Julian Barnes – My Own RE:public

Emma B. & Elizabeth F.

Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.

To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.

Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also remember his essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!

Berthe Morisot: much more than a muse

The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen; so the impressive title of Jason Farago’s equally impressive interactive piece at The New York Times – an exploration of Impressionism and its scandalous beginnings in France in the latter half of the 19th century, as exemplified through one particular work of the one woman associated with the movement – Berthe Morisot’s “In England (Eugène Manet à l’Île de Wight)”. [To be seen at the Musée Marmottan in Paris, which houses the largest collection of her works. Unlike her male colleagues she sold very few works during her lifetime. Well, who would have thunk it!]

*Eugène Manet on the* Isle of Wight, 1875, Musée Marmottan Monet

Farago deconstructs the painting as more than Morisot’s impression of the scene but rendered as an invitation by the artist to explore the multiple gazes – sometimes twice removed, sometimes hidden, always distorted by relative time. No longer discrete, time blurs the edges, and it is no longer clear who is doing the seeing and who or what is being seen.

In 2019, at the time of a major exhibition of her works at the Musée d’Orsay, I read (in German media) for the first time about Morisot. If it is still accessible, I hightly recommend this essay by Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books, from about that time.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Barnes!

“Der Mann in roten Rock” [Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021]

As the years proceed, birthday greetings – given and received – become almost perfunctory, and especially so when they are between peoples unknown; a ritualistic give and take encouraged by the echo of an omnipresent media. But, an interview with Julian Barnes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (on the publication in German of The Man in the Red Coat), alerted me to his approaching seventy-fifth birthday; and that it falls on this 19th January day. Much more than just an admired romancier and essayiste; a very favourite person who had the right words to share with me when I most needed them. So, here, I simply remember that; and to no-one in particular, I say: Happy Birthday, Mr. Barnes!

Where fiction begins

Still on Julian Barnes, another of his novels that I really like is Noise of Time (2017), a literary imagining of sorts of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Musically I will almost certainly never know Shostakovich, but Barnes’s fine character study revealed to me a man tormented by the inability to reconcile the virtuosity and grandeur of an interior personae with the smallness of the exterior life as lived, or vice versa. And one asks and must answer each for oneself: which was the real “Shostakovich” here anyway? And how great and how small can a man be? And will only time tell?

At the time of publication, along with some lauded reviews, there were a number of more critical pieces focusing on the controversial place of Dmitri Shostakovich in the history of 20th century music; some, whilst accepting Julian Barnes’s use of a real historical figure as a useful device in fictional narrative, seem to suggest that he has deliberately sought to secure Shostakovich’s legacy, not only as an artist but in a moral sense. One example is this by the musicologist, Richard Taruskin. Taruskin sees the problematic starting in fact with the very use of the composer’s real name, and an inherent confusion in differentiating between fact and fiction. This may be a valid enough criticism, though it rather underestimates the sophistication of the modern discerning reader, but he extends his negative appraisal by interpreting the novel as an attempt by Barnes to place the (historical) composer in the role of victim rather than identifying him as the opportunist he surely was. In my opinion, this is a very superficial interpretation. My reading is of the portrayal of a man, and an artist, living under totalitarianism, who, yes, made a deliberate choice to kowtow to the regime, but also had to live with the consequence of doing so; including a tainted reputation in the wider world and feeble attempts to redeem himself at least for posterity, and all of this shaded by an ever pervasive sense of guilt. Nor do I see that Barnes in any way diminishes the greater sacrifices made by others – real people and braver people; sometimes even greater artists.

Barnes’s third person narrative, told in the form of interior monologues, is of course highly subjective and therefore biased, even egocentric, but always to be discerned is a tormented, not very courageous man forever afraid of impending denunciation; mitigated only by his retreat to silence and irony and passive cooperation. I accepted the “story” – “his” story and “his” truth; the real Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich remains as elusive to me as is his music (there is something to be said for reading from a point of ignorance), and that in my opinion doesn’t detract from the literary merit of Barnes’s novel. But perhaps that is because I came to the book without looking for a confirmation of the historical person and without knowledge of the “Shostakovich Wars” played out by experts and related others only in the colours of the keys of a piano.

Memories never quite lost

I have just completed reading, and in one sitting – well its pages only number 100 odd! – Patrick Modiano’s Schlafende Erinnerungen. As a matter of convenience I read it in German; in the French original it is titled Souvenirs dormants and in English Sleep of Memory (whereby one could wonder why not “Sleeping Memories” – but that is a thing with memories, we never quite know what to do with them, nor what they do to us!)

This was Modiano’s first work after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, and I seem to recall at the time the usual disenchantment in the English speaking universe when one of their own misses out (again!). Certainly I didn’t know him at all, but it was apparent that in Germany he had an appreciative readership amongst Francophiles and literati sorts, and his books seem to be constantly in print. I did then read his first novel La Place de l’Étoile, written in 1968 when he was just 22 years old, and was at once perplexed and captivated by the unusual voice (not to mention the subject matter of German occupation and collaboration and where all that can lead – but that is another thing again, and something that I will return to) and on reading this new work I recognized immediately this almost dream-like quality in Modiano’s writing that is really quite singular to him. (It must surely be that this is a characteristic of the original French (and Modiano works in general) so I must say Elisabeth Edl seems to capture this beautifully in her German translation.)

Out of the present, the 70 year old narrator Jean remembers his youth in the Paris of the early sixties and in the telling weaves a fine tapestry of fragmented memory of people and place. (Wonderfully illustrated at one point by the metaphor of the Metro plan that lights up on selecting a destination). As if in a trance, Jean takes us with him as he revisits ghosts from this past; those women (enigmatic all in one way or another and beautifully portrayed) who left his life as they entered it, shrouded by mystery, but live still along the boulevards, in the cafes and apartments of his memory, where secrets as dark as the light of a Paris night are shared.

Sleep of Memory is to me a profoundly haunting literary jewel, and if someone were to say (and I have heard it said) that Patrick Modiano somehow seems to write the same story over and over again, then I would reply that is because perhaps that is the only story.

Which has led me back to this impossible book from Julian Barnes! And I should say this so favoured (by me) and very British of writers of a certain age has much in common with the quintessential Parisian Modiano (also of a certain age), most particularly in their consideration of the elusive nature and inherent imperfections of memory. I know only that Barnes is a Francophile and worships at the altar of Flaubert.

And on (literary) jewels, another Modiano book has come to my attention: La Petite Bijou (2001) translated into English only in 2016 as Little Jewel!

The only story (that matters?)

Inevitably perhaps, I can’t help but compare Julian Barnes’ most recent novel The Only Story with his 2011 Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of Ending: the most obvious comparison being the perspective from which the narrative stems, that of an older man, say, of approximately Julian Barnes’ age – you may do the arithmetic – recalling his youth and more youthful years and the defining events now filtered through time and the iteration of memory.

And whilst speaking of memory, I do remember enjoying immensely The Sense of an Ending; the layers in time, the complexity of character and narrative, and now I wonder whether it is perhaps the development of these attributes that I miss in this new work – but then just as I think this I am not totally convinced I haven’t missed something more.

Try as I may I could not warm to the unlikely protagonists; either individually or as a pair. The radical age difference – Paul is a 19 year old university student, Susan a 48 year old housewife – is, well, radical! Forgive me I have led a sheltered life … an affair, an arrangement, an accident perhaps, but more? Well, I thought, I dare say Mr. Barnes’ life has been much more interesting than mine! The peripheral characters also were abhorrent to various degrees, and in terms of Susan’s husband bordering on the grotesque. And the lineal development of the affair from tennis club to social exclusion to long drawn out disintegration was, well, just too…lineal, and Paul’s recollections of these ten precious years of his younger self that took such a bizarre turn so obviously selective. I did wonder a lot about the things he could no longer seem to recall with any certitude, and why not.

In the end, I didn’t believe this story being spun, and believe me that made me cranky because I love Barnes. And that is why I can’t leave it at that and why on further considering all those aspects of the story that seemed to me to so lack credibility, I begin to wonder whether Barnes is not having me (us, the collective reader) on? Is hiding behind an ostensibly serious, albeit against all conventions, love story and simplistic philosophical musings along the lines of “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, perhaps a jest, an intricate satire of sorts of suburbia and its social mores?

Satire as another vehicle to explore the consequences of decisions made and the imperfections of memory? I have time aplenty to dwell on this some more.