Bøger af Julian Barnes

Den nittenårige Paul møder Susan Macleod en sommer i 60’erne, da han er hjemme fra universitetet for at besøge sin familie. Susan er otteogfyrre, selvsikker, ironisk og en gift mor til to næsten voksne døtre. Snart – og tilsyneladende uundgåeligt – bliver Paul og Susan elskere. Senere flytter de sammen til London for at slippe væk fra Pauls forældre og Susans voldelige mand. Årtier senere er Susan død, og Paul ser nu tilbage på deres liv sammen. Han husker forelskelsen, hvordan han befriede hende fra et dødt ægteskab, og hvordan – gradvist og nådesløst – det hele faldt fra hinanden. Den eneste historie er en skarpsindig fortælling, der beskriver, hvordan vores erindringer kan forbløffe, svigte og overraske os – hvordan den allerførste forelskelse kan ende med at determinere et helt liv.

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'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his philosopher brother, a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed... In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; then, finally, he gives us the story of his own grief, unflinchingly observed. This is a book of intense honesty and insight;

I would urge you to read - and re-read ' Daily Telegraph**Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011**Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives.

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers a tragicomedy about a successful businessman who wants to undo the results of his former best friend's betrayal and get his ex-wife back. - "An alarmingly perfect novel." --The New York Review of Books Shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, Julian Barnes continues to reinvigorate the novel with his pyrotechnic verbal skill and playful manipulation of plot and character. In Love, etc. he uses all the surprising, sophisticated ingredients of a delightful farce to create a tragicomedy of human frailties and needs. After spending a decade in America as a successful businessman, Stuart returns to London and decides to look up his ex-wife Gillian. Their relationship had ended years before when Stuart's witty, feckless, former best friend Oliver stole her away. But now Stuart finds that the intervening years have left Oliver's artistic ambitions in ruins and his relationship with Gillian on less than solid footing. When Stuart begins to suspect that he may be able to undo the results of their betrayal, he resolves to act. Written as an intimate series of crosscutting monologues that allow each character to whisper their secrets and interpretations directly to the reader, Love, etc. is an unsettling examination of confessional culture and a profound reflection on the power of perspective.

"Neil, el narrador, es un hombre de mediana edad al que no le ha ido demasiado bien ni en lo personal ni en lo profesional. Si hay algo que recuerda con entusiasmo son las clases de Cultura y Civilizacóin que recibói de una profesora excepcional: Elizabeth Finch. Inteligente e inalcanzable, llena de elegancia, esta mujer admiradora del mundo cálsico consideraba que el mundo haíba tomado el camino equivocado el ída en que el Imperio romano decidói abrazar el monotíesmo cristiano. Por eso su éhroe era elú ltimo emperador pagano: Juliano el Aópstata. Cuando deój de ser su alumno, Neil mantuvo el contacto con Elizabeth, y coíman juntos peróidicamente. Ahora la maestra admirada ha muerto, y su antiguo disícpulo emprende una doble tarea: escribir un ensayo sobre Juliano a partir de las notas y preguntas que ella deój, e indagar en la biograífa de esa mujer enigámtica a traévs de los cuadernos que le ha legado y del testimonio que le brinda su hermano, tan diferente a ella. ÅQuéin fue en realidad la elusiva y fascinante Elizabeth Finch? ÅQéu misterios esconída su personalidad? ÅóDnde termina la admiracóin y empieza el amor? ÅQéu podemos aprender de la historia y la cultura? ÅQéu es lo que da sentido a nuestras vidas?"--

An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art--from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending. "An engaging and empathetic volume." --The New York Times Book Review As Julian Barnes notes: "Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting ... But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged." This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.

Originally published in the UK in 2019 by Jonathan Cape.

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes's wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes-winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending-follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed). Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original. "Brilliant . . . a marvelous literary epiphany."-Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review "Barnes's literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled."-New Republic

Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin... This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.

The updated edition of Julian Barnes' best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.