A History Of The World In 10½ Chapters (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
Ok, the first chapter of the book entitled "The Stowaway" is one of the most brilliant things i've ever read. If there ever was a more intriguing hypothetical account of Noah's Ark, I haven't read it. Sadly, the rest of the chapters are not as amazing. They are worth reading and interesting. They are engaging and inventive. But, they still aren't 5/5 stars good. I'm a tough critic. This is a solid 4 star work with some real five star moments. Barnes proves he's a creative thinker and able to delve into some important events in the history of both events and concepts (i.e. love, mental illness, and heaven for instance). At times he is wry and at other times he is completely serious and should be taken even more seriously for it. There are great historical accounts of the world based on true paintings and events and then more personal accounts that still seem just as valid for an understanding of the world's history. While the chapters are vastly different in terms of the topic and theme, time period, perspective, and setting, Barnes has an apt way of providing a distinguishing link between all of them, as if underneath it all deep within our sub conscious is naturally our own origins. In the meantime, Barnes is going to help us explain our own sense of survival and reaction to terrorism in "Franklin Hughes." He writes about the agony of waiting for death and hope in addition to how humans turn catastrophes into art in "Shipwreck." He analyzes sexism, mysticism, WWIII paranoia, and psychosis in "The Survivor." He tells of a story of one man misunderstanding another based on culture and race in "Upstream!" and celebrates as well as criticizes love in "Parenthesis" He shows us the fallibility of religion in "The Wars of Religion" and of heaven itself in "The Dream." He is ever aware of the immense shortcomings in both humanity and history. It is my opinion that he is just as brutal as he is forgiving.You will learn from this book and you will too investigate deeper thought into human events of the past. It will make you wonder which aspects of history really are true and it will help you re-examine those you thought could be true. He deconstructs history, and myth, and with the greatness of his writing, reminds us of what good there actually is in our species.Memorable Quotes:pg. 4 "It wasn't a nature reserve, that Ark of ours; at times it was more like a prison ship."..."They were chosen, they endured, they survived: It's normal for them to gloss over the awkward episodes, to have convenient lapses of memory. Bit I am not constrained in that way. I was never chosen. In fact like several other species, I was specifically not chosen. I was a stowaway."..."When I recall the Voyage, I feel no sense of obligation, gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on my lens. My account you can trust."pg. 6 "We weren't in any way to blame (you don't really believe that story about the serpent, do you? -it was just Adam's black propaganda), and yet the consequences for us were equally severe: every species wiped out except for a single breeding pair, and that couple consigned to the high seas under the charge of an old rogue with a drink problem who was already into his seventh century of life."..."Did you imagine that in the vicinity of Noah's palace (Oh, he wasn't poor, that Noah) there dwelt a convenient example of every species on earth? Come, come. No, they were obliged to advertise, and then select the best pair that presented itself. Since they didn't want to cause a iniversal panic, they announced a competition for twosomes-a sort of beauty contest.."pg. 12 "I don't know how best to break this to you, nut Noah was not a nice man. I realize this idea is embarrassing, since you are all descended from him; still, there it is He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us. He had a gopher-wood stave with which...well, some of the animals carry the stripes to this day. It's amazing what fear can do..."pg. 16 "Once, in a gale, Ham's wife lost her footing near the rail and was about to go overboard. The unicorn-who had deck privileges as a result of popular lobbying-galloped across and struck his horn through her trailing cloak, pinning it to the desk. Fine thanks he got for his valour; the Noahs had him casseroled one Embarkation Sunday. I can vouch for that. I spoke personally to the carrier hawk who delivered a warm pot to Shem's ark."pg. 19 "Again-I am reporting what the birds said...And the birds said Noah didn't know what he was doing-he was all bluster and prayer. It wasn't difficult, what he had to do, was it? "pg. 25 "If you think I am being contentious, it is probably because your species-I hope you don't mind my saying this-is so hopelessly dogmatic. You believe what you want to believe, and you go on believing it. But then, of course, you all have Noah's genes. No doubt this also accounts for the fact that you are often strangely incurious."pg. 27 "God said...He was creating for us the rainbow. The rainbow! Ha! It's a very pretty thing, to be sure, and the first one he produced for us, an iridescent semi-circle with a paler sibling beside it, the pair of them glittering in an indigo sky, certainly made a lot of us look up from our grazing. You could see the idea behind it: as the rain gave reluctant way to the sun, this flamboyant symbol would remind us each time that the rain wasn't going to carry on and turn into a Flood. But even so. It wasn't much of a deal. And was it legally enforceable? Try getting a rainbow to stand up in court."pg. 30 "He just couldn't handle the responsibility. He made some bad navigational decisions, he lost four of his eight ships and about a third of the species entrusted to him-he'd have been court-marshalled if there'd been anyone to sit on the bench. And for all his bluster, he felt guilty about losing half the Ark. Guilt. immaturity, the constant struggle to hold down a job beyond your capabilities-it makes a powerful combination, one which would have had the same ruinous effect on most members of your species. You could even argue, I suppose, that God drove Noah to drink."pg. 83 "But her Dad said you could tell from the antlers that the reindeer pulling the sleigh were stags. At first she only felt disappointed, but later resentment grew. Father Christmas ran an all-male team. Typical. Absolutely bloody typical, she thought."pg. 103 "The mind just got carried away. Never knew when to stop. But then the mind never does. It's the same with these nightmares"pg. 104 "Everything was connected, the weapons and the nightmares. That's why they'd had to break the cycle. Start making things simple again. Begin at the beginning. People said you couldn't turn the clock back, but you could. The future was in the past."pg. 125 "How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays, the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have it on the London stage within a year. A president is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is *for*"pg. 137 "How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky, how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for."pg. 134 "There always appear to be two explanations of everything. That is why we have been given free will, in order that we may choose the correct one."pg. 205 "Also I think cities make people lie to one another."pg. 226 "It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size of a florin to an expiring speck...Is love meant to glow on like this for a while after the set has been switched off?pg. 227 "I love you. For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of Vitamin C...These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them."pg. 134 "Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary."pg. 235 "A medical textbook doesn't immediately disenchant us; here the heart is mapped like the London underground. Aorta, left and right pulmonary arteries and veins, left and right subclavian arteries, left and right coronary arteries, left and right carotid arteries...it looks elegant, purposeful, a confident network of pumping tubes. Here the blood runs on time, you think."pg. 238 "But I can tell you why to love. The history of the world becomes brutally self important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it's unnecessary. Love won't change the history of the world...but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don't accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don't impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you're wearing. "pg. 239 "How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. It's as simple as that.We get scared by history we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates."pg. 304 "And scholarly people, they tend to last as long as anyone. They like sitting around reading all the books there are. And then they love arguing about them. Some of these arguments-she casts an eye to the heavens-go on for millennium after millennium. It just seems to keep them young, for some reason, arguing about books."
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries than fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with the bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story around them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulations; we call it history. Julian Barnes provides an unconventional, subjective treatise on history, not as a science but as a collection of mostly unreliable fables. As an intellectual exercise I found his account often brilliant in its 'impertinent connections' and irreverent look at historical and biblical figures. As a collection of loosely linked short stories I must confess it often failed to keep me interested and invested in the characters; I usually read one chapter and put the book aside for a few days in order to explore other literary projects I had going on. This is part of the reason I hesitated more than a month about how to be honest about my experience without potentially turning future readers off from what could arguably be described as a masterpiece. Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like. Using a technique that has some similarities with David Mitchell or Italo Calvino, the ten chapters may appear at first glance random and irrelevant to the grand vision alluded to in the title, but the common maritime themes and repetead motifs accumulate in time and somehow gear together like one of those antique clockwork mechanisms. Briefly the journey offered will transport the reader from the patriarch Noah dealing with stowaways on his Ark to the sinking of the Titanic, from the deck of a research ship in the Antarctic to the wastelands of Chernobyl, from a nameless crater on the moon to the wooden throne of a medieval Bishop in France, from a tourist cruiser in the Egeean to the cetacean that swallowed Jonah, from the snowy peaks of Mount Ararat to the destitude survivors of the Medusa raft. A game of six degrees of separation will try to link a lost Amazonian tribe with the fate of William Huskisson (look him up: Death froze him as an instructive cameo about the nature of progress.). Need another example? Here's a connection between Noah and Father Christmas: She was a girl who believed what she was told, and the reindeer flew. She must have seen them first on a Christmas card. Six, eight, ten of them, harnessed side by side. She always imagined that each pair was man and wife, a happy couple, like the animals that went into the Ark. As for the Rudolf's Red Nose? Why, Chernobyl of course. History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce The element of humour, of satire and bufoonery, of challenging established myths and too rigid thinking modes, is one of the constant threads woven from story to story ( What was Jonah doing inside the whale in the first place? It's a fishy story, as you might expect. ). It goes hand in hand with tragedy, as the quote above states, and it doesn't try to belittle the real issues touched upon, like terrorism, or rasism, or ecological disasters. But it might provide the detachment and the strength needed to look at these heavy issues from beyond the easy prepackaged ideas of political or religious dogma.By far my two favorite chapters are the non-fiction ones: Shipwreck is an essay on the human condition, expressed through a lengthy commentary on the significance and importance of Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece Le Radeau de la Méduse. I've seen it a couple of times - a giant darkish painting on a wall in the Louvre, but it turns out I was in need of a professional critic in order to really 'look' at it in the proper way: We don't just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine, we don't just become the sufferers. They become us. And the picture's secret lies in the pattern of its energy. Look at it one more time: at the violent waterspout building up through those muscular backs as they reach for the speck of the rescuing vessel. All that straining - to what end? There is no formal response to the painting's main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. To balance this bleak outlook of the soul lost in a sea of indifference and ultimate destitution, Barnes gives us the half chapter Parenthesis where he breaks out of the story and addresses the audience directly, using a couple of quotes in a way not so different from what we do around here on goodreads when we want to stress a point: What will survive of us is love. tPhilip Larkin - An Arundel Tomb--- The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true remaining mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature - or for love for that matter. tMavis GallantAs a commentary on all the effort that went into the rest of the stories, I found this accolade well worth the price of admission and the most memorable moment of the whole journey, turning the perspective from the global to the personal, the only real level at which we can experience the world, and the only level at which we can finally find a sheltering shore from the Deluge. In one final wacky analogy, we are offered the connection between Noah's Ark and Love: Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an Ark on which two might escape the Flood. It may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment. So we must be careful of our hearts, and treat the sentiment with the respect and reverence it deserves, as apparently our survival, both as a species and as individuals can be reduced to our capacity for love, our willingness to build up and preserve instead of consumme and destroy: I Love You. For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we'll use them without thought; we won't be able to resist. Oh, we say we won't, but we will. We'll get drunk, or lonely, or - likeliest of all - plain damn hopeful. And there are the words gone, used up, grubbied.[...] These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them. As it often happens since I started writing longer reviews and taking notes during reading (bookmarking on ebooks works great) , I realize I begin to appreciate the effort of the author and the quality of the presentation more as I dissect it and try to put my impressions in order. I believe a second reading might convince me to give the maximum number of stars and my currrent lukewarm reaction may be the result of outside stress and disorderly living - which stopped me from giving the book the full attention it deserves.
What do You think about A History Of The World In 10½ Chapters (1990)?
How do you categorise a book which is part fictional, part non-fiction and part personal reflection? Or a book which links the era of the Old Testament to the near modern-day exploration of the moon? In some ways this is one of Barnes' most original and inventive books. It's very readable (as usual for Barnes) and thought-provoking, although at times the links between the very disparate stories seem tenuous, despite recurring themes like Noah's Ark, woodworm, religious belief and sailing the oceans.There is a double link between this book and his most recent one, 'Levels of Life': one because that book is also a mix of genres, but also, more significantly, because both books describe aspects of Barnes' relationship with his wife Pat Kavanagh. By the time 'A History' was published in 1989 they'd been together about ten years, and the 'half' chapter is a moving description of their closeness. 'Levels of Life' was written in the aftermath of her death in 2008, and is an even more moving account of how Barnes is struggling to cope without her.I've just re-read 'A History' because I found the copy I'd lent to my son on his bookshelf, just after he died suddenly in April. I used one of the incidents in it - from the very funny last chapter about what heaven might be like - in my eulogy for him. And I used some of the ideas in 'Levels of Life' for the eulogy, too.There is a tenuous connection with Julian Barnes - he was born in Leicester, where I used to live and where my son lived, and he is a supporter of the local football team as we are/were. The incident in the last chapter describes Barnes' fantasy about Leicester City winning the FA Cup and (later in the chapter) Barnes himself scoring the winning goal. I wonder what the author himself thinks of this somewhat flippant if entertaining conclusion to the book, 35 years later?
—John
I've had 'A History of the World in 10½ Chapters' on my "to read" list for almost 15 years, but kept putting it off. Now I know why I was dithering. Despite the glowing commendations of university professors and English literature elitists, I simply could not warm to the text, clever though it was.A loosely connected series of 10 1/2 short stories, art reviews, re-imagined histories, personal ramblings, epistolary travelogues and personal anecdotes, this is the epitome of post-modern fiction. Julian Barnes ties together his mish-mash of tales with the recurrence of woodworm & reindeer, pilgrimage & shipwreck, doubt & faith. Eclectic and unorthodox, this will not suit every taste. Let me say up front, if you like linear plot development, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU.Settings include Mount Ararat (where the Ark made landfall), the moon, heaven, a jungle, a monastery, and a French courthouse. My main obstacles to enjoyment were the arrogant, foolish and misogynistic male narrators (complemented by the delusional, judgmental female narrators) and the author's struggles with religious belief and Biblical history.The voices are mostly male, including: a worm, an academic, a lawyer, an actor, an astronaut and the author himself. The story about the egotistical academic and the psychology of self-interest made me cringe and nearly put down the book altogether. In a similar way, the stories told from Barnes' own point of view felt highly self-indulgent, like intellectual masturbation. I did like the piece on Gericault's "Scene of Shipwreck" which looked at the wreck of the Medusa and told the story of the boat, the survivors, the artist and the process. Nice bit of art analysis. I also thought the concluding story about the difficulties of making Heaven satisfactory was a fun little thought-experiment.Putting on my feminist glasses, I have to suggest that the women in the book - an insane cat-lady obsessed with her ex-boyfriend, a religious fanatic obsessed with her dead father, a deceitful and narcissistic astronaut's wife - are all utterly despicable and essentially defined by their relationship to significant men in their lives. Loathsome. If you want something similar, only better, try the following...1) Retelling of Noah's Ark - Timothy Findley's 'Not Wanted on the Voyage'2) Funny fake legal trials - Ian Frazier's 'Coyote V. Acme'3) Bold, multilingual Victorian-era female explorers who brave exotic lands - Elizabeth Peters' 'Crocodile on the Sandbank'4) Crazy American astronauts - Stephen King's short story "I Am the Doorway" in the collection 'Night Shift'
—Moira Fogarty
I've been intending to read this book ever since my English Literature tutor raved about it back in my college years. So, put that weight of expectation behind it for starters. Add to this the considerable lure that both it and the writer receive in the press, and I think I was expecting something a little different. What we actually have here is ten - well, eleven let's be honest - short stories of varying quality. While they provide interesting viewpoints, in some cases, they either seem to end too soon, just as they get remotely interesting, or they go on, and on, and on. I see, in retrospect, that these were essentially essays on the human condition. Like many things marked as 'must-read literature' each story fails to provide a punchline worth remembering. There's an overall theme of flood, destruction and human weakness repeating throughout history which the stories illustrate sufficiently, but without real feeling. This is all fair enough and perhaps, if I had read this several years ago, I would have been more open to its efforts. I just felt less about this book than it seems to expect. It didn't draw me in and seemed glad to be rid of me. that's the impression left by this book. I will be trying other books by Julian Barnes, but on this example I don't feel much awe and I hope that his other work will appeal to me more deeply.I would have liked to enjoy this, but as a 'loo book' it worked and, while not a difficult read, it seems to stop the action or narrative just as something is about to happen. This bugs the hell out of me. Hence, two stars this time. Sorry, Julian Barnes.
—J K
