Title: Through the Window (Goodreads)
Author: Julian Barnes
Published: Vintage, 2012
Pages: 272
Genres: Non-Fiction
My Copy: Personal Copy
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his book The Sense of an Ending which has sparked a huge increase in this man’s popularity. To follow up (cash in) on the buzz the release of Through the Window followed soon after, which holds Seventeen Essays (and a Short Story) on the books and authors that have meant the most to him over his career.
I remember reading Julian Barnes’ essay A Life with Books, which really was just a look at his reading history and I absolutely loved it. So I was eager to read this collection to learn more about this wonderful author. What I found was this collection was very dry and this made it difficult to read. Barnes is a very intelligent man and he flexed his intellectual muscles to the point where it back very difficult to read for a pseudo intellectual like me.
While I found it interesting to read this author’s thoughts on Penelope Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kipling, Madame Bovary, Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell I tend to think Barnes wasn’t connecting to the reader like he did with his novels or the essay A Life with Books. It felt more like reading an academic essay more than just someone’s passion for these authors and books.
This is a difficult collection to get through, but people interested in learning more about Julian Barnes or these topics might find something in this book for them. I read this book as soon as I finished Ramona Koval’s By the Book, A Reader’s Guide to Life so it was difficult to go from a book with so much passion for reading to something so dry.
Do you think it deserved the prize?
I head about this book but I’m not much of “a collection of essays” type of guy.
http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
I really enjoyed The Sense of An Ending and his other novels. They are worth reading; this collection is a little harder