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 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.

'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.

Et centralt tema er spørgsmålet om Guds mulige væren eller ikke-væren. Barnes tror ikke på Gud, men savner ham. Engang var hans ateisme på linje med Richard Dawkins og andre overbeviste gudløse, men nu – som 62-årig – vedstår han en usikkerhed, en tiltagende ambivalens og en klarere bevidsthed om sin uvished. Julian Barnes reflekterer over at en af de stærkeste motivationer og tilskyndelser til religion er vores viden om – og dermed forbundne frygt for – døden. Og at det store skel i livet er forskellen mellem dem der frygter afslutningen og dem der ikke gør. Han undersøger berømte sidste ord og nekrologers betydning. Barnes slutter sin vidende, velskrevne og meget vittige bog med sine overvejelser over nekrologer og deres betydning.

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;

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.

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.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain's greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career.In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, ';A Life with Books'), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, ';Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.'

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.

From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes a magnificent portrait of youth and growing up. Christopher and Toni found in each other the perfect companion for that universal adolescent pastime: smirking at the world as you find it.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention.As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of Britain's greatest mappers of the human heart.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn't know anything about that at nineteen.As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.

In May 1937, a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.