jellybeyreads reviewed Staring at the sun. by Julian Barnes
Review of 'Staring at the sun.' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
2.5 stars
Either I'm not smart enough for this book or it's not as good as I hoped it would be. Or both.
The good:
1. I love Jean. She's curious but naive and no one will tell her anything about anything. It's no wonder she agrees that she must be stupid when really she's anything but.
2. Other characters are inconsistently developed, but filtered through Jean and their interactions with Jean, they are interesting, especially Tommy Prosser, Uncle Leslie, and Rachel.
3. There aren't a lot of writers who use language as well as Julian Barnes-- never overly-stylized, always reader-friendly, but not dumbed down, with plenty of really lovely sentences that make you immediately think, Wow, this is why I read.
The... Bad? The only ok?
1. About halfway through the book, Jean's son Gregory becomes a POV character. Why? I thought this was Jean's story?
2. The last …
2.5 stars
Either I'm not smart enough for this book or it's not as good as I hoped it would be. Or both.
The good:
1. I love Jean. She's curious but naive and no one will tell her anything about anything. It's no wonder she agrees that she must be stupid when really she's anything but.
2. Other characters are inconsistently developed, but filtered through Jean and their interactions with Jean, they are interesting, especially Tommy Prosser, Uncle Leslie, and Rachel.
3. There aren't a lot of writers who use language as well as Julian Barnes-- never overly-stylized, always reader-friendly, but not dumbed down, with plenty of really lovely sentences that make you immediately think, Wow, this is why I read.
The... Bad? The only ok?
1. About halfway through the book, Jean's son Gregory becomes a POV character. Why? I thought this was Jean's story?
2. The last of three sections is set in the future (at time of writing, about 35-40 years, but now only 5 years or so). The risk of writing about the future is that you get it wildly wrong; or worse, come close but fall short and the result is just silly and kind of dumb where it should have been provocative. The latter is what happens here. Barnes could not have foreseen the shape of the internet, google, Wikipedia, and socio-cultural change, so it's not his fault it comes off as silly and short-sighted, but it does. On a much smaller scale, he certainly couldn't have predicted the porcelain tower of Nanking would be rebuilt.
3. The last section is suddenly about death and god. Was the rest of the book about death and god and I just missed it entirely? I spent the first two sections thinking, I don't get what this book is about, then suddenly there are Themes, and I can't figure out how they connect to the rest of the book. Or to Jean, as they are predominantly filtered through Gregory, and isn't this supposed to be the story of Jean's life?
