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Something to Declare : Essays on France by Julian Barnes (2002, Hardcover)
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Something to Declare: Essays on France
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-100375415130
ISBN-139780375415135
eBay Product ID (ePID)2312129
Product Key Features
Book TitleSomething to Declaré : Essays on France
Number of Pages320 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2002
TopicPopular Culture
IllustratorYes
GenreSocial Science
AuthorJulian Barnes
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.2 in
Item Weight18.6 Oz
Item Length8.6 in
Item Width5.9 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2002-109567
Reviews"An exceptionally accomplished and ingenious stylist." -The New York Review of Books "France and England square off on almost every issue, from cuisine . . . to currency, but Barnes inhabits both worlds with ease. As a journalistic subject, France is best approached from an oblique angle, and this collection accomplishes that brilliantly. . . . . Barnes remains entertaining and insightful. This is a rich journey for the tourist, and a welcome antidote to Mayle for the French." -- Don Gilmour,The Globe and Mail "[Barnes is] an indefatigable sleuth . . . and a superlative reporter, not just of what he's meant to watch, but also, like a dog picking up bat-hums in the ether, of the mental processes of reporting, whether about the Tour de France, a painting, or Flaubert's letters . . . . He is brilliant on the writer's craft and the experience of writing . . . . Barnes is a devotee of the absolutely accurate description . . ." --National Post "As an essayist, . . . he is the most congenial of hosts. Even when his subjects are grand, his way with them is entertaining: he can be pungently amusing, iconoclastic, wry or tender, but he is always rewarding." --Financial Times(U.K.) "These essays are an expansive, astute and increasingly magisterial salute to French sophistication in all departments, from cinema to cycling, singing and writing above all." --Daily Telegraph ". . . twenty-one energetic essays . . ." --TLS "It's the fiction-lovers who've had most of the treats since Barnes published his first book in 1981.... But now, withSomething to Declare, the essay-lovers are back in the driver's seat -- and they have much to celebrate.... Barnes is wise to disarm his critics by quoting a remark Kingsley Amis made to a mutual friend: "I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert" -- but by the time we reach the quote, we know there is no need for Barnes to shut up about Flaubert or anyone else.... biting intelligence... Barnes has written a profoundly unstupid collection of essays about the land that makes him dream." --The Sunday Times "Whether he is discussing Simenon, Baudelaire or Louise Colet, Barnes illuminates their lives with brilliant metaphoric encapsulation. But it is Flaubert and his 'groaning search for perfection' who brings out the best in him.... Like all the best critics, Barnes persuades you to take his evidence and verdict on trust.... These essays remind you, as he says of Flaubert, that it is 'perfectly possible...for high intelligence, piercing insight and scrupulous concentration to be combined with extreme lucidity of expression.'" --The Guardian From the Trade Paperback edition.
Dewey Edition22
Dewey Decimal944
SynopsisJulian Barnes's long and passionate relationship with la belle France began more than forty years ago, and in these essays on the country and the culture he combines a keen appreciation, a seemingly infinite sphere of reference, and prose as stylish as classic haute couture. Barnes's vision of France-"The Land Without Brussels Sprouts"-embraces its vanishing peasantry; its vanished hyper-literate pop singers, Georges Brassens, Boris Vian, and Jacques Brel ("[he] sang at the world as if it… could be saved from its follies and brutalities by his vocal embrace"); and the gleeful iconoclasm of its nouvelle vague cinema ("'The Underpass in Modern French Film' is a thesis waiting to be written"). He describes the elegant tour of France that Henry James and Edith Wharton made in 1907, and the orgy of drugs and suffering of the Tour de France in our own time. An unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers, Barnes gives us his thoughts on the prolific and priapic Simenon, on Sand, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé ("If literature is a spectrum, and Hugo hogs the rainbow, then Mallarmé is working in ultra-violet"). In several dazzling excursions into the prickly genius of Flaubert, Barnes discusses his letters; his lover Louise Colet; and his biographers (Sartre's The Family Idiot, "an intense, unfinished, three-volume growl at Flaubert, is mad, of course"). He delves into Flaubert's friendship with Turgenev; looks at the "faithful betrayal" of Claude Chabrol's film version of Madame Bovary; and reveals the importance of the pharmacist's assistant, the most major minor character in Flaubert's great novel: "if Madame Bovary were a mansion, Justin would be the handle to the back door; but great architects have the design of door-furniture in mind even as they lay out the west wing." For lovers of France and all things French-and of Julian Barnes's singular wit and intelligence-Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy to read.
LC Classification NumberDC33.7.B315 2002b
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