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Exploring one of man’s most enduring passions
Book Review
By Derryll White
Barnes, Julian (2004). The Lemon Table.
Someone told me to read Julian Barnes; probably one of the customers in Lotus Books. “Oh, you like short stories? Try Barnes!” So ‘The Lemon Table’ was on the Lund Bibliotek shelf and I grabbed it. And I am very glad I did.
Julian Barnes has a wry humour. He laughs in these stories at the way each of us lives convoluted lives. The unstated reality, all that remains after the torture love produces in “The Story of Mats Israelson,” is that life would be SO much easier if we just said what we meant. We almost never do that. Barnes has a delightful way of bringing his reader to this realization.
I love to love, to be loved, to contemplate love. It is the very richest of indulgences. One gives from the soul, and in giving attains pleasures ‘immeasurable to man,’ as Coleridge said. Julian Barnes does this time and again. These are short stories – quirky, happy, sad – but, at least for me, they all explore one of man’s most enduring passions – love.
I recognize there are major themes of death and loss and sadness, but I reiterate – love predominates. As Barnes says in “The Silence”: … ‘the severity of style and the profound logic that creates the inner connection between motifs.’
‘Buried with a lemon in his hand.’
Oh yes, read this book!
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Excerpts from the novel:
DISTANCE: What’s happening now, if you want to know the truth, is that I’m finding it hard to remember what we were like in bed together. It seems like something other people did.
MEN: “Men only use the word nag when it’s something they don’t want to do.”
SEX: Then I thought: what do I know? Why make the assumption that my parents don’t – didn’t – have sex any more? They still shared the same bed until this happened. What do I know about sex at that age? Which left the question: which is worse for my mother, to give up sex at, let’s say sixty – live, and discover fifteen years later that your husband is off with a woman of the age you were when you gave up; or still to be having sex with your husband after half a century, only to discover he’s having a bit on the side?
KNOWLEDGE: Geese would be beautiful, if cranes did not exist.
YOUTH: The young are on the way up. My natural enemies! You want to be a father figure to them and they don’t give a damn. Perhaps with reason.
DEATH: I join the lemon table at the Kamp. Here it is permissible – indeed obligatory – to talk about death. It is most companionable.
LIFE: This is what it is. You stand on a hill and from beyond the clouds hear sounds that pierce the heart. Music – even my music – is always heading south, invisibly.
CRITICISM: “Always remember there is no city in the world which has erected a statue to a critic.”
BARBER SHOP : Then there was the binful of magazines. He was sure some of them were rude. Everything was rude, if you wanted it to be. This was the great truth about life which he’d only just discovered. Not that he minded. Gregory liked rude things.
MARRIAGE: Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
SEX: He was afraid of sex. That was the truth. He didn’t really know any more what it was for. He enjoyed it when it happened. He imagined, in the years ahead, that there would be gradually less of it.
PEOPLE: “You are more discriminating about logs than about members of the human race.”
“Logs, my love, are very different from one another.”
MAN: “A tree is like a man,” he said. “It takes three score years and ten to arrive at maturity and is useless after a hundred.”
GOSSIP: Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest and, in the end, the truest.
LOVE: He hoped – it was his only hope now – that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pain of love. It did not seem likely.
LOVE: If love, as some assert, is a purely self-referring business, if the object of love is finally unimportant because what lovers value are their own emotions, then what more appropriate circularity than for a dramatist to fall in love with his own creation?
WOMEN: It was a pity about Merrill: she didn’t seem to understand that after a certain age women should no longer pretend to be what they had once been. They should submit to time.
LOVE: And as in his life, so in his writing: love did not work. Love might or might not provide kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. Such was love’s nature.
AGE: ‘After the age of forty there is only one word to sum up the basis of life: Renunciation.’
THE ROAD: But all love needs a journey. All love symbolically is a journey, and that journey needs bodying forth.
MEMORY: Now it could be remembered, improved, turned into the embodiment, the actuality of the if-only. He continued to invoke it until his death.
RENUNCIATION: Here is the argument for the world of renunciation. If we know more about consummation, they know more about desire. If we know more about numbers, they knew more about despair. If we know more about boasting, they knew more about memory.
READERS: Whom is the Novel for, I ask myself. In my own case for someone of an understanding nature who requires to lose herself between about 10 p.m. and bedtime.
LIFE: He used to say to me, when we first met, ‘Life is just a premature reaction to death!’
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.