man’s anguish and longing, love for the sake
of love and the sake of living.
Barnes’ writing is so beautifully descriptive that my
imagination leads me on, even when my heart screams “You don’t want to know
this!”
Evocative is a word that comes to mind. Perhaps ‘mirror’ would be even better.
A big question: Is
the book uplifting or depressing? On the
surface it’s a little of both, until you realize the tone is a call to
action. Make of life what you will. Don’t let precious time wither. There’s plenty to be happy about. Don’t wait.
Use your time well. Love. Travel. Celebrate. Do all those things, with people who make your
life worth living.
Julian Barnes wrote a remarkable collection of stories. Read them.
Use them well.
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