Meta-joke

This joke is so meta it makes my head spin:Courtesy of The Onion.

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes - review

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
by Julian Barnes

“Religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.”

Inflammatory words to some, but British novelist Julian Barnes is not out to intentionally ruffle feathers. When you consider his opening sentence, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,” it is clear that there is something far more interesting afoot.

Barnes, two-time nominee for the Man Booker Prize, is interested in death, or more specifically, in mankind’s reactions to inevitability. It is oblivion that is feared, he suggests, the nothing which awaits us all, which lends the title of his pseudo-memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of a subtle double-meaning perfectly in keeping with an author often praised for his discriminating wit.

With characteristic meticulous prose, marked by bursts of glorious low humour, Barnes undertakes an examination of death, using his family as a lynchpin on which to hang a wide-reaching inquiry into the beliefs of the world’s great thinkers. “Most of them are dead, and quite a few of them are French,” he warns, with Jules Renard the main resource, and dozens more philosophers, novelists, and composers as backup.

Barnes takes as his starting point the death of his parents; a self-effacing atheistic father and a domineering agnostic mother. Oddly to Barnes, the death of his mother affected him the more, as “[his father’s] death was just his death; her death was their death.”

Under such parentage, Barnes “had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-referring that an English education entailed.” Barnes and his brother (the philosopher Jonathan Barnes) grow up firmly atheist, understanding that religion, and Christianity in particular, had lasted so long “because it was a beautiful lie, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the overarching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel.”

It is only in the second-half of his life that Barnes begins to firmly question this conviction, but not out of any switch in belief systems. “If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.”

What fascinates Barnes is why we should be so worried about oblivion; as we never worry about our lack of existence before we were born, why do we believe what happens after we die would be any different?

Fear of death, he decides, comes from its implacability. Unlike the concept of God, which has evolved over the centuries “from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party,” death “can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn’t have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful…It is impervious to insult, complaint, or condescension.”

It is the demise of personality which frightens Barnes the most, the reduction of whatever we are into intangible nothingness. “Remaining in character: this is what we hope for, this we cling to, as we look ahead to everything collapsing…I doubt that when my time comes I shall look for the theoretical comfort of an illusion farewelling an illusion…I shall want to remain in what I shall obstinately think of as my character.”

Despite Barnes prowess with words, it cannot be denied that, no matter how amiable and erudite the narrator, an obsession with death can become tiresome. While one could not ask for a better explorer to lead the way, Barnes’ constant jump-cutting from philosophical principles to religious iconography to personal confessions is exhausting at times, and a judicious trimming of Barnes’ ideas would have been most welcome.

Nevertheless, this is firmly a case of having too much of a good thing. When it comes to death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of has more personality, vitality, and depth in any one of its paragraphs than the entirety of the numerous collections of comforting platitudes and bland Chicken Soup homilies that tend to congregate whenever and wherever death rears its head.

There is comfort in the unknowable, Barnes suggests, and for those willing to embrace uncertainty – or, to misquote Emily Dickenson’s final words, the rising fog – Nothing to Be Frightened Of is something to be enamored of.

Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press, April 20, 2008

I guess this is the next logical step...

Oprah Launches Own Reality

First full sentence of whatever page I'm on in novels currently being read, Saturday, April 12, 2008

Laid out in his bed at his own house next door with a powdered-sugar moustache on his upper lip, Doug contemplated sleep, which lurked around his head and gently covered him with darkness.
Farewell Summer (page 7) by Ray Bradbury

It spiralled away safely and joined some pals investigating the malodorous hockey bag in the corner.
Yellowknife (page 58) by Steve Zipp

Kellas bought a first-class, one-way ticket to New York at one of the airline counters.
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (page 39) by James Meek

Booking Through Thursday challenge, April 10, 2008

Booking Through Thursday is a literary-themed blog with a new challenge for its readers every (you guessed it) Thursday. Why Thursday? Why is the sky blue? Some things are not meant to be known.

This week's challenge has caught my eye, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

• Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)


• Turn to page 123.


• What is the first sentence on the page?


• The last sentence on the page?


• Now . . . connect them together….(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

My nearest book is Matt Ruff's terrific Bad Monkeys (What can I say? I'm a sucker for novels with Monkey in the title - see also: Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys).

First sentence: So Phil's like: "The cat wasn't enough?"

Last sentence: The pictures were practically life-size, at least it seemed that way, and each one had a caption: MILES DAVIS MONROE, AGE 16 - the 16 was flashing in red - JORDAN GRAHAM, AGE 17, VICTOR TODD, AGE 17, NICHOLAS MARTINESCU, AGE 16, et cetera, et cetera.

Here we go:

So Phil's like: "The cat wasn't enough?" And I'm all: "As if!" I mean, would the cat be enough for you? I suppose some teens might find solace in a furry bundle of indiscriminate love, but not me. No, Friday nights were not made for quiet movies with felines and popcorn. Fridays were designed for the release of everything that has beaten you down Monday thru Thursday. Fridays were parties, drinking, schmoozing, and all else in between. I would not be alone tonight. Let Phil have his cat, I've got a life.

I checked my Facebook Friends list for some potential date mates. My screen blinked my choices. The pictures were practically life-size, at least it seemed that way, and each one had a caption: MILES DAVIS MONROE, AGE 16 - the 16 was flashing in red - JORDAN GRAHAM, AGE 17, VICTOR TODD, AGE 17, NICHOLAS MARTINESCU, AGE 16, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, that was fun. But seriously, read Bad Monkeys, it's a twisted good time. And far better than what I just wrote.