The 3 best books by Julian Barnes

In the literature of julian barnes We find a commendable mix of brilliant drops of a stoic pragmatic philosophy, at times nihilistic, always lucid. And yet, the most intelligent thing about the author ends up being the decision that this approach to the philosophical is brushed from the most varied scenarios, among the most diverse plot proposals of his fictional narrative.

Thus, In any Barnes novel we end up enjoying real scenarios, plots clinging to reality, but with an allegorical point., symbolic; as if extending the action towards a reflection that provides ground from the apparently everyday, from those experiences that link its characters with any reader.

The result depends on each novel. We can find narratives with surrealist overtones, others completely realistic, historical fictions along George Orwell or authentic existentialist chronicles. Always enjoying an innovative, experimental point even in terms of forms and substance ... A wide range in whose daring change the skilled writer is discovered and determined to offer in his literature everything that of discovery is simply the fact of survival.

Precisely because of this conception of literature towards the explanation of the vital, other narrative incursions further away from this intention are published under pseudonyms such as that of Dan kavanagh for your detective novels. So we can enjoy the versatile Barnes in a multitude of options.

3 Recommended Books By Julian Barnes

The sense of an ending

Time transforms everything. The conception of our days in the sketch of the work that we are never going to represent happens to offer a strange reading when it comes to linking everything to that age in which the future is getting shorter.

Tony Webster's perspective on life provides insight into the entire narrative about Tony himself, his youthful friends, and that hasty life that emerges later, as the years begin to pick up speed.

At a given moment, in the backwaters of adulthood, when the vital task seems to have been completed, Tony is faced with reviewing many scenes in the script of his life thanks to a letter from a lawyer who announces that the mother of his former His childhood sweetheart, Verónica, has bequeathed him a small sum of money and a manuscript.

Except that Veronica does not seem to be willing to let Tony have that documentation, the diaries of a common friend, Adrián, which appear as a very interesting vision of those intense years of youth, a novel perspective that Tony will want to recover at all costs to contrast those idealized memories of happy days.

From the present to the memory of the promised unbreakable friendship, a story in which we can all recognize that evolution of our existence to which we could gladly, or perhaps not so much, look back to see if our memories fit with what was really lived by others who we accompanied ...

The sense of an ending

The only story

Abounding in the theme of the past, of our perspective on what has been lived, in the final frame of our lives with the historical times we have experienced. A novel that starts from a magical moment of change.

Life confronts Paul with one of those scenarios that paradoxically offer happiness, wish fulfillment and even the most intense and liberated love. Because the young Paul with the mature Susan was that vital turning point that could lift Paul up to heaven or plunge him into hell.

And in fact that is what happened. Everything intense ends up closing like a union of opposite poles that make up a circle. And the memory of a circle ends up behaving like an endless stream in our consciousness.

Those days of immense happiness, pleasure and lust without tomorrows finally found their morning, and not precisely as a long-awaited future. Only that the years are in charge of sifting everything.

The time, which Paul still had in those days of the meeting with Susan, ended up closing raw wounds. Only, perhaps after the period of oblivion has expired, Paul wishes that it had not marked him so much. He no longer knows how to classify those memories that added pleasure and pain.

Memories that undoubtedly marked everything he built later in his life. The moments with which we are indebted build our history for good or our regret. A wonderful reflection with the hook of a suggestive plot.

The only story

Living standards

If Julian Barnes is considered a postmodernist narrator, a sort of literary experimenter, without a doubt this novel is the emblem of that labeling (adding "Flaubert's Parrot", for his comings and goings between reality and fiction).

We start with a novel that links up with another novel that finally presents us with a biographical sketch. A whole that points to that will of literature as a constant leap between reality and fiction.

A demonstration that everything Barnes composes always has that reflection drawn from his personal imagination, his experiences, his philosophy and his conception of the history that we weave in our days.

That the novel ends with the death of his wife, after having guided us through a hectic nineteenth century with touches of adventure between hot air balloons and trips to remote places, surprises but, thanks to its ability to mimic, it gives us a disconcerting feeling of the life made of literature and of literature as a channel that only leads to life.

living standards

Other interesting books by Julian Barnes ...

across the canal

Like any relationship moved between love and hate, the French with the English, and vice versa, has its own. After a Hundred Years' War (calculate the rate of attacks it would take to avoid hitting all of them in the first month...), a relationship materialized in the English Channel as a total connection is finally discovered. From there arise as many stories as Barnes wants to present to us in this volume...

Julian Barnes has always been an unpredictable writer and that is why he now offers us a kaleidoscopic collection of stories that, like everything in Barnes, is much more than it seems. A series of apparently unconnected stories that acquire a perfect and illuminating unity through the art of literary birlibirloque. The common thread? The England-France opposition, the island's fascination with the continent, France as the absolute Other of In-England, so close and so far away.

Ten stories that take place in the space of three centuries and a vast ocean of misunderstandings and fascinations, and in which the passage of time, happiness and death are the substance of a work that is subtle and perfect like a filigree.

The man in the red robe

There are characters who, on a historical background, were, however, personalities of unfathomable significance due to their magnetism and their ability, ultimately, to intervene in the social future of each era.

In June 1885, three Frenchmen from Paris came to London to "make intellectual and decorative acquisitions." They were a prince, an earl, and a commoner. The latter, of provincial origin and Italian surname, was called Samuel Jean Pozzi. He was a dandy, a seducer who had countless lovers, a cultured and liberal man who translated Darwin into French, a pioneer of gynecology and also a surgeon. His elegant figure was immortalized by the great American painter established in Europe John Singer Sargent in a famous portrait in which he poses in a red robe.

Barnes conducts an investigation into this fascinating character, which ends up becoming a suggestive cultural, social and political portrait of the Belle Époque. Figures such as Oscar Wilde and Sara Bernhardt, Whistler, Henry James ... parade through the pages of this book.

The man in the red robe
5/5 - (8 votes)

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