“His mother had shaken off the effects of her magazine and stood up” (3).“He suspected it was rude. Things you didn’t know abut, or weren’t meant to know about, usually turned out to be rude. Like the barber’s pole. That was obviously rude. The previous place just had an old bit of painted wood with colours twirling round it. The one here worked by electricity, and moved in whirly circles all the time. That was ruder, he thought. Then there was the binful of magazines. He was sure some of them were rude. Everything was rude if you wanted it to be. This was the great truth about life which he’d only just discovered. Not that he minded. Gregory like rude things” (7). *This remind me of Notes from Underground.“He must stop thinking that he could win a gold medal in a peeing-high-against-a-wall competition” (8).“Gregory saw himself reborn from beneath the shroud, unchanged except that his ears stuck out more” (10). *Wow. What a description of the aftermath of a haircut.“She watchfully half-led him back to the chair, as if drippingness were close to blindness” (20)."That night, Anders Boden lined up all the insults he had received from his wife and stacked them as neat as any woodpile" (38)."She said it as harshly as she could, contemptuous of the whole world of men, with their cigars and mistresses and vain, stupid beards" (50).*I love the first two stories in this collection.“His attempts at chastity failed with comic frequency” (113).“The reason he didn’t play on Sunday, I read, was ‘not due to disinclination on Eddie’s part, or grouchiness on Mr. Steinler’s, but to the primness of our nationals which stultifies gaiety like an ingrowing toenail’” (192).“The manufacturer’s name on its metal badge was Thor. The god of thunder sits and growls in the outer reaches of suburbia” (204).“There’s a triangular green bitten into by negligent motorists…” (207).“ ‘Jim’s well out of it. You should have seen the expression on his face when she got yacking. You could hear his mind wandering’” (211).“The discovery was made in the following way. It was a question of bulbs. A friend in a neighbouring village offered to pass on some surplus narcissi” (212).“ ‘I’m not the voice of reason,’ I said. ‘So don’t expect too much’” (213).“Because we want—need—to see old age as a time of serenity? I now think this is one of the great conspiracies of youth. Not just of youth, but of middle age too, of every single year until that moment when we admit to being old ourselves. And it’s a wider conspiracy because the old collude in our belief. They sit there with a rug over their knees, nodding subserviently and agreeing that their revels now have ended” (217).“…and his eyes express shame at his maimed articulacy” (226).“Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist” (229).“I had once scored a piece for two clarinets and two bassoons. This represented an act of considerable optimism on my part, since at the time there were only two bassoonists in the country, and one of them was consumptive” (230).“Alcohol, which I once gave up, is now my most faithful companion. And the most understanding!” (233).“A. would try to forbid it on grounds of morbidity. But who is allowed to be morbid, if not a corpse” (233).“When I was a young man, I was hurt by criticism. Now, when I am melancholy, I reread unpleasant words written about my work and am immensely cheered up. I tell my colleagues, ‘Always remember, there is no city in the world which has erected a statue to a critic’” (238-239).
The Silence TableThat Brancusian table with its twelve seats, eleven of them duly occupied by eleven characters, each of them waiting for his lemon. The twelfth is forever empty for is forever reserved to the lemons’ distributor – Death. But before leaving with the yellow fruit in hand, each occupant has to tell his story, has to make sense of his life and to acknowledge his place in the world. So maybe Julian Barnes’s Lemon Table is not about old age and death after all, just as Brancusi’s sculpture is not about waiting. But both are surely about the power of art to give sense to the human feelings, to human existence. Like Anders Bodén, the hero of the brilliant Story of Mats Israelson, who, for more than twenty years polishes an old story as a gift for the woman he has loved, thus rising not only the narrative but also his own feelings above the oblivion:…he worked at the story until he had it in a form that would please her: simple, hard, true.In fact, the main theme of the book is love, be it creative or procreative. For the retired major Jacko Jackson, who has visited his mistress Babs once a year for twenty-three years, love is a means to escape the dullness of the quotidian: “She was – what was that phrase they used nowadays? – his window of opportunity” (Hygiene) For the 81-year-old man who leaves his wife to settle with his mistress of 65, love is his mutiny against decrepitude but also against the preconception that old means already dead or waiting for dying (The Fruit Cage). Reading, even cooking recipes, is love that slows the falling into Alzheimer nothingness of the beloved one (Appetite). And then there is love as a source of creation. In the last story, The Silence, the old, drunken and apparently embittered Sibelius, whose love for music cannot be turned into creation anymore, is well aware that it is this love that defines him: 'Certainly, I am neurotic and frequently unhappy, but that is largely the consequence of being an artist rather than the cause.'Finally, the two kinds of Eros are harmonized in The Revival, the story of the 65 year-old Turgenev’s last love for an actress of 25. A bittersweet love which “move il sole e l’altre stele” precisely because it is unfulfilled: Like most of his life’s writing, the paly was concerned with love. And as in his life, so in his writing, love did not work. Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness, there was always an inequality of feelings or intention present. Such was love’s nature.Each of the eleven stories in the volume is about love in one sense or another. In each one of them, love is sought to escape time.Each stool around Brancusi’s table has the form of an hourglass. However, there is no sand dripping the time. The occupants are gone; their voices are but vague memories, their individuality already forgotten. But the seats are there, frozen into eternity. They will continue to speak about love, and suffering, and human imperfections and of death as not the end of all things as long as someone will listen to them. Like Barnes’s book does.
What do You think about The Lemon Table (2005)?
"Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist."Julian Barnes is the crane of modern writers, ruining me for all the geese out there. I can’t remember the specifics of most of the short stories in this collection, but weeks later I can tell you that Barnes’ writing held me captive throughout. My mom, who shares my love of Barnes, describes him as “slice of thought.” His ability to get inside of the way we think astonishes me.I love his characters, starting with a boy who’s convinced that the barber is out to get him, and I adore the emotional setting in which his characters reside.Our way of conversing was long-established: companionable, chummy, oblique; warm, yet essentially distant. English, oh yes it's English. In my family we don't do hugging and back-slapping, we don't do sentimentality. Rites of passage: we get our certificates by mail."Aging is the theme which holds this collection together, but it doesn’t feel sad or slightly beyond my viewpoint. In fact, I forgot that most of his protagonists are much older than I am because I understood their thoughts and concerns. I identified with regret and wasted opportunities and the fear at what lies ahead. I even appreciated the darker sides of their natures."That was all you needed to know about the heart: where the grain lay. Then with a twist, with a gesture, you could destroy it."If you’re looking for plot-driven stories about people you know, Barnes is not for you. But if you’re looking vignettes wrapped around thought-provoking, beautiful language, I strongly recommend The Lemon Table.
—Alena
I read this following my introduction to Barnes: The Sense of an Ending. I found these sentences told reams of stories in a way at which the novel only hinted. The introductory story left me with the sense that I had been acquainted with its protagonist for years and that we might meet on the street where I could compliment him on a new and flattering haircut--which in reality hadn't changed a bit since we were boys. I recommend the book to music lovers, devotes of rhythm, and those with a predisposition toward melancholy humor.
—Patrick Garrett
The second short story collection I read by Barnesy. It was written before A History of the World, and as such one expects it to be less good. I thought it was less good, at least, but I still enjoyed it. This collection had one central theme running through it: death. Which felt a bit morbid to me, but I knew what I was up against before I opened the book. And while it is clearly about death and old age, the other great theme which Barnesy regularly addresses was present here as well: Love. And just as in A History of the World, he makes some philosophical observations, which were interesting, but less well developed as in the aforementioned book. Which did not make them any less interesting, mind you, but the observations seemed more like an afterthought to me; something between the acts. Death still has the leading role.Apart from the main theme, I enjoyed the typical Barnesian humor. Pithy statements and funny descriptions, all somehow relating to the human condition. I particularly enjoyed the music-related stories; one about a man who makes it his job to punish those who dare to cough or make any other noise during a concert (don't you love reading about pedantic people? they're so entertaining); the other about a famous composer (I think it's Schubert, given the hints in the story). Which is another thing which strikes me about Barnesy: he frequently writes stories about real historical people (another story in this book tells us about the last love affair of Turgenev, the Russian author). This is something I find admittedly curious, but it does become an interesting game: who is he talking about this time? (He rarely lets you know from the start.) Admittedly, while working my way through his oeuvre, I have discovered that he does this repeatedly, which starts grating after a while. I too find famous historical people interesting (especially literary ones), but I'm not sure if I would dare to appropriate part of their history to write fiction about them. This is something typically Barnesian. It is fascinating, though. I admit that I did not think I would like this collection as much as A History of the World, and Barnesy has, unfortunately, failed to surprise me much this time. There is markedly less humor in this collection, and a lot less wacky subjects he addresses (which I love about him). The stories are by far not as linked together as in A History of the World, either, and there's also something in the way he addresses The Big Themes. In A History of the World he does this explicitly only in one of the chapters, and in the other chapters reverts to really specific situations which one may find difficult to interpret separately (as entertaining as they are). In this story collection he talks about several subjects, and philosophizes about them in a not-very-systematic way in the individual stories, which is fine considering the characters doing the philosophizing, but feels less satisfying than in the other collection, because it feels like there is less of a unity.But an average Barnes is still better than many other writers I know (in my humble opinion). So yes, I did enjoy this. Comparison, alas, is the thief of joy.
—Helena
