Barnes on Maupassant

Julian Barnes reviews Guy de Maupassant's Afloat (ranslated by Douglas Parméen) and Alien Hearts (translated by Richard Howard), both published by NYRB. "On We Sail" London Review of Books, 31.21, 5 November 2009: 25-28.

Excerpt:

One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of the new group calling themselves Naturalists, he was already well known in Paris; three years previously, he had made his first appearance – as ‘le petit Maupassant’ – in the Goncourt Journal, delighting a company of already famous writers with a long story about Swinburne's decadent behaviour in Etretat. He had written poems, stories and journalism, coauthored a lewd play, and was working on his first novel, Une Vie. He was socially and sexually successful, and physically very fit: the previous summer, having bought a small boat on Zola's behalf, he had rowed it the 50 kilometres from Bezons to Zola’s house at Médan. Yet on 3 August, two days before his 28th birthday, he made the following complaints to Flaubert about life: 'Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren't enough different ways to compose a sentence.'

Read the rest of Barnes's review online at the London Review of Books website.

Julian Barnes on John Updike's final works

Julian Barnes writes about John Updike's final works in "Flights" for The New York Review of Books, 11 June 2009.

From the Essay:

Hearing of John Updike's death in January of this year, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest—"But I thought we had him for another ten years"; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature, the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world.
Though it was not as if he hadn't left us enough to read. For years now his lifelong publishers at Knopf have been giving back-flap approximations. In the mid-1990s, in a cute philoprogenitive linking, he was "the father of four children and the author of more than forty books." By the time of The Early Stories (2003) they had him, in a hands-in-the-air sort of way, as "the author of fifty-odd previous books." Now, with Endpoint, they award him "more than sixty books".

My Father's Tears and Other Stories is available from Knopf and Hammish Hamilton. The Maples Stories is published by Everyman's Library.

Julian Barnes on George Orwell

"Such, Such Was Eric Blair." New York Review of Books, 56.4 (12 March 2009) [Essay on three George Orwell books: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, compiled and with an introduction by George Packer; All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, compiled by George Packer, with an introduction by Keith Gessen; and Why I Write.]

From the Essay:

"Orwell used "sophisticated" and "intellectual" and "intelligentsia" as terms of dispraise, hated Bloomsbury, and not just expected but hoped that the sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin would outlast those of Virginia Woolf. He was scathing about social elites, finding the ruling class "stupid." In 1941 he declared that Britain was the most class-ridden country on earth, ruled by "the old and silly," "a family with the wrong members in control"; yet he also recognized that the ruling class was "morally fairly sound" and in time of war "ready enough to get themselves killed." He described the condition of the working class with sympathy and rage, thought them wiser than intellectuals, but didn't sentimentalize them; in their struggle they were as "blind and stupid" as a plant struggling toward the light."