Review: Julian Barnes mastered in « About Changing »
The reviewer behind these lines read Julian Barnes essay « about changing », which is now in Andreas Vesterlund’s reliable translation, ten twelve days before it was time to gather the impressions. Hardly had he started writing until he realized that the memory had not preserved the text with sufficient concretion. What was delayed was a sense of ambivalence. An uncertainty as to whether he was impressed by the reasoning or not. Whether the book was rich in untested insights or unnecessarily modest. Whether it offered aha experiences or led to mats nodded from someone who was admittedly belonging to a younger generation but who still reached an age when the thoughts could apply to their own experiences. Behind such issues, a more general question signed: How would essay affect his perception of children’s authorship – or at least about the two artist novels he has so far read, « Flaubert’s parrot » and the Sjostakovi portrait « The Alarm of the Time »?
There was – reasonably – only one thing to do: read about the seventy -five pages narrow script. Not only to better remember individuals, but also to see if the ambivalence would harden or disperse.
In five short chapter, Originally held as a radio lecture ten years ago, the children’s potential for change in memories, words, political beliefs, books and age -related experiences examine. What upheavals undergo one’s view of life, the world and the art of ten, thirty, fifty years? How many pins of salt must be taken for memories to taste? Is it we or politics that changed if we choose a different ballot than in the last election? Can former antipatians be reloaded for admiration? And what, Praysays changes about such supposedly stable greats as me, character, attitude?
Barnes is good at reasoning without self -loving lifes, or for that matter toothpicks. The tone is consistently not only balanced but complicated. Different opinions rarely cause the pulse to beat faster, other people’s folly not the breath to seem forced. He deals with tectonic shifts in perception with the same calm as he observes a public for which common reason seems to be a button. In short: the rhetorical heat never reaches over 37 degrees. Or below. Otherwise, said: here is affection control. This makes Barnes book a pleasant company. In his prose there is gray to clear everyday life. No frivolous Saturday evening webweights, no Sunday morning rutation. Even when he writes about disturbances, and the essay is careful about little else, he remains civilized.
It’s a good rating. Keeping the position even when you realize how little that remains certain and reliable in a life has lived to the fullest, is no easy thing. At Barnes we do not have a soldier morality dilapidated stoicism, here is neither strained tongue nor flared lightness, and no plays of the short -mixed kind that most of all reveal the power of existence.
Equally contains « About changing » conclusions that should turn routine’s loyalists into nerve wrecks. In the eyes of children, hardly any of what a thinking person considers as significantly intact during a sufficiently long life. Instead of seeking protection behind system -preserving wisdom such as « the more something changes, the more it remains the same, » he opens up for a gentler interaction with variability. Paradoxically, its secrets make life sustainable.
Thus, ambivalens are not only belonging to what this book deals with, but also to its character. Perhaps the essence’s greatest merit is reminiscent of Francis Picabia’s Dadaist genius: « Our heads are round for the thoughts to change direction. » If changing, one learns that thinking souls are rarely as convincing as when they cannot decide.
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