He’s right that love is a mystery, but to get to the truth of the narrator’s lament – to get to the truth of The Only Story – you need to ask what are all those sad love songs really about? But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. “It could only ever be captured in a story.”. On the contrary, he suffered from a rescue reality.”, But the rescue, as we see, fails, and in the process, Paul suffers, too. Is first love uniquely painful, all-enveloping, potentially dangerous? But I can’t” – the airy good cheer diminishes. Early on, Paul says, “nothing” happens between them except “a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.” So they fall in love, and by the end of the first section, they run away to live together in London. But I think it’s more that she is subsumed into the world she finds herself in, as many women were – and still are. 'The Only Story': An Old Man Recalls His Young Love For An Older Woman NPR's Scott Simon talks to author Julian Barnes about his new novel The Only Story…

The Only Story … One might even go as far as to call them companion pieces. How can it not? The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. This is Barnes’s 13th novel, coming after The Noise of Time in 2016, which was a quiet follow-up to his 2011 Man Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending. Some information in it may no longer be current. The Only Story by Julian Barnes, review: Shattering emotional acuity The Man Booker Prize-winning author's new novel is narrated by an older … At points I wondered whether this is really what the world needs right now – another novel about a disillusioned older, straight, white man ruing the mistakes he’s made (a different type of “the only story”), but Barnes writes with such shattering emotional acuity. In 2017, he was appointed an officer of the Légion d’honneur. Or do I mean carefree?” It’s a small distinction, but an important one. Like any healthy young man, Paul knows with complete certainty that he will never succumb to these humiliations, even if he is dating a woman old enough to be his mother. That’s all I care about. His relationship with Susan creates an obsession: He keeps a notebook with quotations about love, which he reviews from time to time in order to cross out ones he doesn’t believe are true any longer. Here, we are told all, though this couple is different from that couple. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Try the 100-year-old puzzle that only three men have solved, ‘No notice, no proper details’: the little bookshop fearing a second lockdown, How Donald Trump has made American poetry great again, Samantha Morton on being homeless: 'I suffer with PTSD and have major panic attacks', Dirt by Bill Buford review: think you could be a French chef? Oh, Flaubert could have written a great novel about contemporary America. We only see her through his eyes; she’s both a presence and an absence.She is a woman of her time and class: naturally intelligent, funny and optimistic, yet deprived of education and trying to make her way in a world in which men have made the only rules that seem to be around. The Only Story by Julian Barnes, review: Shattering emotional acuity The Man Booker Prize-winning author's new novel is narrated by an older … That slightly absurd detail half-explains the hectoring blur in which some passages of the novel exist – “You realise that tough love is also tough on the lover.” “[F]irst love always happens in the overwhelming first person. “Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition,” Paul thinks. His new novel, which opens in suburban Surrey in the early 1960s, is The Only Story (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). Like that elegiac novel, his new book concerns an older man who looks back with a pained sense of culpability at a relationship in his youth. At the age of 13, he became violently infatuated with a young woman of about 20 – only to make the crushing discovery that the woman in question was already his father’s mistress. Susan, the antique object of his devotion, remains a vague, pathetic presence in the novel. Please, Julian Barnes’s new novel is like a drawn-out meditation on The Sense of an Ending, filmed last year. The Guardian. The focus of The Only Story, an affair between a 19-year-old student and a 48-year-old housewife, is like a drawn-out meditation on. Create a commenting name to join the debate, There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts, There are no comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts. I’m not shut in a box of my own devising.”. Alfred A. Knopf. It begins in the early 1960s in a suburb of London. We just have to intuit what it must have been like from the scantiest of evidence. Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. The Man Booker Prize-winning author's new novel is narrated by an older man looking back over his life, with parallels to his 2011 book ‘The Sense of Ending’, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile.



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