Letters from London (Vintage International) - Softcover

Barnes, Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679761616 ISBN 13: 9780679761617

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995

Synopsis

A sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary life in London—from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, "an exceptionally accomplished [and] ingenious stylist" (The New York Review of Books).

"A splended collection of journalism ... uniformly fine, closely observed and informative." —The Wall Street Journal

With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

From the Inside Flap

With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.

Reviews

The essays in this collection of the celebrated British author of Flaubert's Parrot were originally published in The New Yorker and span the four years of Barnes's tenure as that magazine's London correspondent. From the debacle of Lloyd's of London's decline to the fatwa declared on Salman Rushdie, Barnes explores his topics with an innate curiosity and a merciless wit, using each event to explore the social and political landscape of modern London. If Letters from London has a shortcoming, it is one inherent in any such collection: lack of timeliness. With entries dating back to 1990, it is inevitable that portions of the book seem a bit stale. Some readers may be tempted to skip such missives as "Vote Glenda!" on actress Glenda Jackson's 1992 bid for a Parliamentary seat. But as Barnes notes in his preface, he is admirably "wary of zeitgeist journalism and decade summarizing," and it is this refusal to proselytize or prognosticate that distinguishes Barnes's observations. On the 1994 ceremonial opening of the "chunnel" linking Britain and France, and the British anxiety over a possible resulting influx of rabid French animals, he notes, "It was as if, lining up behind Mitterrand and the Queen as they cut the tricolor ribbons at Calais were packs of swivel-eyed dogs, fizzing foxes and slavering squirrels, all waiting to jump on the first boxcar to Folkestone and sink their teeth into some Kentish flesh." Probably of greatest interest to Barnes's many fans (and equally great numbers of Anglophiles), this collection is nonetheless a consistently pleasurable opportunity to watch a razor-sharp mind at work.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

British novelist Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot, 1985) uses his considerable wit to decipher the various wars--political, social, cultural--that seem, by his report, to keep life in England worth living. (Or anyway, worth watching.) The essays collected here, written originally for the New Yorker, mostly analyze protracted current conflict that seems unlikely to find resolution and, for that reason, bulges out helplessly into story: legendary French-English animosity, hardly scuppered by the 1994 unveiling of the Channel Tunnel (and chronicled in Barnes' "Froggy! Froggy! Froggy!" ); the struggle of the English royals to maintain dignity amid domestic comic melodrama ("Traffic Jam at Buckingham Palace" ). Barnes inadvertently shows why the British tend to make such ingenuously commanding narrators. He does it by dint of moral outrage, curiosity, and/or whimsy--uttering a word like seminonspineless nonchalantly; observing, "Rare is the landed viscount who desires an enigma in hornbeam for his own private puzzlement." Too much outrage can be a fetter, as in Barnes' uncharacteristically blunt piece on Salman Rushdie and the fatwa. But mostly, his comments work like a pleasant whiplash. Molly McQuade

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679761616
• ISBN 13: 9780679761617
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336