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"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who is already there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he's partnered with Susan Mcleod, a fine player who's forty-eight, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how -- gradually, relentlessly -- everything falling apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It's a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, "first love fixes a life forever"--… (more)
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What follows is in part an account of Paul and Susan’s life together. And apart. Susan is surprisingly adventurous. Paul is full of pride and conceit. When they get expelled from the tennis club they are almost gleeful. But this is not a brief summer romance, a necessary step in Paul’s romantic and erotic education. This is love. Or what passes for love. So when they eventually escape to London, buy an ex-council house, and get on with things, that’s just part of it. Heartbreak can be part of a love story too, obviously. As can decline, abandonment, disdain, caring, fond memories, self-delusion and more.
Julian Barnes presents Paul initially in the first person, this being a story that Paul is telling us. At some point, however, Paul’s own story moves to the third person, a grammatical distancing from himself perhaps. Paul is never a comfortable character. At times he seems like an alien in his own story. And that too puts up barriers for the reader. It’s as though Barnes doesn’t want us to get too close to Paul, as though he wants us to critically observe and possibly judge him. Even if the judgement he solicits is understanding forgiveness. I confess I never warmed to Paul and his unsympathetic portrayal appeared to have no further redeeming qualities. Susan, on the hand, is a sad figure who we never fully get to know. In part that is because this is Paul’s story and it’s clear that he never really gets to know Susan either, though his curious incuriousness is troubling. Maybe Paul’s love story is really a story of self love, which is rather disappointing.
There are moments here that are compelling. But the story, the characters, and especially their emotional arch never really captivate. Julian Barnes can, has, and probably will, do better. Fortunately this is not his only story. And for now it is not recommended.
Paul looks back at his life and the love of his life, Susan. He met her when he was only 19, she, at the time, was almost 30 years older, but fascinated by
After writing certain kinds of biographies about Shostakovich and Sarah Bernhardt, Julian Barnes returns with a novel about the greatest topic in literature: love. And it is not meant to end well, like most of the great love stories; neither Romeo and Juliet nor Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary found the love they dreamt of and could live it.
The story is told from elderly Paul’s perspective. Many decades have passed when he remembers how it all began, but he does not judge his younger self, nor smile at his naiveté. He takes young Paul just like he was: innocent, inexperienced and with great expectations. There were adults around him telling him that he was just dreaming and naive – but this did not keep him from falling for the elder woman. His unconditional love and admiration for Susan are compelling, but the reader senses that this will not end well. However, it does not turn out as expected since Susan is not the woman she seemed to be. Taken from her natural surroundings, she is completely lost. Her roots are cut and she does not get a grip on the new life.
It is a sad story, but Paul doesn’t regret it:
“What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love’s nature and working to be.”
Julian Barnes is a great writer, he knows how to tell a story, how to pace it perfectly and he finds the right words to have his characters express themselves. What I liked especially throughout the novel was the search for a definition of what the big four-letter-word ultimately means. He concludes that it can be happy or unhappy but it surely will be “a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely”. Well, that’s it maybe, surrendering yourself, come what may and adhering to it.
A wonderfully told novel, sad but enchanting.
But from there, it all becomes rather routine and monotonous. They decamp to London, Paul starts to work, and Susan descends into alcoholism at a speed that would make Alison from Melrose Place proud. This seems a rather cheap device for pulling the couple apart - surely there are enough challenges for a young man in his 20s and a woman in her 50s to face, than this. And Paul reveals himself loyal, devoted, rather colourless, and Susan behaves like a pantomime drunk. From there it is all predictably downhill
The premise that everyone has one story to tell, however unremarkable most of their lives, is a a good one. Its just that this story beyond the initial chapters just isn't very interesting and is depressingly predictable
There's a lot of play with the uncertainties of memory, the way the story we are trying to tell and the viewpoint we are telling it from define the way we remember things. The narrator, Paul, whom Barnes doesn't seem to like very much, rambles around endlessly before he gets to telling us about the moments at which he acted in ways he's now ashamed of, and at times in Part III there's a distinct feeling that the book has run into the sand.
There are some very good parts in this, but you do come out of it wishing that Barnes had written it as a short story instead of a novel.
While well written, there's no climax. The story ebbs and flows, but there's no sharp, memorable twist as in The Sense of an Ending. Recommended for Julian Barnes fans, but not essential reading.
I read this book too quickly. It does not deserve a skim but a slow read and appreciation of the excellent writing and storytelling inside.
The second part of the story tells of the unraveling of their affair. Having moved in together, Paul starts law school and Susan "keeps house" at times going back and taking care of affairs at her home. Reality sets in when Paul discovers Susan's secret drinking. From her things to from bad to worse; yet, his devotion to her is almost beyond belief. She becomes a serious alcoholic.
The final section of the book is philosophical as Paul is now an older man who looks back and reflects on his love of Susan. His life takes him to many places of the world; a few other women come and go, but he never makes a commitment to marriage. How does one's first serious love affect the rest of life? Does her remember clearly or are his memories clouded with what he hoped to be or what he dreaded. Basically, however, life goes on.
I loved the first part of the book; got a bit tired during the second part; and even more so during the third until the very ending. Overall, a good read; says something about devotion and memory.
I liked the first part of this book, where our young college-age
I only gave "The Sense of an Ending" two and a half stars, and so I guess this gets about the same.
So begins The Only Story by Julian Barnes, a beautifully wrought look at love in the form of a decade-long affair between Paul, beginning when he was
In the second part, Susan and he run away together. As she slips into alcoholism, his love lasts but it no longer holds any of the vestiges of joy and playfulness of the first days. Paul still wants to protect her but he also realizes that he must protect himself and so he distances himself from this part of their story in the third voice, ‘he’. Finally, when it becomes clear to him that he cannot save Susan from herself, he leaves and we learn how the rest of his life proceeds without her.
We are now present with Paul in his later years when time and separation allows him to reflect on his time with Susan and on love in general and so he speaks in the second voice, the more objective ‘you’ showing both distance and a desire to understand how love has changed his life even long after the affair ended. In the end, he walks back through the years, through ‘you’ and ‘he’, ending in ‘I’ as he finally moves to goodbye and ‘the shutting of the doors’.
Julian Barnes is easily one of the greatest wordsmiths of our age. In The Only Story, he has taken what could have seemed a rather mundane love story and made it into a beautiful and sad tale about love, what it means, and how it moves us even over the long distance of time and separation. It is a story full of gorgeous imagery, often all-too-human characters and, of course, fascinating reflections on the only story - love.
Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review
"And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t."
And so, his retelling that began with
As in The Sense of an Ending, Barnes’s writing is full of reflective detail and emotion, here with compulsively readable sections written in a poignant second-person point-of-view that slayed me with its experiential feel. My favorite by Barnes.
(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.
This is the story of Paul, who at age nineteen, falls in love with a married woman twice his age. Now in his 70s, Paul is looking back over the years he spent with Susan; he is trying to find the meaning of love and also
“Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analyzed it, sought to understand its shape, it’s colour, it’s weight and it’s boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshaken given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of him, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.“ The sad truth is not that we get over an early love, but that we do. We grow up and mature against our better judgement; compassion fatigue and anger fatigue in equal measure.
This is a book for those who favor character-driven novels. It is a sad story about love, loss, and memory. It is surprisingly engrossing for one that focuses on the internal world of a young man’s mind. We follow Paul’s thoughts and rationalizations as he analyzes his and Susan’s relationship. He makes notes on the definition of love. He becomes obsessed, and his obsession has a lasting influence. He thinks he can “rescue” Susan, but as we learn more about her background, the reader can see the futility of Pauls’ efforts, though he cannot.
As the novel moves along, the narrative voice changes from first to second to third person, reflecting the ways a person’s thinking changes at different stages of life. By the end, we find Paul trying to unpick the past and figure out what he could have done differently. I have now read four of Barnes’ works and find his writing consistently outstanding.
“Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever.”
4.5