Both were outsiders: she the daughter of Polish Jews, he raised in London’s unfashionable Metroland both were Francophiles who wrote acutely about art and both had a certain chilly reserve in their writing. And this blog is a way to keep up the pressure! It also allows me to vent a bit on related issues.Before her death in 2016, Anita Brookner would go for lunch with Julian Barnes nearly every year. I have long advocated sensible policies to better integrate transport and land use. Until March of 2004 I worked for the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority on wide variety of policy issues. I am a transportation economist and regional planner, displaced from England by the abolition of the Greater London Council and a dislike of Thatcherism. And since it is now probably too late for you to get in on the “first 200” list you will have to wait for August. What I do think is that this will be another winner for Barnes. It is also quite difficult to not reveal too much by writing about it. It is not often when I start and finish a book at one sitting. I have to admit that I do have quite a few books that I have started but failed to get involved enough to care about. No, but there are already many reviews on line. It makes me wonder if there really was an Elizabeth Finch.
It turns out that there really was a Venetian painter called Carpaccio – so that wasn’t what I initially thought. So in reading this book there is quite a lot of both real and imagined history. I must admit that I had never heard of Julian the Apostate – but I suppose for Julian Barnes he must have had good reason to learn all about him. Later he tries to memorialize her, and thus himself, but to do that he has to deal with the history she was teaching. He goes to all her lectures, fails to deliver the one required essay at the end, but then he is the king of unfinished projects – but they continue to meet, for lunch on a regular basis. It is written as a memoir by a man at the end of his life recalling being enraptured by a woman at an adult education course, whose method of teaching both challenges and fascinates him. Julian Barnes has written twenty four previous books and I have read most of them, so as soon as I could open it I started reading it – and read it straight through in a couple of hours.
I was lucky enough to see the email from NetGalley when it came in and immediately requested the book since there were only to be 200 readers. To be published by Random House on August 16
0 kommentar(er)
