Synopses & Reviews
Master prose stylist Julian Barnes presents a collection of stories whose characters are growing old and facing the end of their lives some with bitterness, some with resignation and others with raging defiance.
"Life is just a premature reaction to death," was what Viv's husband used to say. Once her lover and friend, he is now Viv's semi-helpless charge, who is daily sinking ever deeper into dementia. In "Appetite," Viv has found a way to reach her husband: by reading aloud snippets of recipe books until he calls out indelible and sometimes unfortunate scenes locked away in his brain. In "The Things You Know," two elderly friends enjoy their monthly breakfast meetings that neither would ever think of missing. Of course, all they really have in common is a fondness for flat suede shoes and a propensity for thinking spiteful, unspoken thoughts about one another's dead husbands. "The Fruit Cage" is narrated by a middle-aged man whose seemingly orderly upbringing is harrowingly undone when he discovers that his parents' old age is not necessarily a time of serenity but actually an age of aroused, perhaps violent, passions.
In these stories, Julian Barnes displays the erudition, wit and uncanny insight into the human mind that mark him as one of today's great writers, one whose intellect and humour never obscure a genuine affection for his characters.
Review
"This is Barnes at his best. Don't miss this collection." Library Journal
Review
"Eleven old-fashioned stories that take their time but are riveting, muscular, and real....Fine stories, well rounded and grounded." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The Lemon Table has plenty of sharp, even cruel, comic pleasures....The
Lemon Table, in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader's faith in literature as the truest form of assisted living." Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"A French literary syphilitic. One messy little love triangle. A doctor's fixation with Flaubert. This is just a brief entry into the multivalent mind of Julian Barnes. In fourteen books of stunning range, the brilliant Englishman has become one of the very few writers you cannot afford not to read....These gracefully constructed stories are subtle, erudite, and wise; they elevate us because there are few such generous observers of humanity. In a word: The Lemon Table is Barnes at his profound, dexterous best." Adrienne Miller, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Review
"[Barnes's] fiction, as tightly constructed as a soundproof box, provides just as little access to the deeper questions within. This is a particular problem in The Lemon Table, which takes as its main preoccupation the uncomfortable intermingling of sex and old age love and death, in other words, and what could be more crucial than that?....He dreams up some nicely unconventional figures and puts them in provocative scenarios, but he fails to discover any emotion richer than a condescending pathos." Ruth Franklin, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
About the Author
Julian Barnes is the award-winning author of nine novels, including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and England, England, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. He is also the author of Something to Declare, Cross Channel and Letters from London 19901995. He lives in London, England.