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the complete review - non-fiction

Nothing to be Frightened of

by
Julian Barnes

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : the writing is a pleasure to read, but more a collection of thoughts and quotes than a cohering examination of the subject matter

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Most (though not all) find it fairly appealing, if rather an odd, loose collection of thoughts and pieces

  From the Reviews:

• "It’s best not to struggle too much while reading Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes’s chew on death, religion, family, writing, and memory, among other things. Ideas, arguments, quotations, and anecdotes pursue one another across the pages, dogleg, vanish, and resurface. Signposts and footholds are scarce, and there are no chapter breaks or headings. No matter: Barnes is the most companionable of tour guides" - Peter Terzian, Bookforum
  
  
• "After a while -- a very short while, in fact -- it becomes clear that this is also a kind of engagingly hazy autobiography (.....) But this is, on the whole, a philosophical work -- the business of philosophy, as Montaigne and others have reminded us, being to teach us how to die. Hence the importance of his brother. But it is also a meditation on writing, on literary posterity, on the characters and equipment of writers" - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
  
  
• "The core of the book is an aesthetic, rather than a religious, elegy. Barnes surrounds it with a rich array of questionings from the cusp of life and death. (...) Sometimes the book threatens to turn into an anthology of death-writings (.....) The best pages, however, are those in which he evokes his parents." - John Walsh, The Independent
  
  
• "This is a thoughtful and elegantly written memoir, as one would expect from Julian Barnes (.....) The insistent reference to the fact that Barnes himself is a writer is overdone, though. He mentions that he's a novelist on just about every other page; but then, perhaps leaving books behind feels like a little retaliatory knock at death." - Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "That is what makes this book so enjoyable: there's plenty to argue with. Julian Barnes is a delightful companion and much of the book (its informal tone included) is like an extended and very interesting conversation. (...) When he writes about his parents he is at his best, a master of the telling detail. " - Cressida Connolly, Literary Review
  
  
• "Barnes is a masterly novelist, at his best able to summon up characters of all ages and types. But here he emerges as a chilly and tentative character, emotionally challenged and technically hobbled." - Martin Rubin, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "I am delighted (and, you can imagine, not a little relieved) to report that at times this book is both fun and funny. It is sharp, too, in the sense of painful as well as witty. But that is bearable, because when that someone is the novelist and essayist Julian Barnes, you can relax immediately into his lucid prose, safe in the knowledge that you are in the presence of a nimble mind in compete mastery of, and engagement with, its chosen subject." - Lucy Beresford, New Statesman
  
  
• "The book is rather meandering and very English (.....) At any rate the pleasures of Nothing To Be Frightened are in the writing rather than the thoughts" - Michael Wood, The New York Sun
  
  
• "All true so far as it goes, perhaps, but so what? Barnes is a novelist and what gives this book life and keeps the reader happily churning forward is his affection for the people who wander in and out (.....) It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head." - Garrison Keillor, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Barnes's clinical approach tends to reduce other people -- the genetic material that made him -- to extensions of himself, figments not much more substantial than the waterlogged scraps of torn-up correspondence leaking through the gaping seams of his parents' disintegrating pouf. Inanimate objects are more tenderly treated." - Hilary Spurling, The Observer
  
  
• "The overall effect is that of an edifying conversation with an interesting, knowledgeable but refreshingly unpretentious thinker." - Mary Fitzgerald, The Observer
  
  
• "Although death is the destination here, however, Barnes takes a meandering route towards it. (...) It is in its occasional over-reliance on quotations that this book is weakest. While the quotations themselves are rarely dull, their sheer volume makes this seem, in places, like a ‘best of death’ compilation rather than the original work that, for the most part, it is. The more enjoyable passages, in contrast, are those in which Barnes sets out his own far-ranging, and often highly insightful, thoughts on death." - Simon Baker, The Spectator
  
  
• "Ironically, the most mind-expanding idea in his book comes not from the arts but from science." - John Carey, Sunday Times
  
  
• "(A)n elegant, ludic, urbane meditation on death, which manages to dance nimbly round its subject without ever engaging it in mortal combat" - Lynn Barber, The Telegraph
  
  
• "This book reads just like a collection of commonplaces; a ragbag of thoughts, mostly filed under D for death -- death is the Nothing in the Nothing to be Frightened Of." - Harry Mount, The Telegraph
  
  
• "This is not, in short, a book about family'n'God'n'art'n'books'n'Jules's very clever and rather crushing bro, the quaintly dressed, llama-owning, France-dwelling philosopher. It is a meditation on death, in the contemplation of which all the above, and a good deal else beside, are intimately involved. (...) This is, sure enough, an extremely bookish account of mortality: intricate and elegantly structured beneath its anecdotal surface (...). It may also strike female readers as a peculiarly male account of timor mortis." - Jane Shilling, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In Nothing to be Frightened of Julian Barnes faces his fear of death, wondering whether it is ... nothing to be frightened of, or a very big nothing that one should, indeed, be terrified of. He's long been worried about the matter, and in Nothing to be Frightened of he collects his (and many others') thoughts on the matter. He reflects a great deal on family and the death of his parents, and uses his older philosopher-brother -- described as being a completely different type than him -- as a foil and measure for his own attitudes.
       Much of the book also focuses on religion and its usefulness in making the thought of death bearable, especially by offering an ever-after (rather defeating the ... purpose of death) -- a convenient crutch that Barnes wishes he had but can't bring himself to embrace. He begins the book by noting that: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him", and he does go on at quite some length about the benefits (and problems) of religious belief vis-à-vis how to handle death.
       Barnes is also quite fascinated by technological and medical advances, and how they've changed dying: chances are one will breathe one's last in a hospital nowadays, rather than at home; that we can (and often are) kept alive rather artificially and well beyond our sensible expire-by-date (in part also because doctors -- apparently more death-fearing than the average person to begin with -- see patients' deaths as personal (and, obviously, professional) failures and thus try to keep those bodies 'alive' as long as possible); that the time of well-turned dying utterances is pretty much over. Barnes also offers amusing anecdotes of how the best laid plans, expectations, and hopes of how exactly one will die tend to go way astray -- and notes that this is one thing that has not changed, as he nicely puts it in a typically cleverly turned passage:

Maugham is right: we die as dogs die. Or rather -- given medicine's advances since 1902 -- we die as well-groomed, well-tranquillized dogs with good health insurance policies might die. But still caninely.

     I imagine my brother's mental life proceeding in a sequence of discrete and interconnected thoughts, whereas mine lollops from anecdote to anecdote. But then, he is the philosopher and I am a novelist, and even the most intricately structured novel must give the appearance of lolloping. Life lollops.

- M.A.Orthofer, 2 October 2009

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Vintage (UK) publicity page
• Mercure de France publicity page
• Uitgeverij Atlas publicity page
• Interview in The Oxonian Review

• About.com
• America Magazine
• B&N Review
• Bibliophilia Obscura
• Bookforum
• Boston Globe
• The Boston Phoenix
• California Literary Review
• Chicago Maroon
• Claremont Review of Books
• The Compulsive Reader
• Daily Mail
• Evening Standard
• Le Figaro (French)
• First Things
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Independent on Sunday
• Lire (French)
• The Los Angeles Times
• New Statesman
• The New York Sun
• New Zealand Listener
• The Observer (1)
• The Observer (2)
• Of Books and Bicycles
• Shelf Monkey
• spiked
• TV5Monde (French)
• The Walrus Magazine

• Julian Barnes Website -- recommended
• Julian Barnes at British Council Literature
• Interview at Identity Theory

• Arthur & George
• England, England
• The Lemon Table
• Love, etc.
• [Pulse]
• The Sense of an Ending
• Something to Declare
• Talking it Over

• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of books dealing with Religion
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       English author Julian Barnes was born in 1946. He is the author of several highly acclaimed novels.

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