Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
You can't accuse novelist Julian Barnes of picking an easy subject to write about in his new non-fiction outing.
But after apparently spending the majority of his life with an acute awareness of his own mortality, Barnes has decided to confront the matter head on and discuss death and dying.
He starts by saying that: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him", before going on to explore his subject in a number of ways, including sharing his own intimate fears about the one certainty in life; inviting us in to meet his parents as they faced death; listening to discussions with his philosopher brother on the subject and gathering together the thoughts and experiences of artists, composers and writers on the issue.
It's a philosophical journey, peppered with moving and laugh-out-loud moments.
And the conversational style makes it easy to read - deceptively so, since Barnes asks the sort of questions that stay around in your mind afterwards.
He has interesting observations to make - that we have made death a professional business in recent decades, removing it from ordinary human experience, for instance.
That we seem always to view death as a defeat.
That artists make art partly as a way of ensuring immortality - although interestingly, he misses the point that since the making of art is an act of creation, it thus makes the artist a god.
That perhaps – just perhaps – something such as death awareness is essential to making art and, indeed, to living.
There are many other things that one can draw from the book. It's quite a relief to realise that Barnes and his family were more dysfunctional than functional; that his feelings about his parents have not been sanitised for this exercise - in other words, that one's own ambiguous relationship with one's parents is not unique.
All in all, Barnes has produced a challenging read that can trigger some interesting and personal reflections.
You can't accuse novelist Julian Barnes of picking an easy subject to write about in his new non-fiction outing.
But after apparently spending the majority of his life with an acute awareness of his own mortality, Barnes has decided to confront the matter head on and discuss death and dying.
He starts by saying that: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him", before going on to explore his subject in a number of ways, including sharing his own intimate fears about the one certainty in life; inviting us in to meet his parents as they faced death; listening to discussions with his philosopher brother on the subject and gathering together the thoughts and experiences of artists, composers and writers on the issue.
It's a philosophical journey, peppered with moving and laugh-out-loud moments.
And the conversational style makes it easy to read - deceptively so, since Barnes asks the sort of questions that stay around in your mind afterwards.
He has interesting observations to make - that we have made death a professional business in recent decades, removing it from ordinary human experience, for instance.
That we seem always to view death as a defeat.
That artists make art partly as a way of ensuring immortality - although interestingly, he misses the point that since the making of art is an act of creation, it thus makes the artist a god.
That perhaps – just perhaps – something such as death awareness is essential to making art and, indeed, to living.
There are many other things that one can draw from the book. It's quite a relief to realise that Barnes and his family were more dysfunctional than functional; that his feelings about his parents have not been sanitised for this exercise - in other words, that one's own ambiguous relationship with one's parents is not unique.
All in all, Barnes has produced a challenging read that can trigger some interesting and personal reflections.