A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) by Julian Barnes

After reading two of his novels, The Porcupine (1992) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), I’d been quite ambivalent with Julian Barnes. His intellectual register was quite high, but the affective impact was not as much. (It is not the case with Milan Kundera, for example; Kundera’s novels are for me both intellectually and emotionally engaging.) Nonetheless, I couldn’t quite put away Barnes altogether, which also says a lot.

When I finally read his A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, I decided that I loved Barnes more rather than less. His speculation in the accounts on Noah and the great flood is the best first chapter I’ve read in a long time. I am tempted to say that it could be a stand-alone story, but it wouldn’t be right. That first chapter (“The Stowaway”) holds the rest of the novel thematically: the indefinite forms of survival, the randomness of our salvation.

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Novels are the foremost advocates of novel-reading; they are likewise inclined towards commenting on the craft and practice of novel-writing itself. In the “half” chapter of the book (“Parenthesis”), which discourses on love (how I wished Barnes knew of our “mahal kita”), the novelist revealed himself and his thoughts on the ironic virtue of the prose, at the expense of poetry (a lot similar to what Kundera did on the “lyric” in his Life Is Elsewhere):

“All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. … Still, it’s natural for the novelist sometimes to fret at the obliquities of fiction. … Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’ (when I say ‘I’ you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love—selfish, shitty love—into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.”