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A review by rbcp82
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story by Julian Barnes
5.0
Barnes can write not only terrific fiction but also terrific essay so literature. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of essays and learned much from it.
Every author Barnes writes about induces the desire to read that author. I think the great literary criticism all comes down to this: sparking further curiosity and wanting.
- Fiction, more than any other written form, explains and expands life.
- We are, in our deepest selves, narrative animals; also, seekers of answers. The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.
* On Penelope Fitzgerald
One her earlier novels
- They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition.
- Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life she liberated herself into greatness.
- Her writing had to be fitted into the occasional breathing spaces left by family life; and she made little money until the late success of The Blue Flower in America.
- "You should write... novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken." Fitzgerald is tender towards her characters and their worlds, unpredictably funny, and at times surprisingly aphoristic; though it is characteristic of her that such moments of wisdom appear not author-generated, but arising in the text organically, like moss or coral. Her fictional personnel are rarely vicious or deliberately evil; when things go wrong for them, or when they inflict harm on others, it is usually out of misplaced understanding, a lack less of sympathy than of imagination.
- How does she convey what she knows in such a compact, exact, dynamic and resonant way?
- Mastery of sources and a state for concision might lead you to expect that the narrative line of Fitzgerald's novels would be pre-eminently lucid. Far from it: there is a kind of benign wrong-footingness at work, often from the first line.
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- Such divergences transfer into their poetry. Arnold comes out of Keatsian Romanticism, Clough out of Byronism - specifically, the sceptical, worldly, witty tone-mixing of Don Juan.
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juxtaposing opposing ideas together
- For the next thirty years, the debate continued as to the true nature of the Wilkeses - diligent pedagogues or manipulative sadists - and as to the wider consequences of sending small boys away from home at the age of eight: character-building or character-deforming?
- 'Such, Such' retains immense force, its clarity of exposition matched by its animating rage. Orwell does not try to backdate his understanding; he retains the inchoate emotional responses of the young Eric Blair to the system into which he had been flung. But now, as George Orwell, he is in a position to anatomise the economic and class infrastructure of St. Cyprian's, and those hierarchies of power which the pupil would later meet in grown-up, public, political form: in this respect such schools were trully named 'preparatory'.
- Orwell is profoundly English in even more ways than these. He is deeply untheoretical and wary of general conclusions that do not come from specific experiences.
- On the one hand there are change-of-heart people, who believe that if you improve human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and on the other social engineers, who believe that once you fix society - make it fairer, more democratic, less divided - then the problems of human nature will fall away.
To read:
Ford's The Good Soldier
Houellebecq's Atomized
Wharton's The Reef
Geniusness of Kipling
See how he begins the essays, his first paragraphs.
Every author Barnes writes about induces the desire to read that author. I think the great literary criticism all comes down to this: sparking further curiosity and wanting.
- Fiction, more than any other written form, explains and expands life.
- We are, in our deepest selves, narrative animals; also, seekers of answers. The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.
* On Penelope Fitzgerald
One her earlier novels
- They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition.
- Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life she liberated herself into greatness.
- Her writing had to be fitted into the occasional breathing spaces left by family life; and she made little money until the late success of The Blue Flower in America.
- "You should write... novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken." Fitzgerald is tender towards her characters and their worlds, unpredictably funny, and at times surprisingly aphoristic; though it is characteristic of her that such moments of wisdom appear not author-generated, but arising in the text organically, like moss or coral. Her fictional personnel are rarely vicious or deliberately evil; when things go wrong for them, or when they inflict harm on others, it is usually out of misplaced understanding, a lack less of sympathy than of imagination.
- How does she convey what she knows in such a compact, exact, dynamic and resonant way?
- Mastery of sources and a state for concision might lead you to expect that the narrative line of Fitzgerald's novels would be pre-eminently lucid. Far from it: there is a kind of benign wrong-footingness at work, often from the first line.
------------------
- Such divergences transfer into their poetry. Arnold comes out of Keatsian Romanticism, Clough out of Byronism - specifically, the sceptical, worldly, witty tone-mixing of Don Juan.
---------------
juxtaposing opposing ideas together
- For the next thirty years, the debate continued as to the true nature of the Wilkeses - diligent pedagogues or manipulative sadists - and as to the wider consequences of sending small boys away from home at the age of eight: character-building or character-deforming?
- 'Such, Such' retains immense force, its clarity of exposition matched by its animating rage. Orwell does not try to backdate his understanding; he retains the inchoate emotional responses of the young Eric Blair to the system into which he had been flung. But now, as George Orwell, he is in a position to anatomise the economic and class infrastructure of St. Cyprian's, and those hierarchies of power which the pupil would later meet in grown-up, public, political form: in this respect such schools were trully named 'preparatory'.
- Orwell is profoundly English in even more ways than these. He is deeply untheoretical and wary of general conclusions that do not come from specific experiences.
- On the one hand there are change-of-heart people, who believe that if you improve human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and on the other social engineers, who believe that once you fix society - make it fairer, more democratic, less divided - then the problems of human nature will fall away.
To read:
Ford's The Good Soldier
Houellebecq's Atomized
Wharton's The Reef
Geniusness of Kipling
See how he begins the essays, his first paragraphs.