A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (original 1989; edition 1990)

Okay, yeah, this seems interesting. Rec'd by El and Jayme, and I wish you could add two names to that field. Annoying.

Ok, the first chapter of the book entitled "The Stowaway" is one of the most brilliant things i've ever read. If there ever was a more intriguing hypothetical account of Noah's Ark, I haven't read it.

Sadly, the rest of the chapters are not as amazing. They are worth reading and interesting. They are engaging and inventive. But, they still aren't 5/5 stars good. I'm a tough critic. This is a solid 4 star work with some real five star moments. Barnes proves he's a creative thinker and able to delve into some important events in the history of both events and concepts (i.e. love, mental illness, and heaven for instance). At times he is wry and at other times he is completely serious and should be taken even more seriously for it. There are great historical accounts of the world based on true paintings and events and then more personal accounts that still seem just as valid for an understanding of the world's history.

While the chapters are vastly different in terms of the topic and theme, time period, perspective, and setting, Barnes has an apt way of providing a distinguishing link between all of them, as if underneath it all deep within our sub conscious is naturally our own origins. In the meantime, Barnes is going to help us explain our own sense of survival and reaction to terrorism in "Franklin Hughes." He writes about the agony of waiting for death and hope in addition to how humans turn catastrophes into art in "Shipwreck." He analyzes sexism, mysticism, WWIII paranoia, and psychosis in "The Survivor." He tells of a story of one man misunderstanding another based on culture and race in "Upstream!" and celebrates as well as criticizes love in "Parenthesis" He shows us the fallibility of religion in "The Wars of Religion" and of heaven itself in "The Dream." He is ever aware of the immense shortcomings in both humanity and history. It is my opinion that he is just as brutal as he is forgiving.

You will learn from this book and you will too investigate deeper thought into human events of the past. It will make you wonder which aspects of history really are true and it will help you re-examine those you thought could be true. He deconstructs history, and myth, and with the greatness of his writing, reminds us of what good there actually is in our species.

Memorable Quotes:

pg. 4 "It wasn't a nature reserve, that Ark of ours; at times it was more like a prison ship."

...

"They were chosen, they endured, they survived: It's normal for them to gloss over the awkward episodes, to have convenient lapses of memory. Bit I am not constrained in that way. I was never chosen. In fact like several other species, I was specifically not chosen. I was a stowaway."
...

"When I recall the Voyage, I feel no sense of obligation, gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on my lens. My account you can trust."

pg. 6 "We weren't in any way to blame (you don't really believe that story about the serpent, do you? -it was just Adam's black propaganda), and yet the consequences for us were equally severe: every species wiped out except for a single breeding pair, and that couple consigned to the high seas under the charge of an old rogue with a drink problem who was already into his seventh century of life."

...

"Did you imagine that in the vicinity of Noah's palace (Oh, he wasn't poor, that Noah) there dwelt a convenient example of every species on earth? Come, come. No, they were obliged to advertise, and then select the best pair that presented itself. Since they didn't want to cause a iniversal panic, they announced a competition for twosomes-a sort of beauty contest.."

pg. 12 "I don't know how best to break this to you, nut Noah was not a nice man. I realize this idea is embarrassing, since you are all descended from him; still, there it is He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us. He had a gopher-wood stave with which...well, some of the animals carry the stripes to this day. It's amazing what fear can do..."

pg. 16 "Once, in a gale, Ham's wife lost her footing near the rail and was about to go overboard. The unicorn-who had deck privileges as a result of popular lobbying-galloped across and struck his horn through her trailing cloak, pinning it to the desk. Fine thanks he got for his valour; the Noahs had him casseroled one Embarkation Sunday. I can vouch for that. I spoke personally to the carrier hawk who delivered a warm pot to Shem's ark."

pg. 19 "Again-I am reporting what the birds said...And the birds said Noah didn't know what he was doing-he was all bluster and prayer. It wasn't difficult, what he had to do, was it? "

pg. 25 "If you think I am being contentious, it is probably because your species-I hope you don't mind my saying this-is so hopelessly dogmatic. You believe what you want to believe, and you go on believing it. But then, of course, you all have Noah's genes. No doubt this also accounts for the fact that you are often strangely incurious."

pg. 27 "God said...He was creating for us the rainbow. The rainbow! Ha! It's a very pretty thing, to be sure, and the first one he produced for us, an iridescent semi-circle with a paler sibling beside it, the pair of them glittering in an indigo sky, certainly made a lot of us look up from our grazing. You could see the idea behind it: as the rain gave reluctant way to the sun, this flamboyant symbol would remind us each time that the rain wasn't going to carry on and turn into a Flood. But even so. It wasn't much of a deal. And was it legally enforceable? Try getting a rainbow to stand up in court."

pg. 30 "He just couldn't handle the responsibility. He made some bad navigational decisions, he lost four of his eight ships and about a third of the species entrusted to him-he'd have been court-marshalled if there'd been anyone to sit on the bench. And for all his bluster, he felt guilty about losing half the Ark. Guilt. immaturity, the constant struggle to hold down a job beyond your capabilities-it makes a powerful combination, one which would have had the same ruinous effect on most members of your species. You could even argue, I suppose, that God drove Noah to drink."

pg. 83 "But her Dad said you could tell from the antlers that the reindeer pulling the sleigh were stags. At first she only felt disappointed, but later resentment grew. Father Christmas ran an all-male team. Typical. Absolutely bloody typical, she thought."

pg. 103 "The mind just got carried away. Never knew when to stop. But then the mind never does. It's the same with these nightmares"

pg. 104 "Everything was connected, the weapons and the nightmares. That's why they'd had to break the cycle. Start making things simple again. Begin at the beginning. People said you couldn't turn the clock back, but you could. The future was in the past."

pg. 125 "How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays, the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have it on the London stage within a year. A president is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is *for*"

pg. 137 "How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky, how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for."

pg. 134 "There always appear to be two explanations of everything. That is why we have been given free will, in order that we may choose the correct one."

pg. 205 "Also I think cities make people lie to one another."

pg. 226 "It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size of a florin to an expiring speck...Is love meant to glow on like this for a while after the set has been switched off?

pg. 227 "I love you. For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of Vitamin C...These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them."

pg. 134 "Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary."

pg. 235 "A medical textbook doesn't immediately disenchant us; here the heart is mapped like the London underground. Aorta, left and right pulmonary arteries and veins, left and right subclavian arteries, left and right coronary arteries, left and right carotid arteries...it looks elegant, purposeful, a confident network of pumping tubes. Here the blood runs on time, you think."

pg. 238 "But I can tell you why to love. The history of the world becomes brutally self important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it's unnecessary. Love won't change the history of the world...but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don't accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don't impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you're wearing. "

pg. 239 "How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. It's as simple as that.

We get scared by history we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates."

pg. 304 "And scholarly people, they tend to last as long as anyone. They like sitting around reading all the books there are. And then they love arguing about them. Some of these arguments-she casts an eye to the heavens-go on for millennium after millennium. It just seems to keep them young, for some reason, arguing about books." ( )

The Ship of Fools - Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1500

A set of deliciously intertwined stories. A wry humor on the nature of existence and history, and how adrift we are on it, and a poke in the eye of dogma and 'history' as a lie.

We start with Noah's Ark, and dance around human history from there - mad astronauts, cannibalism, and the legal defense of woodworms. All the pieces matter.
( )

This is my first Julian Barnes, and as I read I was very excited to have found him. I was all set to give this a five-star rating until I reached the half-chapter alluded to in the title. It's the only section of the audiobook I played at a faster rate so I could get through it more quickly. It's not clear to me whether it was an authorial intrusion or a fictive voice (either of which would have been fine); I kept wanting to yell at Barnes, "Don't wreck what you've made! It stands on its own! Don't bludgeon the reader with heavy-handed explanations that link the 10 stories!" In fairness, I shout this a lot at Chuck Palahniuk as well: "Trust your story! Don't undo it!" though, to be perfectly honest. I've stopped reading Palahniuk after too many experiences of this type. Suggestion: Ignore the blundering exegetic half-chapter; read only the other 10 stories.

Those other 10 stories are varied and delightful. I enjoyed Barnes's wry and acerbic narration, and really admired the resonance across the stories, which mirror,amplify, invert, distort, and corrupt each others' symbols and tales in a way that wonderfully exemplifies the central themes of redaction and redemption, awe and doubt, and cyclicity and free will. Yes, at times these chapters can get a bit meat-fisted as well, but nothing like the half-chapter which, if I were Queen of the Universe (or at least in heaven), I would excise for the good of the masses, telling only the history of the world in 10 chapters. ( )

This book, pace some of the blurb supporters, is not a novel….at least not in the traditional sense of having a protagonist and supporting characters, a narrative arc and a plot that may or may not work and may or may not be resolved in the end. I’m not sure what genre I would call it; it reminds me of Molina’s Sepharad: a book of ideas that, in the case of Barnes, ranges even more broadly across ideas or questions of the connections between art (writing, painting, music) and life; the role, meaning and purpose of religious belief; the moral capacities of animals versus humans with the latter coming off rather the worse in the comparison; the rightness/wrongness/impossibility of judging the actions of others taken in extreme circumstances and the unknowability of one’s own actions until faced with similar circumstances; the ‘reality’ of perception versus the ‘reality’ of the world and how the ‘reality’ of either shifts with the observer/actor so which is ‘real’; myth as collective memory but also something that refers us forward to something that will happen so that myth becomes reality; the fragility and permeability of personal relations that can shift and sour to degrees unimagined at the start; the need to look clearly at death as part of life; the attraction of, and need for, love in all its unfathomable aspects; the tendency to simplification (“…complicated matters were best understood using zestful intuition untainted by any actual knowledge or research.”); the gap between native peoples and those of a more “sophisticated” technological society and the uncertainty of where sympathies should lie.

If there is a unifying arc in this book it is the Ark and Noah himself. The book opens with a story of the voyage of the Ark told from the point of view of stowaways (woodworms) ; others of this species are later the subject of a story about a court case seeking to excommunicate woodworms for having weakened a chair that tumbled a Bishop and reduced him to a “state of imbecility”. The story, The Mountain, recounts the history of a Miss Ferguson who, in the 1800s,with a paid travelling companion, Miss Logan, makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat where Miss Ferguson happily lies to down to die in a cave; her bones are found over 100 years later by a former US astronaut who, having walked on the moon, makes his own pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and believes he has found Noah’s bones when he comes upon the remains of Miss Ferguson. Through all of these, it seems to me, Barnes ridicules the permeability and utter flexibility of faith that sees portents and answers in the strangest places and can, in the end, rationalize anything with reference to faith and the belief that it is not for us to discern the mind of God. I am rather with Barnes in thinking of God’s “routine and fairly repellent morality” and his role as a “moral bully” in the story of Jonah and whale. Elsewhere, in another piece, Barnes muses on the lack of a “single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself; maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn’t’ show God in the best possible light?”

Barnes has a jaundiced view of the moral capacities of human beings especially as they are manifested through great ideas or great movements: “…it’s about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilization. Discipline v. permissivenss. Sticking to the letter of the law v. sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v. doing the wrong thing for the right reason. How great ideas like the Church get bogged down in bureaucracy. How Christianity starts off as the religion of peace but ends up violent like other religions. You could say the same thing about Communism or anything else, any big idea.”

I like Barnes on history:
“History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it's connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. We, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by a decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush.
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes overlap; strange links, impertinent connections.”

I especially liked Barnes’s exploration and parsing of the painting, “The Raft of the Medusa” by Gericault (1819) based on a true incident in which a French naval ship, the Medusa, ran aground; some got to shore, but at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly fashioned raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days they were on the ocean; they survived starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. Barnes takes the painting apart and invites us to consider different interpretations of what Gericault had in mind with his use of light, of the numbers of people (more than the 15 rescued in reality), how they are posed on the raft and what those postures mean; also, what the painting can say to us about the incident itself and more broadly about life and class and morality. Barnes notes that Gericault did not paint the necessary cannibalism, but I think there is a hint of it: the figure at the far left bottom on the raft is clearly just a torso that has been split open at the chest and cut off just below the ribs. At the bottom, almost centre is the naked body of a man lying in the lap of an older man who has his back turned on the rescue ship on the horizon; to the far right, also at the bottom, is the body of woman whom we see only from about the neck down, she is on her back, her legs naked and open, her modesty preserved with a drape of cloth. Both the male and female figures share the same lighting effects; in life they would represent regeneration and birth through the possibility of mating; in death they mock that.

A very interesting and thought-provoking book.