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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Nothing
To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Mortality The
emphasis word in the title of Julian Barnes’ new book, Nothing
To Be Frightened Of, is “nothing.” Throughout the 250 or so pages of this
philosophical reflection on death, Barnes takes readers on a clever and
finely written exploration of the one reality we will all face. The opening
line, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,” sets us up for all that
follows. Barnes thinks about death every day, something all self-aware adults
do the older we become. With Barnes, the musings head all over the place, to
a reader’s great satisfaction. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 105-6: As a young man, I was terrified
of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I
felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking Bouvard et
Pecuchet on a flight from Paris to London, deluding myself that after the
inevitable crash a) there would be an identifiable body on which it might be
found; b) that Flaubert in French paperback would survive impact and flames;
c) that when recovered, it would still be grasped in my miraculously
surviving (if perhaps severed) hand, a stiffened forefinger bookmarking a
particularly admired passage, of which posterity would therefore take note. A
likely story and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate
on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger
readers. I
was largely cured of my fear at Athens airport. I was in my mid-twenties, and
had arrived in good time for my flight home such good time (so eager to
leave) that instead of being several hours early, I was a whole day and
several hours early. My ticket could not be changed; I had no money to go
back into the city and find a hotel; so I camped out at the airport. Again, I
can remember the book the crash companion —I had with me: a volume of
Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. To kill time, I went up on to the viewing roof
of the terminal building. From there, I watched plane after plane take off,
plane after plane land. Some of them probably belonged to dodgy airlines and
were crewed by drunks; but none of them crashed. I watched scores of
planes not crash. And this visual, rather than statistical, demonstration of
the safety of flying convinced me. Could I try this trick again? If I looked on
death more closely and more frequently—took a job as an undertaker's
assistant or mortuary clerk—might I again, by the evidence of familiarity,
lose my fear? Possibly. But there's a fallacy here, which my brother, as a
philosopher, would quickly point out. (Although he would probably delete
that descriptive phrase. When I showed him the opening pages of this book,
he declined my assumption that it was "as a philosopher" that he
distrusted memory. "Is it 'as a philosopher' that I think all that? No
more than it is 'as a philosopher' that I think no second-hand car salesmen
are reliable." Perhaps; though even his denial sounds to me like a
philosopher's denial.) The fallacy is this: at Athens airport, I was
watching thousands and thousands of passengers not die.
At an undertaker's or mortuary, I would be confirming my worst suspicion:
that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred
per cent. That
final sentence is another of my favorites from Nothing
To Be Frightened Of. Whatever your age, or the degree to which you muse
about death, reading this book is likely to stretch your mind a little and
bring some pleasure along the way. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Nothing To Be Frightened Of.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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