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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781400076505
ISBN number: 1400076501
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: April 05, 2005
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: April 05, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 265942
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
In his widely acclaimed new collection of stories, Julian Barnes addresses what is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old.
The characters in The Lemon Table are facing the ends of their lives–some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage. Their circumstances are just as varied as their responses. In 19th-century Sweden, three brief conversations provide the basis for a lifetime of longing. In today’s England, a retired army major heads into the city for his regimental dinner–and his annual appointment with a professional lady named Babs. Somewhere nearby, a devoted wife calms (or perhaps torments) her ailing husband by reading him recipes.
In stories brimming with life and our desire to hang on to it one way or another, Barnes proves himself by turns wise, funny, clever, and profound–a writer of astonishing powers of empathy and invention.
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Rated by buyers 
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These eleven short stories by Julian Barnes all have one thing in common. They are peopled with characters near the end of their lives and facing death. Some are meek and mild; some do foolish things; others do not go gentle into that good night; one may be the victim of spousal abuse; one has dementia. Another has no qualms about committing adultery, having engaged in an out-of-town affair for twenty-three years although he can no longer "ring the gong three times" in one afternoon. One character keeps engaged in life by complaining about and to the noisemakers at classical concerts, but only after his partner stopped going to performances with him. One man and woman love each other for twenty-three years but, through misunderstanding and the inability to voice their feelings, sadly, their love is never consummated.
Barnes can get as much said about a character into twenty pages or so as any writer I have read. He is the master of beautiful concise description and phrases. One couple "had more time and they got less done." Another couple perhaps may grow old together and "rely, over time, on the hardening of the heart." One character's life can be summed up in "one long cowardly adventure." There are nuggets like these everywhere in every story. They so appeal to the intellect but also go straight to the heart.
One such story, which I read twice, is "Knowing French," as perfect a short story as I remember. The story unfolds through a series of letters written by Sylvia Winstanley to a writer named Julian Barnes. Sylvia, when the correspondence begins in 1986, is a new arrival at an "Old Folkery," her putdown for a retirement home inhabited by the "deaf" and the "mad." She ran across Barnes' name when she decided, in an effort to remain alive and alert, to read through all the fiction in the local library beginning with authors whose names start with "A" and discovered in the "B" fiction FLAUBERT'S PARROT. You will love Sylvia as she wraps herself around your heart. She moves into the retirement home by jumping before she was pushed and before she started scalding herself with Ovaltine. Visiting other like-establishments she is discouraged when she observes "obedient biddies sitting in cheap armchairs while the Box blares at them like Mussolini." Finally, having spent the last two years or so visiting a mother with dementia in a nursing home and all too aware of institutional food, I was undone by Sylvia's craving a croissant and dreaming of apricots. Suicide in her words is vulgar. The main reason for dying is that people expect it of people Sylvia's age. The main reason not to, she has never done what other people wanted her to do.
Now that's a woman you can tip your hat to, preposition or no preposition at the end of a sentence.
Rated by buyers -
Julian Barnes has made an art form of pulling together short stories that add up to a collective meaning greater than the sum of its parts. In his seminal work, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, the book of short stories which Barnes insists is actually a novel, the stories work together, themes repeat, ideas get strengthened as the book progresses, and by the time you've finished, a single overriding theme around life and love comes into focus. A similar tension occurs in Cross Channel, where the individual pieces move around a central core of things French, but ultimately adds up to a whole that once again illuminates what it means to be a human being. Barnes has stated that the origin of each book's he's done was in the previous one. Since he is so prolific, and since his writing takes on a wide variety of genres, from farce to drama to literary criticism to food writing to very literary fiction indeed, one could probably find the origins for this one in his last book of grouped stories, Cross Channel, in his character "The Elderly Englishman" of "Tunnel" who returns home to create "the stories you have just read." As with History and Cross Channel, the stories in The Lemon Table, while able to function separately, add up to a single picture, a totality of expression which has more meaning than any of the stories on their own. You need to stand back to get the full density of the work.
The key theme of The Lemon Table is old age, and some critics have stated that it seems odd that Barnes would write such an epitaph type of work so early in his life, but Barnes has always stated that his work, and all novels, start with life. There is no better way to illuminate life than to take the reader to the end of it. There are eleven stories, each with a different structure. The first, "A Short History of Hairdressing" tells the story of a character through his haircut appointments. You could probably do this kind of perspective taking any recurring event in a person's life, but it is the combination of mundane and regimented - of meditative and vanity ridden - the image in the mirror a tangible reminder of the aging process accelerated at each visit - which makes a haircutting session so appropriate. We watch Gregory, from his very first terrified trip to the barber on his own: "Boys didn't tip. Perhaps that was why barbers hated boys. They paid less and they didn't tip. They also didn't keep still. Or at least, their mothers told them to keep still, they kept still, but this didn't stop the barber bashing their heads with a palm as solid as the flat of a hatchet and muttering, `Keep still.' to his twilight victory over the mirror - a tiny revolt in old age. Another story which revisits a meeting point is "The Things You Know" which follows two friends as they have breakfast together at different times and reminisce over their dead husbands . The reader is made aware of the irony through the perspective of time, but the characters don't have that vantage, even when they should.
The stories follow a wide variety of different settings and structures. Love lost, missed, idealised and regretted form the basis of the 18th century Swedish tale "The Story of Mats Isrealson" where the main character mis-tells a story to his neighbour's wife, a woman with whom he has fallen in love, and the two resist the temptation and go their separate ways, living a life of regret and longing. The story culminates in Isrealson`s one chance to make amends before dying. In "The Revival", an aged Turgenev falls in love with the actress who played Verochka in one of his plays, but is it really love, or just another way of avoiding love? "This is safe. The fantasy is manageable, his gift a false memory." (98). There is Major Jacko Jackson of "Hygiene," who travels regularly to visit his mistress, a retired prostitute in London - his two days of furlough from his wife, "as per," until he finds that aging has caught up with his mistress, as it has caught him. In "The Fruit Cage," we learn about a couple through the narration of their son, a boy who discovers a third party in his parent's marriage. All of these stories have a strong undercurrent of irony - of the human and fairly unattractive needs which are hidden under what we call love in our youth. There is always a twist in the tale - the politics of the ego, the idealisation of beauty, and the vanity of our romantic illusions.
Other stories deal with self-justification and the vanities that become entrenched as we age, such as Vigilance", the story of a man who takes increasingly violent steps to pay back those who are cough or otherwise rude during the concerts he attends. The blackly humorous piece ends with an ironic nod to the rich and varied exploration through the pain, frustration, and vanities of aging, of what it means to be alive.
notion of `civilisation.' In another blackly humorous piece, "Bark," Jean-Etienne Delacour's ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Somehow, I was never able to finish Flaubert's Parrot, though I loved Staring at the Sun, A History of the World, and England, England. Why mention that? Well, for anyone who is not uniformly blown away by everything JB writes, I think you'll have no problem enjoying this collection of short stories. Published in the year of his sixtieth birthday, these stories are Barnes's reflections on old age. And it's a bit sobering, but also touching and funny. "Knowing French" and "A short history of hairdressing" are wonderful, as are "The Story of Mats Israelson" and "Hygene". "Vigilance" is hilarious but with pathos lurking in the wings. "Appetite" and "The Things You Know" are a little on the painful side. Can't quite figure out why prostitution kept popping up and never knew JB was so knowledgable about classical music. I listened to this book on CDs and didn't realize that the main character of "Knowing French" had spelling problems until I read it in one of these reviews - a limitation of that medium, but still a good recording.
Rated by buyers 
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This collection brings together eleven stories written over a span of roughly ten years, six of which were originally published in The New Yorker, and the remainder in venues such as Granta and the TLS. Originally titled "Rage and Age" (per the Dylan Thomas poem), the collection is thematically focused on aging and death and Barnes has said that the stories were intended to counter the notion that life calms down or gets serene in old age. While the collection certainly counters that myth, the thematic concentration results in a certain repetitiveness when the stories are read back to back.
The fairly forgettable "A Short History of Hairdressing" tells the story of a man's life through the framework of three visits to the barber, one as a child, one as a adult, and one as an old man. Set in 19th-century Sweden, "The Story of Mats Israelson" ponders the unconsummated love between a sawmill manager and the wife of the town pharmacist. As is so many period pieces, the two are locked into their social roles unable to express their feelings to each other, leading the a lifetime of yearning for what might have been. Thankfully, this ennui is dispelled in "The Things You Know," in which two widows meet for breakfast. Each is determined to sugarcoat their memories of married life, but each also knows certain nasty truths to the other's marriage, making the entire story very spiky and harsh.
In "Hygiene", a WWII veteran makes his way to London for the annual banquet of his old regiment. This affords him the chance for a yearly meeting with the same prostitute, a tryst which is his sole way of demonstrating his existence to himself. The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev is the protagonist of "The Revival", which reflects upon a brief period of happiness in his later years, spurred by his platonic love for an actress. "Vigilance" is easily the best story of the collection, dwelling on a middle-aged gay Londoner whose anger and frustration with his relationship is sublimated, only to emerge with venom at concert-goers who fail to be suitably quiet. It's both quite funny and sad at the same time. Much less successful is the French-set "Bark," which revolves around a scheme to finance the building of public baths by which twenty or so investors put up the initial funds, and the last living one inherits the proceeds.
"Knowing French" is built on a clever conceit, that an elderly woman reading her way through the library's fiction in alphabetical order, has come to Barnes' much lauded novel "Flaubert's Parrot." She then initiates a correspondence with him, of which we are only privy to her side. It's an effective evocation of the "problem" of elder homes, for which not all elderly people are suited. In "Appetite", a woman reads recipes to her Alzheimers-stricken husband, whose only responses are barks of indignation at vague recipe directions or lewd outbursts. "The Fruit Cage" tackles the confusion of a middle-aged man whose 80-year-old parents suddenly separate. The final story is, "The Silence", in which a fictional version of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius jots down fragmentary reflections on his life and career.
Ultimately, the stories are a clear warning to the reader that one's old age is not likely to be dominated by grandchildren and warm fires, but rather by nostalgia and brooding over mistakes of the past, words left unsaid, deeds left undone. In that sense, the stories are quiet affecting. However, they are perhaps best read one a month or so, as the same note tends to get struck -- albeit by very different characters in very different settings.
Rated by buyers -
"The Lemon Table" is a strong -- no, very strong -- set of tales in which the theme is unified but the styles are varied. Barnes has succeeded in what is a virtuoso examination of the theme of aging and impending death through a variety of (stylistic) lenses. The prospective reader should be warned, though, that the stories are depressing, which is what one would expect given the subject matter. Old age is given only a few of its positive attributes; loss and futility dominate.
In particular, I want to single out "The Story of Mats Israelson" as particularly successful. It made me almost cry; very, very powerful and beautifully written. By itself, it makes the volume worth reading. The very first story, about going to a barbershop, is a miniature version of Barnes' terrific very first novel, "Metroland." As a big fan of Sibelius, I also want to praise Barnes for getting so many details right in the fragmentary final story, "The Silence", which is about the composer's long final 30+ years when he had abandoned composing.
If this book could get 6 stars, I'd probably give it that. Superb.
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