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Nothing to Be Frightened Of | 
 enlarge | Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 113
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 0.9 x 0.4
ISBN: 0307269639
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307269638
ASIN: 0307269639
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Product Description
Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French”—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.
Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.
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 Frightened of nothing, indeed October 12, 2008
The nothing of which Mr. Barnes is frightened is death, I found out after selecting the book based on the title and the author's photograph on the cover--a tightly framed head shot of a middle-aged man looking directly into the camera with his head slightly turned to the side, with a a faint smile that might signify cool cynicism, a private joke, or a knowing wisdom. I had never read anything by the author before, but found this essay on death deep, readable, and witty, even when I disagreed with him.
Barnes, it turns out, is a British writer (so his wit is by turns subtle, ironic, and scathing) who is an agnostic obsessed with death--as a philosophical subject, of his parents, of famous writers, and more personally, his own. He is often awakened by dreams of death, and faces his fears from the standpoint of a humanist evolutionist unable to believe, but yet, professes that "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," a profession his atheist philosopher brother finds "soppy."
Despite it all, Barnes still approaches the subject with good humor and consideration that he might be ("hopes to be" would be overstating the case) wrong. Quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer on immortality, "If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.", Barnes turns to the camera with that wry smile and ripostes "The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing." (p. 65)
I don't agree with Mr. Barnes, approaching the subject as a believer, a Christian secure in the belief that the Bible describes first the certainty of eternal life after death, and then the path to enjoying that eternal life in the presence of God. I say this not in an attempt to proselytize, antagonize, or criticize agnostics like Barnes or atheists less friendly to my spiritual belief, but merely to preface my awareness that accepting God's existence and salvation is essentially a closed system; one either believes in God, the Bible, and the plan of salvation, and are thus convinced of immortality, or one does not, in which case all bets are off and one is left to approach death either in abject fear, resolute denial, or as Barnes has done, with insightful examination of the complete bundle of human emotions the subject arouses.
I do wish that I could do a better job through the quiet testimony of my life in revealing the existence and presence of God and the ability to face death with certainty; instead, as Barnes says "My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity--or their opposites." (p. 117) That is a sad commentary that my spiritual maturity and that of the Christian community is not what it should be.
In any case, any reader whether Christian, agnostic, or atheist who approaches Barnes with an open mind will find plenty to ponder and enjoy here.
 Ruminations on mortality October 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"In the midst of life we are in death." Julian Barnes has discarded God and religion, albeit admitting that he misses the certainty that religious faith offers. That makes his thoughts on mortality and death particularly intriguing, especially for others who share his lack of religious conviction or who grapple with questions. Death is the central and inevitable fact of our lives; our fear of confronting it means that works like Barnes's are all-too-rare.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have become a tedious and self-indulgent exercise. But Barnes blends memoir, literary reflections and personal philosophy to produce a series of extended essays that should prod the most reluctant baby boomer to re-examine their lives. Ultimately, the value of this eloquent book lies not only in Barnes's own insights about death and life, but in the way that it spurs readers to define for themselves what makes a well-lived life.
Should be mandatory reading for everyoone over the age of 40. And now I'm going back to read some other Barnes, after rediscovery the delights of his prose style and agile intellect.
On Death and Dying September 28, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.
Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."
Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."
Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."
When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.
You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.
Lively Thoughts on Death September 27, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Novelist Julian Barnes thinks a lot about death. And he doesn't like it; he describes himself as "one who wouldn't mind dying as long as I didn't end up dead afterwards." Naturally death has been part of some of his books, but in _Nothing to Be Frightened Of_ (Knopf), death takes center stage in what is a memoir and an essay on a popular subject. Everybody thinks about dying, but Barnes has used his thoughts to power a book that is funny (look at the two meanings in that title), sad, informative, and earnest. Barnes quotes many stars from history about the big subject, like Freud, who said that it was impossible for any of us to imagine our own deaths. Barnes strongly disagrees. He is 62, and does not give any intimation of ill-health, but since adolescence he has been thinking about his own death, and those of others. He isn't morbid. "I am certainly melancholic myself," he writes, "and sometimes find life an overrated way of passing the time; but have never wanted not to be myself anymore, never desired oblivion." The inevitable end is coming, however, so Barnes seems to be saying let's look at it seriously, and learn and laugh, and keep it in mind to season the days of our lives. Just remember, as he says, "that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred per cent."
Barnes's family had a family Bible, but it was someone else's family's, bought at auction, "... and was never opened except when Dad jovially consulted it for a crossword clue." His father was a "death-fearing agnostic", his mother a "fearless atheist", and much of his book has to do with how the two of them interacted, and then, well, died. The other family member frequently consulted in these pages is Barnes's older brother, an analytic philosopher and expert on ancient Greek, who lives in France, teaches, and keeps llamas. The brother has come very close to death, and even breathed out what it seemed were going to be his last words: "Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker's Aristotle." Barnes remarks that the wife of the philosopher found this "insufficiently affectionate." For an unbeliever, Barnes finds God all over the place. Barnes reflects that the important divide may not be between believer or nonbeliever, but between those who fear death and those who don't. He tells us how he conquered his fear of flying; perhaps he will conquer his fear of death, but he admits that even writing about it, which other people would think an exercise "to get it out of your system", does not work.
It doesn't matter. Barnes has a terrific subject, and if he doesn't have firm answers, he has great questions which any reader will enjoy thinking about. After all, as he quotes Montaigne, "The end of our course is death. It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish?" Barnes himself wonders at the beginning, "How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death?" And if we are not writers, how are we to think about death? And as a writer, he wonders about the last person to turn the pages of a Julian Barnes book, ages hence; he is no sentimentalist, cursing such a person for not recommending the book to the next reader. What is the meaning of words carved on a neglected headstone, or a mutilated photo within a family album? If you don't have faith, does this keep you from fully appreciating religious music and paintings? Do we have less fear of death if we consider how insignificant we are in the cosmos, or do we have more? Maybe there is no consolation on offer here: "We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten," he concludes, but if there is no consolation here, there is also little despair, and there are heaping amounts of joviality, sympathy, and curiosity. "For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out forever - including the jug - there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?" Readers with any interest in the subject (and we all are) will find conversational but lucid prose from a writer who has complete engagement and enthusiasm for his subject.
Coldly, cleverly faces the void April 25, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Julian Barnes has long been a novelist preoccupied with death. Every one of his previous books has, I think, contained at least one section featuring ruminations on the inevitable denouement to life, but never before has he devoted a whole book to the subject.
Nothing to be Frightened of is a book that will appeal mainly to long term Barnes fans. It is a return to the smorgasbord style - part essay, part epistolary debate, part philosophical disquisition, part literary homage that hallmarked his great 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot, and was reprised in his 1989 meditation on history, A History of the World in 10 Chapters. This book is hard to summarize, but the blurb writer has an impressive stab in one sentence: `among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.' That just about does it. It is something of a departure from Barnes's previous novels and essays, a comedown from the lofty heights of intellectual detachment, as he gives the reader an insight into episodes from his own life, particularly his relations with his family, people he has written of very little in the past.
Not that we should read this as his autobiography mind. A scrupulous guarder of his privacy, Barnes is unlikely to rip the lid off and spill everything in a messy reveal all in one go. Rather, he reaches into the pot to reach out carefully chosen morsels, starting with an account of his maternal grandparents who were an arch conservative and communist respectively. He recalls how his grandfather used to let the young Julian and his brother watch while he wrang chicken's necks in the garage. Here, the Barnes brothers' memories diverge over the exact nature of the execution (was there a guillotine mechanism? Was there a bucket to catch the heads?), and a tense dualism between them is set for much of the book.
Barnes, the younger of the brothers, gives us the impression that he is an intuitive, novelist thinker who is interested in things such as whether human life has a narrative, what happens after our death (he contemplates a huge array of options), how to get value out of a life in an age where Darwin and Dawkins have pretty much done for the idea of God - his chosen path, is a devout appreciation, the religion of art as Flaubert called it, even to the extent where he downplays his blood relations and instead considers his genetic lineage as a line of great artists including Renard (a death haunted artist who features prominently in the book), Flaubert, and Stravinsky.
Perhaps this worship of art is a result of his tricky family relations. His older brother, Jonathan, is a remote, fiercely rational Aristotelian philosopher. He features at points throughout the book, hoisted in at carefully chosen moments to illustrate a cold, philosophical angle on life. In an early exchange Barnes recounts a discussion in the car on the way home from their mother's funeral that turned into a stern grammatical debate on the music that should have been played at the service, and whether this construed an inadmissible `hypothetical want of the dead'. Some readers may find this medical gloved dissection of the event appealing in its precision, many more may find the reaction of the Barnes brothers, with their mother's corpse not yet cold, rather sub zero on the emotional scale.
Barnes's pere and mere were a difficult couple too. His father was a quiet, reserved French teacher, frequently overruled by his domineering wife who was frequently damning of her sons' literary talents `one son writes books I can read but can't understand, the other writes books I can understand but can't read'. Parts of the book focus on their respective declines and deaths, Barnes painfully watching as his father suffers a series of strokes, his mother reacting with stern admonishing towards his aphasia.
The deaths of his parents are the way into this book, the gate at the entrance, but most of the short sections feature great artists and their reactions to the inevitable. Philip Larkin, author of the great death angst poem Aubade, we learn would have died gibbering with fear in a Hull hospital were he not heavily sedated. Flaubert maintained stoical impassivity in the face of the void. Renard himself aimed to die a stylish, French death and eventually succumbed to standard emphysema. Barnes himself fears death constantly, waking up in the night pounding his pillow screaming NO, NO, NO at the injustice of it all. He says he expects his departure to be preceded by extreme pain, coupled with extreme frustration at the euphemistic, imprecise language used by those about him. A grammarian to the end.
Coupled with fear of death is fear of God, or rather, wistful unhappiness at the absence of God. `I don't believe in God, but I miss him,' is the first sentence of the book. His brother finds this soppy, but Barnes can't give up so easily. As with his 1986 novel Staring at the Sun he asks a number of questions concerning God - on Pascal's wager: `What if it turns out that God exists but disapprovesof gambling'. He ponders the hypothetical fury of the resurrected atheist and posits a would you rather question (one of many in the book - would you rather be an atheist philosopher who finds a wonderful surprise after your death, or be right after all.
The scale of the philosophising in this book stretches from the solipsistic to the very large. In the worst passages of the book, Barnes engages in self indulgent games, wondering what the last ever reader of his books will be like, or how it would work if he were to die in the middle of writing the book, or a sentence, or a wo (not one of the high points of his normally erudite style). But he can also stretch his mind to contemplate the bigger picture. Towards the end he considers Martin Rees's warning to us that humans are nothing in the scheme of things. By the sun's demise, in 6bn years time, any creatures left will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.
Yes, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead. So enjoy this witty and contemplative death volume while you can, and try not to worry about it too much.
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