Julian Barnes on Sibelius's Home, Ainola

 Julian Barnes explores the house where Sibelius lived, died, wrote much of his music -- and spent decades not writing, or not publishing ...

"Where Sibelius Fell Silent." More Intelligent Life January/February 2012.
From the Article:

"There are two famous silences in the history of classical music: those of Rossini and Sibelius. Rossini’s, which lasted nearly 40 years, was a worldly, cosmopolitan silence, much of it spent in Paris, during which time he co-invented tournedos Rossini. Sibelius’s, which lasted nearly 30 years, was more austere, self-punishing and site-specific; and whereas Rossini finally yielded again to music, writing the late works he referred to as “the sins of my old age”, Sibelius was implacable. He fell silent, and remained silent."

Barnes also wrote a piece for More Intelligent Life in 2008 about the Museo Mandralisca in Cefalu, Sicily:

"Julian Barnes Is Very Fond of an Unknown Man."

Julian Barnes at Sibelius's home

Julian Barnes Wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize

Julian Barnes has been named the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Sense of an Ending, published by Jonathan Cape, Random House Canada, and Alfred A. Knopf.

Barnes has been shortlisted three times previously for Arthur and George (2005), England, England (1998) and Flaubert's Parrot (1984).

The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.

Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?

Available from Jonathan Cape, Random House Canada, Alfred A. Knopf, Waterstones.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, BN.com, or a variety of Independent Booksellers.

The Sense of an Ending: Signed, Limited Edition from London Review Bookshop

The London Review Bookshop is offering a signed, limited first edition of The Sense of an Ending, published in association with Jonathan Cape, comprising 100 copies, 75 of which have been quarter-bound in Tusting Chestnut fine grain leather with Rainforest cloth sides, numbered 1 to 75, and 25 copies fully bound in the same leather, numbered i to xxv. All books have head and tail bands, brushed green tops and green Bugra Pastell endpapers, and are housed in suedel-lined slipcases.

Edition of 75: £150 (£170 after 4 August)
Edition of 25: £260 (£280 after 4 August)

For ordering information, please consult the promotional flyer.

Win a Signed Copy of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending

The Julian Barnes Website is working with Jonathan Cape to offer the chance to win a signed copy of the Cape edition of Julian Barnes's new novel The Sense of an Ending, published August 4th.

Please email the correct answer to the question below to contest@julianbarnes.com to be entered into a random drawing for one of the signed copies. We will forward a handful of randomly selected names supplying the correct answers to Jonathan Cape, and they will contact the winners for their postal address. Sound good? Please only enter once.

Here It Is: Julian Barnes's paperbacks are published by Vintage, and Vintage is about to turn 21. What Julian Barnes novel will be repackaged as part of the Vintage 21 promotion? (It will be published on August 4th in the UK, which is also the deadline for the giveaway).

Julian Barnes on Voltaire's Candide

Julian Barnes writes "A Candid View of Candide" for The Guardian (1 July 2011), in which he pays tribute to Voltaire's Candide. Barnes's essay introduces the new Folio Society edition of the book, available via the Folio Society Website.

From the Essay:

All this makes Voltaire's Candide even more of an extraordinary case. It was written between July and December 1758 and published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam in January 1759. That year no fewer than three English translations appeared, shortly followed by the early version that is now most often read, by Tobias Smollett. This formed part of a 25-volume edition of Voltaire's works "translated from the French with Notes by Dr Smollett and others" and published between 1761 and 1765. Even the British acknowledged Voltaire as Europe's most famous public intellectual, and his Candide as a prime example of literature as news. This philosophical tale may be described as an attack on Leibnitzian optimism – and, more broadly, on all prepackaged systems of thought and belief – a satire on churches and churchmen, and a pessimistic rumination on human nature and the problem of free will. But it was no fable inhabiting some make-believe or symbolic location; rather, it was a report on the current state of the world, deliberately set among the headlines of the day.

The Sense of an Ending (Extract)

The Telegraph has published an extract from Julian Barnes's soon to be published novel The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending, the disturbing new novel from Julian Barnes, is narrated by a man looking back on a lifetime of hope and remorse. In this exclusive extract, he grapples with his memories of a former friend -- a charismatic figure who enters his life as a prodigious schoolboy and departs it with an act of chilling calculation.

Read the extract at the Telegraph website.

New Fiction -- "Homage to Hemingway"

Julian Barnes's new short story "Homage to Hemingway" is published in the July 4, 2011 issue of The New Yorker (pp. 60-65). Online subscribers have access to the story through the New Yorker digital archive or via their iPads.

Julian Barnes on Jules Renard

Julian Barnes reviews Nature Stories by Jules Renard for the London Review of Books 33.13 (30 June 2011): 23-24.


From the Review:

I own two photographs of Jules Renard (1864-1910). There is no indication of when either of them was taken, and at times I have wondered if they are really of the same man. In the first, from a series called ‘Nos contemporains chez eux’, he sits at a cluttered desk; behind him is a scruffy bookcase and a calendar showing the first of some month; on the floral wallpaper hangs a looped speaking tube, perhaps for ordering his mid-morning coffee. He looks wary and fierce, badger-like, as if he has just been dragged from his sett, stuffed into a suit that scarcely fits and ordered to face the camera: the result is one of the most ill-at-ease author photos I have ever seen. The second shows a leaner, older figure, identifiably the same person from the hairline, big right ear and droop of the moustache; otherwise he seems a different man, a different writer. Fingers elegantly interlaced, he poses in a tapestried chair of the studio photographer Pierre Petit (of place Cadet, Paris); he is in morning dress, with a huge knot to his tie and the visible ribbon of the Légion d’honneur (which dates the portrait to post-1900). He looks worldly, a confident man of achievement: perhaps a city mayor whose recent improvements to sewerage and street lighting have been much applauded by the bourgeoisie.

New Books on Julian Barnes

Two new books about the works of Julian Barnes were recently published. Both treatments add to the growing scholarly treatment of Barnes's work. Table of contents can be viewed on the Julian Barnes Website.

Sebastian Groes & Peter Childs, Eds.

Julian Barnes (Contemporary Critical Perspectives)

Continuum, 2011. Pp. 192

From the Publisher:

Julian Barnes is one of the most admired British writers of his generation. Although known primarily as a novelist and essayist, the ‘chameleon of British letters’ has written with distinction across the widest range of literary genres. Both he and his diverse and distinguished body of work have been awarded numerous literary prizes both in the UK and abroad. This critical guide provides a wide range of current critical perspectives on Barnes's work from best-selling novels of the 1980s, Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, up to his recent memoir Nothing to be Frightened of. Including contributions by some of the finest critics working in the contemporary field, it reflects the richness and diversity of one of Britain's greatest living writers.

Peter Childs

Julian Barnes (Contemporary British Novelists)

Manchester University Press, 2011. Pp. 166

From the Publisher:

Peter Childs's Julian Barnes is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates Barnes's work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy. It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but along the way it also shows how certain key thematic preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory). Chapters provide detailed reading of each major publication in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes’s fiction, including art, authorship, history, love and religion. The book is very lucidly written, and it is also satisfyingly comprehensive - alongside the 'canonical' Barnes texts, it includes brief but illuminating discussion of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of fictions of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George also benefits from archival research into his unpublished materials.

David Cohen Prize for Literature 2011

The David Cohen Prize for Literature 2011 has been awarded to the English novelist, essayist and short story writer Julian Barnes for his lifetime’s achievement in literature. Visit the award website for more information and visit the Front Row website to listen to an interview with Julian Barnes and Mark Lawson.

Julian Barnes is one of England’s foremost fiction writers. Shortlisted on three occasions for the Man Booker Prize (for Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England, and Arthur and George), he is as lauded overseas as in his homeland. The French Ministry of Culture named him Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 and he has also been awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literature.

On winning the Prize Julian Barnes said:

‘The measure of a literary award's value lies in its list of previous winners. Over the last 18 years the David Cohen Prize has established itself as the greatest honour a British or Irish writer can receive within these islands. It is also conducted with proper secrecy and dignity. So it is a matter of sober delight to be added to the list of prize-winners.’

Mark Lawson, chair of judges, said of this year’s winner:

‘The David Cohen Prize is in effect a UK version of the Nobel Prize for Literature, open to writers of fiction and non-fiction, comedy and tragedy. Within those divisions, there are writers who are most efficient at prose or dialogue, structure or style, narrative or character, plot or ideas, novels or short stories. What is remarkable about Julian Barnes is that he has excelled in all these areas: from the combination of literary criticism and fiction in Flaubert's Parrot, through the structural daring of the multiple narratives in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to the historical faction of Arthur and George and the essayistic reflection on faith and mortality in Nothing To Be Frightened Of. The already extraordinary list of David Cohen Prize-winning authors has been fittingly extended.’

Julian Barnes Reads 'The Revival'

Julian Barnes reads 'The Revival' for the Vintage Podcast 5.

In the Vintage New Year Podcast they’ve turned the spotlight on their editors and asked them to give us a sneak preview of the books we can look forward to in 2011. Alex Clark talks to Brighton Rock director Rowan Joffe, Susan Hill reads from A Kind Man, Anthony Quinn talks about his new novel Half of the Human Race, Julian Barnes reads his short story ‘The Revival’, and they introduce their new competition ‘Guess the Last Line.’ ‘The Revival’ was originally published in Barnes's collection The Lemon Table.

Listen to Julian Barnes read his story on the Vintage website from 7 February 2011. Also available for download in .mp3 format.