267- ] Enlish Literature - Julian Barnes

267- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes 

British author and critic 

Julian Barnes lives with his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in an elegant house with a beautiful garden in north London. The long library where the interview was conducted is spacious and quiet. Overlooking the garden, it has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a comfortable sofa and chairs, an exercise bike in a corner (“for the winter”), and a huge billiard table. On the walls are a series of cartoon portraits of writers by Mark Boxer—Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, V. S. Pritchett, among others— “some because they are very good cartoons, others because I admire the writers.” There is a superb photograph of George Sand in middle age, taken by Nadar in 1862, and a short original letter by Flaubert, a present from Barnes’s publishers when they had sold one million copies of his books in paperback. Barnes works down the corridor in a yellow-painted study with an enormous three-sided desk, which holds his typewriter, word processor, books, files, and other necessities, all of which he can reach with a swivel of his chair.

Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and soon after the family moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford. After university he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and then read for the bar, while writing and reviewing for various publications. His first novel, Metroland, was well received when it was published in 1980, but it was his third book, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), that established his reputation as an original and powerful novelist. Since then he has produced six novels, including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters(1989) and The Porcupine (1992); a collection of short stories, Cross Channel (1996); and Letters from London (written when he was The New Yorker’s London correspondent). At the time of the interview his latest novel, Love, etc. had just been published in England to good reviews; it will be published in the States in February of 2001.

Tall and handsome and very fit, Barnes looks ten years younger than his fifty-four years. His well-known courtesy and charm are enhanced by acute intelligence and mordant wit. From the beginning, a passionate love of France and French literature, specifically Flaubert, has informed his work. Reciprocally, he is one of the best-loved English writers in France, where he has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Flaubert’s Parrot, and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. He is an officer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

INTERVIEWER

You are very European, which is unusual for an English writer, but also very English, especially to a foreigner. In France, for example, they think of you as quintessentially English. Where do you place yourself?

JULIAN BARNES

I think you are right. In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You’re so English! I think I’m probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.

INTERVIEWER

Sartre wrote an essay called “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” What is literature for you?

BARNES

There are many answers to that question. The shortest is that it’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet. And being a writer gives you a sense of historical community, which I feel rather weakly as a normal social being living in early twenty-first-century Britain. For example, I don’t feel any particular ties with the world of Queen Victoria, or the participants of the Civil War or the Wars of the Roses, but I do feel a very particular tie to various writers and artists who are contemporaneous with those periods and events.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “telling the truth”?

BARNES

I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television. For example, even people who condemned Madame Bovary, who thought that it ought to be banned, recognized the truth of the portrait of that sort of woman, in that sort of society, which they had never encountered before in literature. That is why the novel was so dangerous. I do think that there is this central, groundbreaking veracity in literature, which is part of its grandeur. Obviously it varies according to the society. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

INTERVIEWER

Literature, then, can take a lot of forms—essays, poetry, fiction, journalism, all of which endeavor to tell the truth. You already were a very good essayist and journalist before you started to write fiction. Why did you choose fiction?

BARNES

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.

INTERVIEWER

Did you want to be a writer at an early age?

BARNES

Not at all. It is an abnormal thing to want to be an artist, to practice an art. It is comparatively normal to practice an interpretative art. But to actually make things up is not something that, well, usually runs in families or is the recommendation of a career master.

INTERVIEWER

Yet England has produced some of the greatest writers, and perhaps the greatest literature, of the world.

BARNES

That is a separate truth. But there is nothing when you are growing up, even as a reasonably well-educated person, to suggest that you have an authority to be more than, say, a reader, an interpreter, a consumer of art—not a producer of it. When I became a passionate reader in my teens I thought writing was something that other people did. In the same way, when I was four or five I wanted to be an engine driver, but I knew that this was something other people did. I come from a family of schoolteachers—both my parents were teachers—so there were books in our house, the word was respected, but there was no notion that one should ever aspire to write, not even a textbook. My mother once had a letter published in the London Evening Standard and that was the maximum literary output in our family.

266- ] English Literature - Julian Barnes

266- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes

British author and critic

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories, as well as two memoirs and a nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat, about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts.

In 2004, he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.

Early life

Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were French teachers. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination".

In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the "Metroland" of his first novel. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. After graduation, he worked for three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.

Career

His first novel, Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth.

His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel that uses a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.

During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh). The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way".

During the 1990s, Barnes wrote several additional novels and works of journalism. In 1991, he published Talking It Over, about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. This was followed by a sequel published in 2000 called Love, etc, which revisited the characters ten years on. Barnes's novel The Porcupine (1992) again deals with a historical theme as it depicts the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe, as he stands trial for crimes against his country. England, England (1998) is a humorous novel that explores the idea of national identity as the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of the tourist spots of England. Barnes is a keen Francophile, and his 1996 book, Cross Channel, is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France. He also returned to the topic of France in Something to Declare, a collection of essays on French subjects.

In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories. Arthur & George (2005), a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, launched Barnes's career into the more popular mainstream. It was the first of his novels to be featured on The New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction.

Barnes's 11th novel, The Sense of an Ending, published by Jonathan Cape, was released on 4 August 2011. In October of that year, the book was awarded the Man Booker Prize. The judges took 31 minutes to decide the winner and head judge, Stella Rimington, said that The Sense of an Ending was a "beautifully written book" and the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century." The Sense of an Ending also won the Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks.

In 2013, Barnes published Levels of Life. The first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning and aerial photography, describing the work of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story about Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both also balloonists. The third part is an essay discussing Barnes's grief over the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh (although she is not named): "You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed . . . I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." In The Guardian, Blake Morrison said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief."

In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor".

In 2025, Barnes published the essays entitled Changing My Mind, in which he questions whether it is possible for the Self to change the mind, stating instead that it is the mind that changes our identity, the Self being inside the mind and not something separate from it. Furthermore, these essays contain reflections on memory, in which, developing what his brother had suggested to him – namely that memory is "an act of the imagination" – Barnes argues that "sometimes we remember as true things that never even happened in the first place; that we may grossly embellish an original incident out of all recognition; that we may cannibalise someone else's memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind".

Personal life

Barnes's brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specialising in ancient philosophy. Julian Barnes is a patron of the human rights organisation Freedom from Torture, for which he has sponsored several fundraising events, and Dignity in Dying, a campaign group for assisted dying. He has lived in Tufnell Park, north London, since 1983. Barnes is an agnostic. Barnes married Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in 1979. She died on 20 October 2008 of a brain tumour. Barnes wrote about his grief over his wife's death in an essay in his 2013 book, Levels of Life.

Awards and honours

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2017)

1981: Somerset Maugham Award, winner, Metroland

1985: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize , 1986: E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters , 1986: Prix Médicis Essai, winner, Flaubert's Parrot , 1992: Prix Femina Étranger, winner, Talking It Over , 1993: Shakespeare Prize, Alfred Toepfer Foundation

2004: Austrian State Prize for European Literature , 2004: Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier, 1988). , 2008: San Clemente Literary Prize , 2011: David Cohen Prize for Literature , 2011: Man Booker Prize, winner, The Sense of an Ending , 2011 Costa Book Awards, shortlist, The Sense of an Ending , 2012: Europese Literatuurprijs , 2015: Zinklar Award at the first annual Blixen Ceremony in Copenhagen , 2016: Siegfried Lenz Prize , 2017: Officier in the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur

2021: Jerusalem Prize , 2021: Yasnaya Polyana Prize (for Nothing to Be Frightened Of)

List of works

Novels

Metroland (1980) Before She Met Me (1982) Flaubert's Parrot (1984) – shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Staring at the Sun (1986) A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) Talking It Over (1991) The Porcupine (1992)

England, England (1998) – shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Love, etc (2000) – sequel to Talking it Over , Arthur & George (2005) – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize , The Sense of an Ending (2011) – winner of the Man Booker Prize , The Noise of Time (2016) , The Only Story (2018) , Elizabeth Finch (2022)

Collections

Cross Channel (1996) The Lemon Table (2004) Pulse (2011)

Non-fiction

Letters from London (Picador, London, 1995) – journalism from The New Yorker, ISBN 0-330-34116-2 , Something to Declare (2002) – essays , The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) – journalism on cooking , Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) – memoir , Through the Window (2012) – 17 essays and a short story , A Life with Books (2012) – booklet , Levels of Life (2013) – memoir , Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (October, 2015) – essays

The Man in the Red Coat (2019) , Changing My Mind (March, 2025) – essays

Works as Dan Kavanagh

Novels

Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981) , Putting the Boot In (1985) Going to the Dogs (1987)

Short story

"The 50p Santa. A Duffy Detective Story" (1985) , As translator , Alphonse Daudet: In the Land of Pain (2002), translation of Daudet's La Doulou

Volker Kriegel: The Truth About Dogs (1988), translation of Kriegel's Kleine Hunde-Kunde  , Julian Barnes

265-] English Literature , Julian Barnes

265- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes 

British author and critic

Facts

Also Known As    Julian Patrick Barnes • Edward Pygge • Dan Kavanagh

Born  January 19, 1946 (age 79) • Leicester • England

Notable Works     “Arthur & George” • “Elizabeth Finch” • “Flaubert’s Parrot” • “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art” • “Levels of Life” • “Nothing to Be Frightened Of” • “Pulse” • “Something to Declare” • “The Lemon Table” • “The Man in the Red Coat” • “The Noise of Time” • “The Only Story” • “The Pedant in the Kitchen” • “The Sense of an Ending” • “Through the Window”

Julian Barnes (born January 19, 1946, Leicester, England) is a British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past. His most well-known novel is the award-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has also published many works of literary criticism and essay collections.

Early career

Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1968), and worked for three years as a lexicographer on a new supplement of The Oxford English Dictionary. He began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Dan Kavanagh pseudonym. These books—which include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987)—feature a protagonist named Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop turned private detective.

Novels and short stories

The first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinize his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the short story “Un Coeur simple.” Barnes’s later novels include A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross Channel (1996). In the satirical England, England (1998), Barnes skewers modern England in his portrayal of a theme park on the Isle of Wight, complete with the royal family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and pubs.

Critics thought Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explores why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur & George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2011 Barnes published Pulse, a collection of short stories, as well as The Sense of an Ending, a Booker Prize-winning novel that uses an unreliable narrator to explore the subjects of memory and aging. The Noise of Time (2016) fictionalizes episodes from the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. In The Only Story (2018), Barnes explores memory and first love as a man looks back on his relationship with an older woman. In 2022 he published Elizabeth Finch, which centers on a man whose intellectual crush on one of his teachers has a lasting impact on his life.

Nonfiction works

Barnes’s nonfiction work includes Something to Declare (2002), a collection of essays about France and French culture; The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), which explores his love of food; Through the Window (2012), an exploration of his literary influences; and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015). Barnes used the story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi to explore Belle Époque Paris in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).

Barnes’s memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) is an honest, oftentimes jarringly critical look at his relationship with his parents and older brother. Levels of Life (2013)—which pays tribute to his wife, who died in 2008—is a series of linked essays. In 2025 Barnes published Changing My Mind, which makes a case for the benefits of open-mindedness. The loosely connected essays discuss such topics as books, politics, and Barnes’s post-college tenure at The Oxford English Dictionary.

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love.

Barnes has received several awards and honours for his writing, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. Barnes's other awards include the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award; Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2013 and the 2015 Zinklar Award. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize and the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize, the latter for his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Also in 2021, he was awarded the Jean Bernard Prize.