Book Review: Through The Window
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, how it goes wrong, and how we lose it. Novels speak to and from the mind, the heart, the eye, the genitals, the skin: the conscious and the subconscious. What it means to be an individual, what it means to be part of a society. What it means to be alone ...In this collection of seventeen essays (and one short story) Julian Barnes discusses about British, French and American writers who have meant most to him as well as the cross-currents and overlapping of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do.
Through The Window is not a collection of fast paced biographies. Instead, Julian Barnes pauses, relaxes and presents interesting, important and insightful discourses on few of his chosen stalwarts from the world of Literature. As the author goes on to explain his idea about writer and reader, and how they correlate:
Alone, and yet in company: that is the paradoxical position of the reader. Alone in the company of a writer who speaks in the silence of your mind. ... Fiction makes characters who have never existed as real as your friends, and makes dead writers as alive as a television newsreader.Through The Window is Julian Barnes's thoughts on Fiction and writers who have meant the most to him. It may read slow-paced but you are a sincere reader looking for books on writers by another important writer of our times, go for it.
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Important and insightful. I had received the review copy from Random House India. Thank you Random House India for giving me this opportunity. You can buy this book at amazon or at Flipkart in case you live in India.
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