Status
Available
Publication
Vintage (1990), Edition: Reprint, 320 pages
Description
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 10 Chapters presents a surprising and 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.… (more)
Media reviews
Guardian
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
Barnes has found a niche for himself as an English-born French intellectual who happens to write in the English language. This is a very cunning ploy, as few British readers are prepared to admit how little French literature we have actually read, and therefore assume he must be terribly clever to
This book is - in a way - an English answer to Perec's La vie mode d'emploi. Like Perec there is a grandiose title that can't be taken literally; unlike Perec it is subverted by the little joke of the half-chapter. As in Perec, the different chapters bring in a wide range of different literary styles and genres, with recurrent themes and images linking them together, but without any single narrative line running through the book. Unlike Perec, Barnes doesn't bother with an explicit architectural framework to link the chapters together: it would be possible to read the book as a short-story collection (although not many short-story collections mix fiction with art-criticism or philosophical essays on the nature of love).
The most important image in the book, touched upon in almost ever chapter, is Noah's Ark, and the idea of the uncertainty of the human condition that it implies. Barnes is certainly being English and whimsical in his choice of narrator for the first chapter, but after that it gets more serious.
Barnes doesn't seem to have much trust in rainbows. At the centre of the book there is an extended discussion of the "Raft of the Medusa" incident and Géricault's celebrated painting of the raft. First we get a summary of what happened after the frigate Medusa was wrecked, drawn from the accounts of the survivors, then we get a detailed critical analysis of the painting. Obviously, we are supposed to put this account of real humans, saved from drowning by killing and eating their companions, side by side with our nursery book ideas of animals going in two by two, as well as looking carefully at the way such subjects are represented in art.
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know about Flaubert, Proust and co. Perhaps he is. However, unlike genuine French intellectuals, he is modest about his cleverness, so it doesn't upset us too much. Meanwhile, the French literary establishment showers honours on him, as the only British writer entirely uncontaminated by anglo-saxon attitudes.This book is - in a way - an English answer to Perec's La vie mode d'emploi. Like Perec there is a grandiose title that can't be taken literally; unlike Perec it is subverted by the little joke of the half-chapter. As in Perec, the different chapters bring in a wide range of different literary styles and genres, with recurrent themes and images linking them together, but without any single narrative line running through the book. Unlike Perec, Barnes doesn't bother with an explicit architectural framework to link the chapters together: it would be possible to read the book as a short-story collection (although not many short-story collections mix fiction with art-criticism or philosophical essays on the nature of love).
The most important image in the book, touched upon in almost ever chapter, is Noah's Ark, and the idea of the uncertainty of the human condition that it implies. Barnes is certainly being English and whimsical in his choice of narrator for the first chapter, but after that it gets more serious.
Barnes doesn't seem to have much trust in rainbows. At the centre of the book there is an extended discussion of the "Raft of the Medusa" incident and Géricault's celebrated painting of the raft. First we get a summary of what happened after the frigate Medusa was wrecked, drawn from the accounts of the survivors, then we get a detailed critical analysis of the painting. Obviously, we are supposed to put this account of real humans, saved from drowning by killing and eating their companions, side by side with our nursery book ideas of animals going in two by two, as well as looking carefully at the way such subjects are represented in art.
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LibraryThing member browner56
During a heated discussion several years ago, my wife accused me of being “way too linear” in my thinking. (I’m still not quite sure what she meant by that, but I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t a compliment.) Given that comment, however, I am sure that she would appreciate the sort of
In fact, as with "Flaubert’s Parrot," some might argue that "A History of the World" is not really a novel at all but rather a collection of tangentially connected stories that are as much documentary as they are fiction. What the book clearly is not is linear story-telling, mixing as it does a retelling of the Noah’s Ark story from the perspective of a stowaway with a detailed analysis of a painting that hangs in the Louvre and an archeological expedition to Mt. Ararat.
It all does make sense ultimately—the chapters actually do progress from Genesis to Revelations—and much of what it contains is both philosophically challenging and very funny.
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novels that Julian Barnes writes.In fact, as with "Flaubert’s Parrot," some might argue that "A History of the World" is not really a novel at all but rather a collection of tangentially connected stories that are as much documentary as they are fiction. What the book clearly is not is linear story-telling, mixing as it does a retelling of the Noah’s Ark story from the perspective of a stowaway with a detailed analysis of a painting that hangs in the Louvre and an archeological expedition to Mt. Ararat.
It all does make sense ultimately—the chapters actually do progress from Genesis to Revelations—and much of what it contains is both philosophically challenging and very funny.
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LibraryThing member glade1
What a fun and thought-provoking read! Julian Barnes gives us a "history of the world" via short stories and even non-fiction, which can be read separately but which also have some recurring themes: the woodworm, animals, the Biblical story of Noah, the clean and the unclean, and more. It's an
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exercise for the author in many different writing styles, and he pulls each off beautifully. Love this book! Show Less
LibraryThing member adzebill
Reread after 20 years. The cleverness of tying together a short story collection with a theme of woodworm and Noah's Ark is less impressive this time round. The anomalous story, “Parenthesis”, on the nature of love, seemed the most honest, though the linked accounts of the wreck of the Medusa
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and Géricault's painting of it I found engrossing, reminding me of the best of Flaubert's Parrot. Show Less
LibraryThing member martensgirl
I'm in two minds about this book. Whilst it is beautifully written, well observed and hilarious in parts, there were some bits that I found really dull. The breadth of Barnes' scope is astonishing and the stories are cleverly linked, but I found The Survivor and The Mountain rather weak.
LibraryThing member phredfrancis
This was a surprising story collection, one with more range than any that I've read before. The recurring themes and images tied the tales together without seeming forced, giving the book cohesion even if it didn't necessarily feel like the homogenous volume I expected. Truthfully, if the book had
Many parts of the book flirted with perfection, but others, while quite good, seemed obscure in their contribution to the overall themes. They succeeded on their own terms, but not nearly enough in context of their exploration of the "history of the world" and its complication, decay, misapprehension, and tenuous promise of redemption.
Plus, there's a hilarious prosecution of termites for crimes against the church. Not to be missed.
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been as predictable as my limited imagination first thought, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did.Many parts of the book flirted with perfection, but others, while quite good, seemed obscure in their contribution to the overall themes. They succeeded on their own terms, but not nearly enough in context of their exploration of the "history of the world" and its complication, decay, misapprehension, and tenuous promise of redemption.
Plus, there's a hilarious prosecution of termites for crimes against the church. Not to be missed.
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LibraryThing member kant1066
For whatever reason, I like my fiction to cohere in predictable ways; oftentimes when that doesn’t happen, I leave a reading experience feeling less than satisfied. Chalk it up to being weaned on something other than the so-called “postmodern” novel. In several ways, “A History of the World
The chapters do span the scope of what we call human history, from a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm to a chapter clearly based on the 1985 PLF hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro. A playful jokiness reminiscent of Nabokov and concomitant preoccupation with the mythic (resembling Borges) informs the way in which the chapters speak to and resonate with one another; in “The Wars of Religion,” a Bishop sits down on this throne during a service in church, and immediately falls down due woodworm infestation. Church officials decide to bring suit for the slow, careful, destruction of the Bishop’s seat. Against whom do they file suit? The woodworms, of course. Even for fiction, this sounds twee and jokey, but it works in a most convincing way.
I think it works so well because these pieces do hang together as something more than a series of stories, and many of them provide fascinating things to think about. “Parenthesis” (which might be the half-chapter of the title) provides an almost essayistic analysis of love which I find didn’t at all detract from the novel’s progress. It’s told through the voice of a man laying next to a woman, desperate to fall asleep but unable to stop meditating on the power and mystery of human love. It quietly informs other chapters without letting Barnes’ authorial voice get in the way.
Another entire chapter is dedicated to a fictionalized account of Gericault’s rendering of perhaps his most-recognized painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Incorporating the “real life” (we quickly learn how perfunctory such labels are) accounts on which the painting is based, Barnes adeptly shows how Gericault selected details carefully, leaves others out, and made still others up, in order for the painting to ring true to the viewer. This immediately raises important questions about history and any mode of representation, more generally. How is history possible if we recognize it only as a true account of past events? Is the historian always a writer? Or, to put matters more explicitly, is she always a novelist?
Another theme that echoes throughout the novel is that of religion and its mystifying effects. Read without care, this can seem a harsh treatment of religion and the religious mindset. Noah is identified by the stowaway woodworm as a vicious drunk, the Catholic officials who try the woodworm for eating the Bishop’s throne come off as a little maniacal, and the last chapter coyly pokes fun at common ideas of Heaven. “Project Ararat” takes up a former astronaut who has had a religious conversion, and now has put his and his wife’s lives on hold to find Noah’s Ark. Despite coming from a conservative, Christian town, the locals have their reservations. The chapter ends with him having raised enough money to go on his mission. He finds the Ark, collects samples, and quickly returns home to have them tested. The tests show that they are no more than a couple hundred years old. This doesn’t matter, though. He is already planning his second mission next year, even more determined to find Noah’s remains. It’s not God that works in mysterious ways. It’s the human mind. That’s Barnes’ point.
Rarely do I find works of fiction so self-referential simultaneously so appealing. Barnes might be telling us about Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, but he’s telling us about very human, all too human, forces. Love, the weird preoccupations that perennially concern us, ideas – they’re all here, and not in the heavy-handed way we’re probably only too familiar with. This book is playful, and serious without taking itself too seriously, which gives it a coy sort of charm that’s nearly impossible to dislike.
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in 10 ½ Chapters” complicates my expectations. It can feel more like a series of short stories than a traditional novel – however, one cannot avoid the interconnectedness they share. The chapters do span the scope of what we call human history, from a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm to a chapter clearly based on the 1985 PLF hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro. A playful jokiness reminiscent of Nabokov and concomitant preoccupation with the mythic (resembling Borges) informs the way in which the chapters speak to and resonate with one another; in “The Wars of Religion,” a Bishop sits down on this throne during a service in church, and immediately falls down due woodworm infestation. Church officials decide to bring suit for the slow, careful, destruction of the Bishop’s seat. Against whom do they file suit? The woodworms, of course. Even for fiction, this sounds twee and jokey, but it works in a most convincing way.
I think it works so well because these pieces do hang together as something more than a series of stories, and many of them provide fascinating things to think about. “Parenthesis” (which might be the half-chapter of the title) provides an almost essayistic analysis of love which I find didn’t at all detract from the novel’s progress. It’s told through the voice of a man laying next to a woman, desperate to fall asleep but unable to stop meditating on the power and mystery of human love. It quietly informs other chapters without letting Barnes’ authorial voice get in the way.
Another entire chapter is dedicated to a fictionalized account of Gericault’s rendering of perhaps his most-recognized painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Incorporating the “real life” (we quickly learn how perfunctory such labels are) accounts on which the painting is based, Barnes adeptly shows how Gericault selected details carefully, leaves others out, and made still others up, in order for the painting to ring true to the viewer. This immediately raises important questions about history and any mode of representation, more generally. How is history possible if we recognize it only as a true account of past events? Is the historian always a writer? Or, to put matters more explicitly, is she always a novelist?
Another theme that echoes throughout the novel is that of religion and its mystifying effects. Read without care, this can seem a harsh treatment of religion and the religious mindset. Noah is identified by the stowaway woodworm as a vicious drunk, the Catholic officials who try the woodworm for eating the Bishop’s throne come off as a little maniacal, and the last chapter coyly pokes fun at common ideas of Heaven. “Project Ararat” takes up a former astronaut who has had a religious conversion, and now has put his and his wife’s lives on hold to find Noah’s Ark. Despite coming from a conservative, Christian town, the locals have their reservations. The chapter ends with him having raised enough money to go on his mission. He finds the Ark, collects samples, and quickly returns home to have them tested. The tests show that they are no more than a couple hundred years old. This doesn’t matter, though. He is already planning his second mission next year, even more determined to find Noah’s remains. It’s not God that works in mysterious ways. It’s the human mind. That’s Barnes’ point.
Rarely do I find works of fiction so self-referential simultaneously so appealing. Barnes might be telling us about Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, but he’s telling us about very human, all too human, forces. Love, the weird preoccupations that perennially concern us, ideas – they’re all here, and not in the heavy-handed way we’re probably only too familiar with. This book is playful, and serious without taking itself too seriously, which gives it a coy sort of charm that’s nearly impossible to dislike.
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LibraryThing member saturnloft
Labeling this as a novel is somewhat of stretch, as this book is more of a loosely-connected collection of short stories. There's a definite nautical theme running through many of the tales, recurring mentions of woodworms & Noah's Ark, ironic twists, and quite a few wry jabs at Judeo-Christian
PS: One of the stories is about The Raft of the Medusa, a 19th century painting by Theodore Gericault. Instead of making the reader Google it, there's a surprisingly generous color foldout of the work in the book. I thought that was a nice touch.
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myth. Quite fun, with some surprisingly poignant interludes.PS: One of the stories is about The Raft of the Medusa, a 19th century painting by Theodore Gericault. Instead of making the reader Google it, there's a surprisingly generous color foldout of the work in the book. I thought that was a nice touch.
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LibraryThing member stef7sa
Funny stories with as a common theme the Flood and Noah's Arc, in various forms and retellings, not all of them equally good, but fun reading in general. The story about the actor making a film in the jungle is hliarious.
LibraryThing member MarianneHusbands
Gordon Bennett what a read!. This offering by Julian Barnes published 1989 defies being put into any particular genre. It's not a novel and it’s not strictly a collection of short stories in so much as each chapter is dependent to some degree on each of the chapters before it. No chronological
I have reached a stage in my reading where I am wanting to get more from a book than an enjoyable read. I want to connect with the text in a more meaningful way. I want to read critically. I want to read the author as well as the written words.
This book was for me a lesson in literary theory - Postmodernism. Of course I am only just beginning to understand where studying literature will take me but with this one I really did take more of an active role in the reading process.
It's a book for raising questions, something that made me think a lot about all kinds of things. Many of the questions I have had floating about in my mind for some time. Thoughts about life, what it is to be human and how we as humans connect with our world and each other.
So what's it all about? Well do not try to figure it out and expect answers or any eureka moments because I do believe doing so would be a mistake and will affect your enjoyment of some brilliant story-telling. For me it is a reflection of life on earth as a human race since life began ( more or less ) and essentially summed up that means a bloody mess with a few bits that seem to be connected somehow throughout the history of time.
I took this extract from the book which I think sums up what I am trying to say about it from Chapter 8 - Upstream which is in an epistolary form - ooh get me picking up the literature lingo already:
" .... it's about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilisation. Discipline v Permissiveness. Sticking to the letter of the law v sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
This all makes it sound pretty heavy but it is far from it. It's funny, quirky, moving, thought-provoking, thrilling and utterly gripping. This is the first book I have read that I really wanted to savour and take my time over. It's the first book I have read that I have actually shouted out to when Mr Barnes playfully teases us with a ' forgotten' name in the first chapter and like being in a pub quiz team I had to shout out the answer. Totally engaging.
Every chapter is different in style and voice. You will read the story of Noah like you have never read it before - Noah pops up throughout as one of the threads that binds the chapters together. You will have a lesson in art appreciation - which was one of my favourite chapters as I have a thing for art too. You will attend the trial of woodworms who will also feature regularly throughout. You will go on a cruise or two both of which will be nothing like you expected and also very relevant to what's happening in the world today. Ships and the sea are another theme. Ooh I forgot Jonah - that was a fab bit. There is lots of searching going on too and a quote related to searching which I think really sums up the intention of the book but I will let you find that quote yourself - because I forgot to write it down!
This was the kind of reading experience that I have been craving. It was enjoyable, it gave me pleasure. It was thought-provoking - it fed my soul. It was a learning journey and made me explore further into the realms of critical reading and literary theory.
There is an interesting essay on this book by Brian Finney which can be found on the net.
A superb offering from Julian Barnes which I heartily recommend.
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order either as the reader jumps like a time traveller through the ages.I have reached a stage in my reading where I am wanting to get more from a book than an enjoyable read. I want to connect with the text in a more meaningful way. I want to read critically. I want to read the author as well as the written words.
This book was for me a lesson in literary theory - Postmodernism. Of course I am only just beginning to understand where studying literature will take me but with this one I really did take more of an active role in the reading process.
It's a book for raising questions, something that made me think a lot about all kinds of things. Many of the questions I have had floating about in my mind for some time. Thoughts about life, what it is to be human and how we as humans connect with our world and each other.
So what's it all about? Well do not try to figure it out and expect answers or any eureka moments because I do believe doing so would be a mistake and will affect your enjoyment of some brilliant story-telling. For me it is a reflection of life on earth as a human race since life began ( more or less ) and essentially summed up that means a bloody mess with a few bits that seem to be connected somehow throughout the history of time.
I took this extract from the book which I think sums up what I am trying to say about it from Chapter 8 - Upstream which is in an epistolary form - ooh get me picking up the literature lingo already:
" .... it's about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilisation. Discipline v Permissiveness. Sticking to the letter of the law v sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
This all makes it sound pretty heavy but it is far from it. It's funny, quirky, moving, thought-provoking, thrilling and utterly gripping. This is the first book I have read that I really wanted to savour and take my time over. It's the first book I have read that I have actually shouted out to when Mr Barnes playfully teases us with a ' forgotten' name in the first chapter and like being in a pub quiz team I had to shout out the answer. Totally engaging.
Every chapter is different in style and voice. You will read the story of Noah like you have never read it before - Noah pops up throughout as one of the threads that binds the chapters together. You will have a lesson in art appreciation - which was one of my favourite chapters as I have a thing for art too. You will attend the trial of woodworms who will also feature regularly throughout. You will go on a cruise or two both of which will be nothing like you expected and also very relevant to what's happening in the world today. Ships and the sea are another theme. Ooh I forgot Jonah - that was a fab bit. There is lots of searching going on too and a quote related to searching which I think really sums up the intention of the book but I will let you find that quote yourself - because I forgot to write it down!
This was the kind of reading experience that I have been craving. It was enjoyable, it gave me pleasure. It was thought-provoking - it fed my soul. It was a learning journey and made me explore further into the realms of critical reading and literary theory.
There is an interesting essay on this book by Brian Finney which can be found on the net.
A superb offering from Julian Barnes which I heartily recommend.
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LibraryThing member LynnB
This book explores life and love through the ages, beginning with Noah's ark and ending with a futuristic look at death. And yes, it does have 10.5 chapters. It's not a single story but a look at life through various time periods, styles, and focal points. Yet, it hangs together with enough links
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to be satisfying as a novel...more than a set of inter-related stories. Each chapter is very different from the others...almost like enjoying a multi-course meal. Mr. Barnes is a great writer and this book made me think. Show Less
LibraryThing member baswood
The 10 and a half chapters of short stories that make up this novel are written to entertain and bye and large they do, if the reader can get past the first story which I found to be just plain crass. The Stowaway is a re-telling of of the story of Noah’s Ark from a humorous practical
“I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting.”
I immediately thought that if I was still this eighteen year old person then I might have found this book wonderfully enriching, but as I am not I don’t.
The novel was published in 1989 and has been hailed as a post-modern approach to the history of the world as a reflection of the human condition. I enjoyed some of the stories and appreciated some of the clever witty writing, but only when the crassness was not too overwhelming. Barnes references the story of Noah’s ark in every one of his stories I think, although I could not bring myself to search through the half chapter entitled Parenthesis (I had a feeling it was called Possession until I checked the contents list) to check this out. A mixed bag then that has amused and entertained many readers, but it didn’t do much for me especially as I knew where Mount Ararat was having seen it for myself. Three stars
PS I have got [Flaubert’s Parrot] on my shelf to read and I have a feeling I know exactly what it is going to be like, perhaps I can forget it is there.
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perspective, the jokes or really one extended joke are relentless and thirty three pages later I feared for the rest of the book. It does however serve to introduce one of the major themes that run through the book and that is the myth of storytelling. This is picked up and taken to the extreme in the chapter entitled ‘Shipwreck’ which is a deconstruction of Théodore Géricault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” (there is a reproduction of the painting enclosed in the book so that readers will not find themselves all at sea) - Oh my God I am beginning to sound like Barnes. Chapter seven starts off like this:“I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting.”
I immediately thought that if I was still this eighteen year old person then I might have found this book wonderfully enriching, but as I am not I don’t.
The novel was published in 1989 and has been hailed as a post-modern approach to the history of the world as a reflection of the human condition. I enjoyed some of the stories and appreciated some of the clever witty writing, but only when the crassness was not too overwhelming. Barnes references the story of Noah’s ark in every one of his stories I think, although I could not bring myself to search through the half chapter entitled Parenthesis (I had a feeling it was called Possession until I checked the contents list) to check this out. A mixed bag then that has amused and entertained many readers, but it didn’t do much for me especially as I knew where Mount Ararat was having seen it for myself. Three stars
PS I have got [Flaubert’s Parrot] on my shelf to read and I have a feeling I know exactly what it is going to be like, perhaps I can forget it is there.
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LibraryThing member janemarieprice
I don’t know about this one. It was recommended to me by a Barnes fan, but I’m hoping it just wasn’t the best place to start. This is a collection of very loosely linked stories - the best I can figure is most of them have a boat?. Well first I hate reading about boats for whatever reason -
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like boats, like being on boats, just haven’t liked anything I’ve read that was boat focused. And I just hated the first story so it started off rocky. However, the variation among the stories in tone, voice, mood, etc. is incredible and shows a great writing talent. So while this wasn’t my cup of tea, I’m hoping my next Barnes will be better. Show Less
LibraryThing member ashleyk44
When I read the first two chapters of this book I was blown away. The first is absolutely hysterical, and the second begins that way, but leaves you staring at the book in disbelief, unsure what to make of what just happened. I couldn't wait to read the rest, but I have to say that I was a little
While each story is very clever, and the connections that run through the book are fun to find, I found myself getting a little bored. The chapter titled "The Mountain" seemed to go on for much too long, and wasn't as witty as the others.
Nonetheless, I think this one is definitely worth reading. Even if it does become a bit slow in places, I can't argue with the mastery of Barnes in connecting all of these seemingly unconnected chapters, and in his ability to really make you think about the world around you.
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disappointed. While each story is very clever, and the connections that run through the book are fun to find, I found myself getting a little bored. The chapter titled "The Mountain" seemed to go on for much too long, and wasn't as witty as the others.
Nonetheless, I think this one is definitely worth reading. Even if it does become a bit slow in places, I can't argue with the mastery of Barnes in connecting all of these seemingly unconnected chapters, and in his ability to really make you think about the world around you.
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LibraryThing member John
This book, pace some of the blurb supporters, is not a novel….at least not in the traditional sense of having a protagonist and supporting characters, a narrative arc and a plot that may or may not work and may or may not be resolved in the end. I’m not sure what genre I would call it; it
If there is a unifying arc in this book it is the Ark and Noah himself. The book opens with a story of the voyage of the Ark told from the point of view of stowaways (woodworms) ; others of this species are later the subject of a story about a court case seeking to excommunicate woodworms for having weakened a chair that tumbled a Bishop and reduced him to a “state of imbecility”. The story, The Mountain, recounts the history of a Miss Ferguson who, in the 1800s,with a paid travelling companion, Miss Logan, makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat where Miss Ferguson happily lies to down to die in a cave; her bones are found over 100 years later by a former US astronaut who, having walked on the moon, makes his own pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and believes he has found Noah’s bones when he comes upon the remains of Miss Ferguson. Through all of these, it seems to me, Barnes ridicules the permeability and utter flexibility of faith that sees portents and answers in the strangest places and can, in the end, rationalize anything with reference to faith and the belief that it is not for us to discern the mind of God. I am rather with Barnes in thinking of God’s “routine and fairly repellent morality” and his role as a “moral bully” in the story of Jonah and whale. Elsewhere, in another piece, Barnes muses on the lack of a “single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself; maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn’t’ show God in the best possible light?”
Barnes has a jaundiced view of the moral capacities of human beings especially as they are manifested through great ideas or great movements: “…it’s about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilization. Discipline v. permissivenss. Sticking to the letter of the law v. sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v. doing the wrong thing for the right reason. How great ideas like the Church get bogged down in bureaucracy. How Christianity starts off as the religion of peace but ends up violent like other religions. You could say the same thing about Communism or anything else, any big idea.”
I like Barnes on history:
“History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it's connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. We, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by a decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush.
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes overlap; strange links, impertinent connections.”
I especially liked Barnes’s exploration and parsing of the painting, “The Raft of the Medusa” by Gericault (1819) based on a true incident in which a French naval ship, the Medusa, ran aground; some got to shore, but at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly fashioned raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days they were on the ocean; they survived starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. Barnes takes the painting apart and invites us to consider different interpretations of what Gericault had in mind with his use of light, of the numbers of people (more than the 15 rescued in reality), how they are posed on the raft and what those postures mean; also, what the painting can say to us about the incident itself and more broadly about life and class and morality. Barnes notes that Gericault did not paint the necessary cannibalism, but I think there is a hint of it: the figure at the far left bottom on the raft is clearly just a torso that has been split open at the chest and cut off just below the ribs. At the bottom, almost centre is the naked body of a man lying in the lap of an older man who has his back turned on the rescue ship on the horizon; to the far right, also at the bottom, is the body of woman whom we see only from about the neck down, she is on her back, her legs naked and open, her modesty preserved with a drape of cloth. Both the male and female figures share the same lighting effects; in life they would represent regeneration and birth through the possibility of mating; in death they mock that.
A very interesting and thought-provoking book.
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reminds me of Molina’s Sepharad: a book of ideas that, in the case of Barnes, ranges even more broadly across ideas or questions of the connections between art (writing, painting, music) and life; the role, meaning and purpose of religious belief; the moral capacities of animals versus humans with the latter coming off rather the worse in the comparison; the rightness/wrongness/impossibility of judging the actions of others taken in extreme circumstances and the unknowability of one’s own actions until faced with similar circumstances; the ‘reality’ of perception versus the ‘reality’ of the world and how the ‘reality’ of either shifts with the observer/actor so which is ‘real’; myth as collective memory but also something that refers us forward to something that will happen so that myth becomes reality; the fragility and permeability of personal relations that can shift and sour to degrees unimagined at the start; the need to look clearly at death as part of life; the attraction of, and need for, love in all its unfathomable aspects; the tendency to simplification (“…complicated matters were best understood using zestful intuition untainted by any actual knowledge or research.”); the gap between native peoples and those of a more “sophisticated” technological society and the uncertainty of where sympathies should lie.If there is a unifying arc in this book it is the Ark and Noah himself. The book opens with a story of the voyage of the Ark told from the point of view of stowaways (woodworms) ; others of this species are later the subject of a story about a court case seeking to excommunicate woodworms for having weakened a chair that tumbled a Bishop and reduced him to a “state of imbecility”. The story, The Mountain, recounts the history of a Miss Ferguson who, in the 1800s,with a paid travelling companion, Miss Logan, makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat where Miss Ferguson happily lies to down to die in a cave; her bones are found over 100 years later by a former US astronaut who, having walked on the moon, makes his own pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and believes he has found Noah’s bones when he comes upon the remains of Miss Ferguson. Through all of these, it seems to me, Barnes ridicules the permeability and utter flexibility of faith that sees portents and answers in the strangest places and can, in the end, rationalize anything with reference to faith and the belief that it is not for us to discern the mind of God. I am rather with Barnes in thinking of God’s “routine and fairly repellent morality” and his role as a “moral bully” in the story of Jonah and whale. Elsewhere, in another piece, Barnes muses on the lack of a “single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself; maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn’t’ show God in the best possible light?”
Barnes has a jaundiced view of the moral capacities of human beings especially as they are manifested through great ideas or great movements: “…it’s about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilization. Discipline v. permissivenss. Sticking to the letter of the law v. sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v. doing the wrong thing for the right reason. How great ideas like the Church get bogged down in bureaucracy. How Christianity starts off as the religion of peace but ends up violent like other religions. You could say the same thing about Communism or anything else, any big idea.”
I like Barnes on history:
“History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it's connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. We, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by a decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush.
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes overlap; strange links, impertinent connections.”
I especially liked Barnes’s exploration and parsing of the painting, “The Raft of the Medusa” by Gericault (1819) based on a true incident in which a French naval ship, the Medusa, ran aground; some got to shore, but at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly fashioned raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days they were on the ocean; they survived starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. Barnes takes the painting apart and invites us to consider different interpretations of what Gericault had in mind with his use of light, of the numbers of people (more than the 15 rescued in reality), how they are posed on the raft and what those postures mean; also, what the painting can say to us about the incident itself and more broadly about life and class and morality. Barnes notes that Gericault did not paint the necessary cannibalism, but I think there is a hint of it: the figure at the far left bottom on the raft is clearly just a torso that has been split open at the chest and cut off just below the ribs. At the bottom, almost centre is the naked body of a man lying in the lap of an older man who has his back turned on the rescue ship on the horizon; to the far right, also at the bottom, is the body of woman whom we see only from about the neck down, she is on her back, her legs naked and open, her modesty preserved with a drape of cloth. Both the male and female figures share the same lighting effects; in life they would represent regeneration and birth through the possibility of mating; in death they mock that.
A very interesting and thought-provoking book.
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LibraryThing member ragwaine
Short stories,original but at many times boring.
LibraryThing member the_awesome_opossum
This is a fun and lighthearted collection of short stories that ends up tackling the uncertainty of the human condition and the meaning of life constructed out of and against our interpretation of religion. Really. Or at least, that's what I got from it. Since apparently relativism is a big thing
History of the World leads with a story of Noah's Ark, a motif which most of the stories tie back into in one way or another. God is vicious and wrathful, Noah's an angry drunk, and clearly there's resentment among the animals over their playing favorites with the clean and unclean business. But as the stories progress, the readers seem to be drawn farther and farther away from God - from the religious fundamentalists who misuse God to their own ends, to the vaguely spiritual, to the secular humanists, to a Heaven that's crafted democratically, with abounding pleasure and nothing adversative and no God in sight.
With such a loss comes an existential crisis: what is the reason for the world, and how should one live, in light of this lack of a religious and moral guiding force? Barnes does not quite answer this, but I do like a line spoken by an ex-astronaut gone off on a search for Noah's Ark: "I went 240,000 miles to see the moon - and it was the earth that was really worth looking at."
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with this book.History of the World leads with a story of Noah's Ark, a motif which most of the stories tie back into in one way or another. God is vicious and wrathful, Noah's an angry drunk, and clearly there's resentment among the animals over their playing favorites with the clean and unclean business. But as the stories progress, the readers seem to be drawn farther and farther away from God - from the religious fundamentalists who misuse God to their own ends, to the vaguely spiritual, to the secular humanists, to a Heaven that's crafted democratically, with abounding pleasure and nothing adversative and no God in sight.
With such a loss comes an existential crisis: what is the reason for the world, and how should one live, in light of this lack of a religious and moral guiding force? Barnes does not quite answer this, but I do like a line spoken by an ex-astronaut gone off on a search for Noah's Ark: "I went 240,000 miles to see the moon - and it was the earth that was really worth looking at."
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LibraryThing member otterley
A clever and deceptively easy read. Barnes plays with different voices and kinds of narrative; interlocking phrases and themes, creating echoes and resonances throughout history - the peripheral and the marginal taking the centre from the start. History goes on while we are doing other things.
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Barnes uses comedy and bathos alongside a meditation on love; shows us the ability of humans to sail on while terrible things occur , taking us from the deluge to heaven along some quirky and unexpected paths. Show Less
LibraryThing member TedWitham
One of those quirky books, playful, which takes you from the Ark (and a nasty drunken Noah), through other disastrous sea voyages in northern Australia and west Africa, to a quest to find the Ark and a rather fake Noah. It's the history of the world in a tangential funny sense, but there is also
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insight behind the satire. Show Less
LibraryThing member kousouna
An extremely entertaining read that gives you a lot to think about. I love Julian Barnes!!!
LibraryThing member quondame
A deep rumination on woodworms on the Arc and other related maritime excursions with love and a rather loveless afterlife for spice. Somewhere between nightmare and dream is the strange heart of this biblical group of salted fantasies.
LibraryThing member AlCracka
Okay, yeah, this seems interesting. Rec'd by El and Jayme, and I wish you could add two names to that field. Annoying.
LibraryThing member byronemerson
The parts of this book that I liked, I liked a lot. Those sections were witty, irreverent, insightful, and offered an interesting viewpoint on entrenched ideas. When I encountered the sections that failed for me, I found them long-winded, with forced connectivity to the other sections, and yes,
I find most of the book worth reading. When you get to a part that bores you, skip it, it really doesn't get better. Enjoy the nuggets, treasures and jewels hidden here but don't keep digging expecting to find a mother lode of interestingness.
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boring enough that I wanted to stop reading the book. I find most of the book worth reading. When you get to a part that bores you, skip it, it really doesn't get better. Enjoy the nuggets, treasures and jewels hidden here but don't keep digging expecting to find a mother lode of interestingness.
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LibraryThing member wester
This book is really weird. The stories themselves are moderately weird, and the links between them elevate it to higher weirdness. I'm not sure if I like the book though. I don't dislike it either, I just don't know what to make of it. And I usually do like weird books.
LibraryThing member Sharon.Flesher
Clever. I liked it, but I would stop short of characterizing it as a life-changing experience.
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