Julian Barnes is the author of several books of stories, essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, and numerous novels, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of an Ending and the acclaimed The Noise of Time. His other recent publications include Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art and The Only Story. His book The Man in the Red Coat was published in the UK in 2019 and in the US in 2020. He also selected and introduced a collection of John Cheever stories titled A Vision of the World (Vintage Classics, 2021). His new novel Elizabeth Finch will be published in 2022.
Barnes has received numerous awards and honours for his writing, most recently the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011, the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the 2021 Jerusalem Prize, and the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award. Also in 2021, he was awarded the Jean Bernard Prize, so named in memory of the great specialist in hematology who was a member of the French Academy and chaired the Academy of Medicine. Now let us throw some light on the novel The Only Story.
The Only Story
‘The only Story’ is a thirteen novel by Julian Barnes. It was published on 1 February 2018. The story is about nineteen years Paul Roberts and forty-eight-year-old Susan Machold. The story is mostly based on memory. This novel is divided into three parts. It is divided into first, second and, third-person narration. A story begins with the narration of Paul Roberts. It has a tragic end. The story has an unreliable narrator.
2) Postmodern Novel
Julian Barnes, an outstanding English contemporary postmodern writer, a highly acknowledged novelist and the author of ten novels, two volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, and four detective novels was born in the family of teachers specialized in French who probably ignited his initial interest in French literature. Although he had studied law and qualified as a barrister he found much more pleasure in reviewing the books than defending a criminal. He might have rejected to stand for the rights of the criminals, but he decided to defend the rights of every living creature on earth or else to oppose them at all with his literary works which help us to recognize him as a postmodern humanist. Fundamentally, postmodernism stands for neither this point nor that one, it is both. When he said in one of his interviews: “I don’t feel roots there, I don’t feel roots anywhere” [1, p. 9] might make us apprehend it as a territorial root on the surface but those who have read his works infer that he freed himself from any type of root that might relate him somewhere he doesn’t belong to with his heart.
Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically
Every man has a past of his own. A lot of new stories can come out of that by remembering the past. Its past is contained within its memory and it comes out at certain times. The same thing is shown in this 'the only story' novel. We can say that this novel 'The only Story' is a memory novel. Because it is based on the memory of Paul Roberts. He tells his own story so we can say that he himself is narrative. So the question here is whether they themselves are narrative. And we can see many points related to memory which are shown below.
1)History is collective memory; memory is personal history
2)Trauma in memory
3)Memory and morality
4)Memory prioritizes
The love affair in Pual's life is depicted in this novel. So clearly we find that his own personal point of view has shown the whole novel. But we don't know if this novel is a first person narrative. The structure of the whole novel seems to us to be connected with one memory. The storyline of the whole novel runs in the same way as the thing that comes in the memory. One thing ends, another thing begins. Once again the same thing has started and another thing is done. The structure of the whole novel is going on as the thoughts in the memory come from one thing to another and from one thing to another.
3) Theme of Love (Passion + Suffering)
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."
This sentence, which introduced this most recent book of Julian Barnes to his potential readers, was pretty much my Achilles heel from Page 1. I don’t quite understand how you can adjust the levels of love, like making marks on a burette and letting the content drip as per your desire of color and consistency of the final emotion. Quantifying love is beyond my comprehension.
And yet, there is a certain granular tenderness in this story of a young man and his (almost) thirty-year senior lover that prevents this love story from becoming a chore.
Seen in the rearview mirror during his twilight years, Paul reminisces the first time his 19-years old self fell for the 48-years old married Susan at a Tennis Court when the two were brought, fortuitously, together to team up for a mixed doubles match, and that his feelings were near immediately reciprocated. Ignited by this act that was both adventurous and liberating, Paul and Susan built walls around them, barricading their respective families with a dangerous, and often confounding, indifference and pushing this affair out of their current state, both literally and geographically. But at their new abode, which stripped them of their familial clutches, love gets suddenly exposed to the calamities of habituation, expectations, and aging. As a result, a whole new world sprouts between the two – one where they commence playing from different sides.
Barnes’ signature prodding into the delicate gossamer of human dilemmas and questionable foibles as much on display here although the narrative veered to the unpleasant edge of excess a good many times. Of the three sections the novel is divided into, the first was a watertight bag that didn’t allow for any of my emotions to blossom. The characters appeared like a bunch left unanchored on a theatre stage, waiting for the director to give them a cue. But beyond those 80 odd pages, Barnes plays his magic trick, and all of a sudden, the palette of love bursts open and renders an immersive experience. The turning points when love turns into duty, the duty into a burden, the burden into a gash, and the gash into a permanent scar, are the crevices where Barnes resonated the most with me.
”Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”
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