The Lemon Table

The British roundabout, bane of American motorists who have been known to beome entrapped in one and not know how to get out again, provides an appropriate metaphor for discussing the stories in this book. For the Brits in these stories, it's not the roadway traffic circle that has them buffaloed. Sex is the troublesome roundabout, as hard for some to enter as for others to exit. Still, as Julian Barnes' collection in "The Lemon Table" (2004) makes ever so clear, from adolescence to senescence (which many of the characters in these stories are approaching), they are nearly always ready for a go. The sex drive, a motivating impulse in all but one of these stories, unifies them and, pardon the pun, makes them ever so appealing. Here are samples from five of the stories: "Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly." A Short History of Hairdressing. "Other men would at least wait until the steamer was out of sight of the jetty before starting their canoodling." The Story of Mats Israelson. "We, now, would like it to be neat then, but it is rarely neat; whether the heart drags in sex, or sex drags in the heart." The Revival. "...those composers . . .tried to write tunes of such commanding beauty that even a lustful upcountry baronet would for a moment stop tampering with the exposed flesh of the apothecary's wife." Vigilance. "Instead he chased after women all his life..." Knowing French. The veiled reference to "Madame Bovary" in the quotation from Vigilance is a tip of the hat from Barnes to Gustave Flaubert, his favorite author. There is, in short, little if anything not to like in this collection.End note. Six of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker. That's very good news for those of us who look forward to each new story from this distinguished writer. Indeed the July 4th 2011 issue of the magazine now on the newsstands contains his latest, Homage to Hemingway, about a professor examining his own life and teaching Hemingway to various groups of students in different classes.

One of the things I most enjoy about Julian Barnes is his variety. Each of his books questions the conventional idea of a novel, and each does so in a different way. So I open this collection of eleven short stories expecting an intriguing range of subject and technique, united by a humanity that Barnes has never yet failed to provide. I was not disappointed. This book is as wonderfully written as it is pleasant to hold in the hand, in this beautiful Vintage paperback edition. The range of subjects is indeed large, with scenes of contemporary London alternating with historical stories set in France, Sweden, or Russia. Although all the stories are about twenty pages long, some take place in a single hour, others span a lifetime. They are linked by the common theme of aging, but this should not be a deterrent; few are sad, but rather wry, tender, surprising, or even hysterically funny. Barnes' range of emotion is as great as his range of style.The stories are technically varied, too. In some, the narrator speaks entirely in the first person: "A Short History of Hairdressing," the first story, opens in the voice of a fearful young schoolboy; "Hygiene" replays the mental check-list of a retired soldier still locked in army lingo. Others seem written by a dispassionate historian -- or not so dispassionate, as when the biographer of Turgenev narrating "The Revival" starts re-examining conventional phrases of 19th-century courtesy in 21st-century four-letter terms. Or the objective and subjective can be mixed, as in "The Things You Know," where the conversation between two widows sharing a hotel breakfast is intercut with their very different thoughts. Another story, "Knowing French," is told entirely through correspondence. People who know Barnes from his extraordinary quasi-novels such as  A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS  or  FLAUBERT'S PARROT  will be exhilarated, not surprised; people who enjoy these stories will be encouraged to try the novels.My favorite contemporary short-story writer up to now has been William Trevor -- at his best, I think, in  AFTER RAIN . The wisdom with which he looks back on the wicked world as an older man has always had something profoundly consoling, and Barnes shares this quality. But the two writers approach their subjects from quite different angles. Trevor is the more straightforward, telling a story straight on in sequence. Barnes stalks his subjects from the side, often ostensibly writing about something quite different, striking his real target only tangentially. We see glimpses of a romantic life-history among the barbershop visits in "Hairdressing"; the old major's annual visit to a London prostitute in "Hygiene" reveals only his love for his wife; an older man's diatribe about concert behavior in "Vigilance" turns out to be about the dislocation of a gay relationship. Sidelong glances in retrospect.Barnes' wonderful tangentiality is shown nowhere more clearly than in my favorite of these tales, "The Story of Mats Israelson." The irony is that the title story -- about a real copper miner in Falun, Sweden, killed in a accident in 1677, whose petrified body turned up 40 years later -- is never properly recounted at all. The non-telling of the story becomes only one of many things that do not take place between one upright citizen and the wife of another in a small town in 19th-century Sweden, whether through propriety, shyness, or circumstance. Yet for the rest of their lives, as they continue in their marriages, they each nurse the pain of the unconsummated attraction. Barnes, who loves Flaubert, here writes a beautiful antithesis to  MADAME BOVARY  -- one where the adultery does NOT take place, its poignant absence distilling a lingering essence of what might have been.The collection ends with an elderly Scandinavian composer watching a flock of cranes disappear into the distance. "I watched until my eyes blurred; I listened until I could hear nothing more, and silence resumed." The full irony may be lost on readers who do not identify the composer as Jean Sibelius, whose own music had passed into silence some thirty years before. But it remains a touching image of that last transition.

There is a problem with certain kinds of literature. The plays of Shakespeare, with the possible exception of "Romeo and Juliet", are far too often rammed down the throats of teenagers in schools, resulting in a lifelong aversion to any of his works. Why? Because young minds are simply not receptive to the ideas that Shakespeare explores, nor do they have the experience of life itself to relate to the complexities of plots and characterisation.This review carries a health warning in the headline for the very same reason. Julian Barnes, one of the greatest of our living novelists, has put together a collection of short stories which are all linked by the theme of ageing and the increasing awareness of our own impending mortality. They are not all at the same level of inspiration but they each reveal marvels of characterisation and insights into human nature; anybody in their fifties, sixties and beyond that will recognise those character traits, those human failings, those stirrings of passion still left in dying embers and those iniquities of human existence that sum up so succinctly what being an elderly male or female is all about.What Barnes does, he achieves with an economy of language and an irony that make these stories a delight to read. In the second story, set in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century, he takes the image of an architectural feature in front of a village church (to which he neatly returns right at the end) as a lead-in for a tale of unrequited love, made the more poignant because the two leading characters, taciturn as Swedes often are, are held back by the mores of their age, their own misunderstandings and moral cowardice. In between he describes another figure in one of the remarkable phrases that distinguish his writing - ".....succumbed to akvavit, frivolity and atheism" - gives us one of many insights into the human condition - "a greater pain drives out a lesser one" - and presents in a simple sentence the dilemma of the leading female character - "......the desolation of her life, divided between not loving a man who deserved it, and loving one who did not." There are few contemporary writers who can lay bare the pain and sadness of human existence as precisely as Barnes can.His powers of observation and ability to recreate authentic dialogue stand out in the third story, in which two elderly ladies dependent on each other for a kind of friendship spend all their time engaging in one-upmanship and malevolent deceit. Above all, he understands what hormones, and the lack of them, do to one's sex drive, not least in the ironically named "Hygiene". The elderly army officer, who once a year deceives his wife about his intentions in travelling up to London, is beautifully mirrored in the next generation up, a middle-aged man seated opposite in the train who uses his mobile to deceive his wife about his whereabouts and expected time home. Like father, like son, one is tempted to say: human behaviour repeats itself over and over again.The range of Barnes' fictive imagination includes the rage of one concertgoer incensed at the antisocial disregard by others for his own enjoyment; the hilarious epistolomania demonstrated by one of the author's admirers, herself in increasing stages of dementia; the coprolalia (yes, I had to find a name for this activity) displayed by another more serious dementia sufferer; and the sexual passion of the aged Russian dramatist Turgenev for a woman who could have been his own daughter. Those who are familiar with the life of the composer Jean Sibelius will recognise all the references he weaves into the final story, "The Silence", where the origin of the title of this short story collection is revealed. And, as so often, Barnes provides food for thought in "The Fruit Cage": "Why make the assumption that the heart shuts down alongside the genitals?" This is a chilling story in so many respects, with its implication of domestic violence (in this case what the wife does to the husband), and the inability of one son to come to terms with his elderly parents' disintegrating marriage.These stories are not intended to be a quick read and will not unlock their secrets easily, but they repay hugely.

Another fine selection of short stories from Julian BarnesHere’s a couple of my favourites:"Vigilance", a tale about a concert goer who becomes obsessed with the coughers, snufflers and sneezers while an orchestra is playing and devises a number of strategies to "deal with them". Offering a cough sweet is at the mild end of the strategic spectrum whilst tripping them up at the top of a flight of stairs during the interval is more extreme ... but more fun. Lots of other funny strategies in between.The author has a way of writing these stories in such a way that you believe the characters are real and known to him. In some cases they probably are, but they are human stories as much as tales about an event or an incident. Typical of this is "Knowing French" which is nothing to do with France or the language, but a series of letters written to Barnes by an 81 years old woman, Sylvia Winstanley, from her Old People’s Home she refers to as The Old Folkery. It’s sad but funny as she refers to her "inmates" as The Deaf and the Dead and relates various incidents such as the disappearing Creme Eggs, and her friendship with Daphne Charteris supposedly one of the few women trained to fly a Lancaster Bomber in WWII!Much food for thought in every one of them!

"Among the Chinese", it's revealed towards the end of the last story in this collection, "the lemon is the symbol of death", and the table of that name is in a cafe where people meet to talk about that all-consuming subject. But by the time you get to that point in this short book, you've already got a pretty good idea that this is what the book has been about. The characters are all growing old, on the foothills of "extinction's alp", and viewing their end with bitterness, or regret, or resignation. It can be hard to find anything original or memorable to say on this much-worked theme and, reading them one after another, I found that not all of these stories hit the mark, in spite of the usual excellence of Barnes' writing. I enjoyed "Vigilance" for its humour, and the way in which the unreliable narrator gradually reveals himself (similar to the protagonist in Barnes'  Before She Met Me ), and the wistful sadness within "The Story Of Mats Israelson" and "Hygiene", but I don't think the others will stay with me for long. Perhaps, as has been mentioned elsewhere, they worked better as separate pieces in their original settings; collected together, their common theme is somewhat overwhelming, and just a little too bitter. Before She Met Me

I should have read the reviews more carefully but I honestly wish that I had never started on this book. I was expecting a collection of short stories, written by a writer whose work in the past I have always enjoyed reading. Having previously only read novels by Julian Barnes I was looking forward to seeing how his collection of short stories would come over. I abandoned the book about a third of the way in because it made me feel utterly miserable. Many of the sentiments expressed were unnecessarily spiteful and very bitter. It is not fair to assume that bitterness is a natural trait of the ageing process and is certainly not humorous to portray old age in this way.

Barnes is a great stylist but there is also substance. Playing with his usual themes of aging, regret and death Barnes looks at them from different perspectives. He draws, with his usual humour, pictures of what it is to be human and to live. Using the palette of human experiences Barnes colours these pictures with different shades of grey. Sometimes wistful, sometimes bitter, these stories are always reflective even when playfully ironic. The odd thing is that at the end I couldn't recall exactly all the different stories but the themes stayed with me for a while. Perhaps I shouldn't have read the whole book in an evening. The one story that has stuck is "The Story of Mats Israelson", where two people pine for one another over drawn out years. This is a heartfelt recommendation.