Musings on belief (or not) in God; acceptance (or not) of death; the accuracy (or not) of memory; and the comfort (or not) of family. Spiced with little-known (to me) stories from literary history, this was an entertaining and sometimes enlightening piece on facing up to death. Reminded me of Kundera books I've enjoyed. My first Barnes, but I'll read more. ( )

Oh dear, oh deary me ( )

Julian Barnes' prose is described as fastidious or meticulous in two of the reviews comprising the blurb for this book. And that is right, Barnes is an excessively clean, hygienic writer. Nothing to be Frightened Of is a contemplation of death and plays on the ambiguity of the title.

It is less an after dinner speech than an amiable conversation with a dinner partner who is too polite and sympathetic to be offended by your dumbness and inability to respond. Essentially a dialogue as a monologue. It is a tender rather than tendentious consideration of our relationship to mortality. There are no frightening figures but plenty of literary allusions. A comfortable rather than comforting read, perhaps a little indulgent.

There is a slight feeling, one that I get a lot with Barnes, that the book is written more for the author than the reader. Nevertheless there are some laugh out loud funny pieces which help to lighten the overall fairly downbeat approach. ( )

Both of my parents are dead. My sister recently made good on a longstanding threat to send me some of their personal possessions, in three boxes of diminishing size, like children's stacking blocks. The boxes included a brass tea set (allegedly from Russia), a ceramic ink pot (also from Russia), some carved wooden boxes (Indonesian? - empty, but which used to hold family photos), a few odd pieces of crystal and ceramics, the smelly trunk which I always assumed my father had while in the Navy, but which, in fact, my grandfather brought over from Ireland, some photos (mostly of me at various stages of youthful development), and some assorted odds and ends: a little leprechaun statuette that my youngest son thinks looks as though it's pooping on a shamrock, some newspapers of the JFK assassination, and no less than three Bibles(!) and two Bible storybooks from the 1920s, now sadly fallen into heathen hands. The detritus of a few lives lived in the last century and a half, mostly of no monetary value, and hardly any (to me) sentimental value. Stuff that gets pass down a couple of generations, and then (all familiar associations spent) deservedly disappears without a trace.

This is the sort of thing Julian Barnes meditates upon in this book, a personal examination of family, memory, and mortality. Barnes is afraid to die. That is, he is afraid of being dead, and seems to fret about this incessantly. (The canard is that people are either afraid of dying, or of being dead. I suppose, as the prospect of total extinction has always held a certain appeal to me, I fall within the former category. But as long as there's not a lot of blood or exposed organs, I'm ok with it.)

Early on, Barnes makes generous use of insights by the likes of Jules Renard and the brothers Goncourt , Stendhal, and Shostakovich. Rachmaninoff makes a humorous appearance as a man so terrified of death that he ran shrieking from the first graveyard scene in "Frankenstein", but later became convinced, temporarily at least, that salted pistachios calmed his death fear. Stendhal is used as an exemplar of the faultiness of memory, as his diary entries of an early trip to Florence are compared to later recollections. There is a smattering of philosophical speculation and medical information, but little space devoted to religion, a perspective on death that Barnes, an atheist/agnostic, sees as little more than whistling in the dark. (Not that I disagree.)

Nothing to Be Frightened Of sustains interest for most of the first half of the book (thanks to Renard & Co.), but gets rather bogged down in the middle with somewhat unfocused meanderings and blathering frets and fears at the prospect of his eventual sloughing of this mortal coil (the title of the book, if you haven’t figured it out, has a double meaning). By the end, with a meditation on Stendhal, Barnes manages to pull it together again. If I were into ratings, I'd give this a middling one.

On page 39 Barnes writes, “Perhaps I should warn you (especially if you are philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book my strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff,” and on page 165 he warns that his mind “lollops from anecdote to anecdote.” No kidding, Joolz. On the backcover Kate Summerscale claims this book is a “disquisition” on death. Uh, not quite. This book is an assortment anecdotes and quotes from a gang of Frenchmen that Barnes was unable to pull together into a coherent whole---and his “lolloping“, coincidental expository style is rather maddening (just try to follow the “argument” on pages 144-149).

A strange book. He is an unbeliever that cant stop talking about the Big G. I should have thought after reflecting on the thoughts of Newton, Darwin and Freud Barnes would have, like other intellectuals, adopted some mechanistic view of the universe, biology or the self. None apparent here.

Of course neither Barnes nor the parade of Frenchmen have an answer about death or God. How could they?

Since there is nothing conclusive to say about death other than it concludes life as we know it, Barnes brings in other subjects to discuss: his family, memory (curiously he makes no mention of Proust) and some observations on writing that I will delve into a little further. “Fiction...balances precise observation with the free play of imagination.” Nice. “Literature can tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how to live in that world, though it does it most effectively when appearing not to do so.” Interesting, although it would be better to say that some literature makes suggestions of how one might live in the world; but keep going, tell me how. (I end disappointed). “...[the novelist] wants to tell the one true story.” Losing interest, there isnt one true story. “....novelists conspire to present human life as a story progressing toward a meaningful conclusion” Okay, I’m done. I would argue Chekhov and Joyce, for instance, are counterexamples to that statement. In any event, it is pretty silly to try to say what “the novelist” is attempting to present, it would seem to be as varied as there are authors.

Oh! He did write a very funny bit about his last reader. I should like to extend my arms across the years and embrace that man as my brother. ( )