A very confusing book. Barely readable. It has its mesmerising points but nothing brighter or engaging. The question that kept plaguing me, was: the protagonist, what, had some congnitive abnormalities or something? Or was it just the convoluted style that made me feel like that?A DNF at that.

The really important questions do not have answers: and the really important answers do not need questions. Life is itself, not comparable to anything. And all the great miracles are present in the here and the now, if only we can see them... like staring at the sun through the gap between your fingers....Some of the things which I took away from this magical, unreviewable book.Read it.

Julian Barnes has certainly improved a bit in the last 25 years. I recently read his wonderful latest book, The Sense of an Ending (review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), and for my second Barnes, turned to this, one of his earliest, from 1986. Both books document a long life, but the style is very different. There is a promising novel struggling to reveal itself here, but this isn't it.It is the story of Jean, told in three parts: as a late teen on the cusp of marriage at the e...

THE IMPOSSIBLE ALWAYS TAKES A LITTLE LONGER This is a very tough book to review, but a magical one to experience. The prose is close enough to a warm bed on a winter morning with a steaming cup of coffee in your hand and your favourite song playing in the background. It is a book of questions and answers of life (not corresponding to each other) - right from the curiosity of a child to the exploration of sex and marriage to wondering if there is a life after death. It is also a book of brillian

This is an early Barnes book (1986) which recalled Metroland (1980), one of his first books that got me hooked on Barnes. After reading most of his last books this was both a blast in the past as well as making me realize that some of his subjects such as love, death and existence has never left him and hence, reinforces why I love his books.This is the story of a very plain woman, Jean Sergeant who, after living through World War II meets a pilot who boasts he can stare at the sun. Intrigued by...

I'd like to think I'd have been brave enough to be a woman, but somehow I doubt it. It remains to be seen how I'll cope with the tedious matter of death but I'm no rush to sit that test.Dazzlingly thought provoking, brilliantly written (as always) and with a charming foretelling of our world of Google, Wikipedia and Siri - imagination, pathos and a morbid honesty.I will read everything Julian Barnes has written because failing to do so would be unforgiveable.

I absolutely love Julian Barnes' writing. He has a way with words and also with stories. Jean, the main protagonist, is a likeable character. The book is about her life and, in the last part, about her son's life too. It is also a book that raises - and answers questions about life and death, about humanity and how we live our lives. This book was first published in 1986 but the story ends in 2020. Barnes painted a picture of the future that is not far off. I'm so happy that there are still so m...

2.5 starsEither 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 writer...

One of the most remarkable books I ever read. I'm generally stuck in either whodunit or historical ruts, and it has to be said I'm happy there.But this is one of the few exceptions that has, as we stuck in the '60s insist on saying, 'blown my mind'. It is such a mixture of tragedy, comedy, trivia and deep philosophy as to keep the reader on his toes throughout. And it's not a page-turner; every so often, you just have to slip in a bookmark and think. Then re-read the chapter that MADE you think....

In his recent Booker Prizewinning The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes' middle-aged character tries to make sense of a pivotal event in his life many years ago. Barnes had written about an elderly character looking back on a life once before in Staring at the Sun, one of his earlier works written in 1985, and the difference between the two books is instructive. Both are massively ambitious. Whereas The Sense of an Ending explores the nature of history, Staring at the Sun tries to tell whether y...

A book in three parts. The first two parts develop interesting characters and ideas. Part 3 goes into an imaginary future with some sort of state controlled wikipedia which is out of keeping with the first two parts of the novel. All a bit disjointed and unsatisfactory.

Reminds me of "Nothing to be frightened of" by same author. I share his obsession with death!

A Julian Barnes story is never much about taking a journey through different places or different ages. Don’t get me wrong, those aspects are part of his stories as is the case with Staring at the Sun. But the protagonist and his or her journey is of lesser importance as Barnes seeks to strike a deeper chord with us through his ideas, ideologies, his convictions, his doubts on a whole range of topics, be it the existence of God (which you will read even in his other book Nothing to be Frightened

i have been thinking about how to review this book, and... i just don't know. i felt like i needed to say something. i like simple things and i felt this novel was just that: simple yet, since it deals with the entire lives of two people, beautifully complex. it's just about the questions (sometimes real, sometimes not) and the answers (or lack of) of everyday life, all summed up in the fundamental question: why is the mink excessively tenacious of life?

After a mildly interesting set up for the first half of the novel, I completely loss interest when Barnes left behind the keenly observed world of human relationships for an endless, acronym filled sci-fi scenario replete with pages of sophomoric metaphysics. Gack. Like a warm beer, you just can't stomach the last few swallows...setting a record this year for unfinishable books...

Wonderful.

I was looking forward to this book for quite sometime. However, when I read that part of it is set in Barnes’ imagination of 2020, I decided to wait for 2020 to read it. Ah, what a year! It begins with the an epilogue where a pilot fighting a war witnesses the sun rising twice. We, then, follow the story of a curious, English girl name Jean and her life with Uncle Leslie, Prosser (the pilot), her husband Michael and her son Gregory. In the Bildungsroman, Barnes traces Jean’s growth from childhoo...

I somehow oscillated between love/hate attitude towards this book throughout my journey with it, and I ended up somewhere in the middle, which is the worst position, if you think about it. Consisiting of three parts, where the first focuses on the youth of Jean, the main character, the second on her middle ages and the third - on her approaching her venerable age of 100, the book seems to be unsure about its style and consistency. I get it: it was supposed to mature along with the protagonist, t...

Well, as some of the other reviewers said, a bit of a difficult book. But worthwhile. An exploration of Jean Serjeant's life and what she learned from it. And questions about life. I think the final (third) chapter is the point of the book and needs the set up of the first two chapters for the reader to be able to understand/appreciate the questions and answers and the answers and questions posed in the third chapter. In that chapter "Gregory wondered if this was what being old meant: everything...

It took me forever to read this, mostly because I stopped reading it part-way through August and then almost never picked it up again. I actually liked the last parts with Gregory more than I did the beginning. Can't quite pinpoint what I didn't love about this book, but glad I finished it.

Barnes' books fall under one of the two categories- yay or nay. This one shows promises of the former, but ends up becoming the latter.The book begins with a young impressionable Jean and shows her journey through the years right till she reaches the age of hundred. The earlier chapters are a breeze, but soon enough they stop making sense and turn into a drag.

A NY Times Best Book of 1987. The novel charts the life of Jean Serjeant, a lower middle-class English woman, from girlhood through WW II, marriage, separation, motherhood and travel to the age of 99 in the 21st century. The underlying question is whether ordinary people must lead ordinary lives or if magic is possible. Jean leads an everyday life with glimpses of enchantment and therein lies the beauty of the novel.

We could never be married, me and Julian Barnes. His point of view is too foreign to me, we would be discussing the same thing and scarcely able to understand each other. Separated by a common language, as it were. It's not to say that I didn't like, or find sympathy with, or relate to this book, or any of his books, for that matter; I'm just not sure I understand where he's coming from, or where he's going. At the end, what I feel most of is perplexity.

Another brilliant book by Julian Barnes. With "Flaubert's Parrot" and "The Story of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" they are my three favorite books by Julian Barnes and all of them make it in my top 10 books of all times.This book is hugely surprising. I find it hard to say more without giving away the plot. Let's say that it asks Very Important question in a very original way.

"why is the mink tenacious of life?"

Love/Hate relationship with this book. It was good and terrible at the same time.

Hmmmmm. I really enjoyed the first third. Worked my way through the second third. I forced myself to finish the third third.This probably tells you something about how I found this book.

This is the first novel I've read from British author Julian Barnes. The novel was first published in 1986 and I read it in 2021. The novel is divided in 3 parts:- the 1st part was the best one about the leading character Jean, born in rural England before WWII. She grows up to be curious about people and life, but is naive as her education is limited to her parents and village. She has a "normal" life and marriage for people of her generation. However, things changes for her when she is in her

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3834524.htmlWhat's it about? In fact only the third (and shortest) section of three is set in 2022, and even that is a bit ambiguous in that the year is never identified, though 2022 seems a reasonable best fit given what we are told earlier in the book. The first section deals with the childhood of the protagonist in the 1940s; the second with her unsuccessful marriage to the village policeman; and the third flashes back to her life in between from the perspectiv

Not so much the seven ages of Man as the three ages of Woman. This is a relatively early novel (written in the mid 80s) but the themes that occur often in his work (well the ones I've read so far) are all present & correct. The novel is in 3 parts broadly covering a woman's youth, middle age & old age. The first part is relatively slight (although with a funny ending), the second part is the most enjoyable whilst the third part explores death & the afterlife (arguably sketching out some of the t...