- Paperback: 200 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 9 edition (18 Mar 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330299301
- ISBN-13: 978-0330299305
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 640,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Staring At The Sun
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
None of Mr Barnes's previous work... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth Harpers & Queen Brilliant... Mr Barnes's work is at the forefront of a new internationalization of British fiction New York Times A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny and also genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head Glasgow Herald
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
'Teasing fullness, wit, incisiveness, gentleness and generosity' Times Literary Supplement
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Whether it is actually possible for the pilot of a plane changing altitude rapidly during the dawn to see the sun rise twice I don't actually know, although it sounds very unlikely to me. However that is the theme with which this story starts and ends. The start and end are very neatly tied together, and so indeed are all the various strands of the plot. Clever and deft workmanship of this kind is what I have learned to expect by now after experiencing five novels by Julian Barnes, and it is the sort of thing that leaves me unable to make up my mind whether I like his work or not.
After at least the last two novels I vowed to myself that I would never read another page by him because he is such a clever-clogs, and good heavens does he know it. For all that, whenever my eye lights on something bearing his name I keep picking it up, because he is just so exceptionally talented. He is talented as a writer, as a novelist and as an essayist. You will find coherent and convincing portraiture in this book, hung around the 100-year life of Jean, but really no less persuasive in the depiction of Leslie, Gregory, Michael, Tommy Prosser, Rachel and even Olive. That would form a good basis for any novel, but until near the end of the book I kept wondering whether the plot-line was really a device to string together a series of essays by the ultra-intellectual Mr Barnes. The lengthy sequence on what it must be like to die in an airliner crash is a rather blatant intrusion on the general narrative, but being the craftsman he is Barnes can get away with even this as being related in a tenuous way to the overall theme.
The reason why he can do that is that he keeps it skilfully vague and uncertain what the overall theme actually is. Is it the life of Jean, or is it the philosophical ponderings on the nature of God and the afterlife with which the book concludes? You tell me and I'll tell you - I don't really know which it is meant to be, and I don't think I'm meant to know. The book was published in 1986, I see, and the predictions for 21st-century computing have not really worked out as Barnes seems to have expected, but I find no fault with him for that. Indeed it could still turn out Barnes's way, I suppose. If I have a criticism at all of the numerous intellectual extravaganzas it would actually be that the interactions between Gregory and the computer regarding God, death and the rest of it run a distinct risk of being platitudinous. By what token we human beings presume to believe that if there is a Creator of the cosmos He shares human sensibilities I don't know, but I suggest a reading of Olaf Stapledon's `Star Maker' as a salutary mental corrective for Barnes or anyone else inclined to this outlook.
However even if we focus on the strictly narrative thread it is excellent. Jean's story is clear, it is coherent and it is involving. If I had to defend the book against a charge of artificiality and over-ingenuity in the way the various sub-plots and sub-threads are linked and associated, I don't think I could do it. This is just Julian Barnes, that's the way he is, and we just have to take him or leave him as we feel inclined. In fact this book does not annoy me in the way Flaubert's Parrot did, and I suppose I am having to recognise that talent of this order doesn't grow on trees and that if I chose to ignore Barnes I would be missing out on something major.
After at least the last two novels I vowed to myself that I would never read another page by him because he is such a clever-clogs, and good heavens does he know it. For all that, whenever my eye lights on something bearing his name I keep picking it up, because he is just so exceptionally talented. He is talented as a writer, as a novelist and as an essayist. You will find coherent and convincing portraiture in this book, hung around the 100-year life of Jean, but really no less persuasive in the depiction of Leslie, Gregory, Michael, Tommy Prosser, Rachel and even Olive. That would form a good basis for any novel, but until near the end of the book I kept wondering whether the plot-line was really a device to string together a series of essays by the ultra-intellectual Mr Barnes. The lengthy sequence on what it must be like to die in an airliner crash is a rather blatant intrusion on the general narrative, but being the craftsman he is Barnes can get away with even this as being related in a tenuous way to the overall theme.
The reason why he can do that is that he keeps it skilfully vague and uncertain what the overall theme actually is. Is it the life of Jean, or is it the philosophical ponderings on the nature of God and the afterlife with which the book concludes? You tell me and I'll tell you - I don't really know which it is meant to be, and I don't think I'm meant to know. The book was published in 1986, I see, and the predictions for 21st-century computing have not really worked out as Barnes seems to have expected, but I find no fault with him for that. Indeed it could still turn out Barnes's way, I suppose. If I have a criticism at all of the numerous intellectual extravaganzas it would actually be that the interactions between Gregory and the computer regarding God, death and the rest of it run a distinct risk of being platitudinous. By what token we human beings presume to believe that if there is a Creator of the cosmos He shares human sensibilities I don't know, but I suggest a reading of Olaf Stapledon's `Star Maker' as a salutary mental corrective for Barnes or anyone else inclined to this outlook.
However even if we focus on the strictly narrative thread it is excellent. Jean's story is clear, it is coherent and it is involving. If I had to defend the book against a charge of artificiality and over-ingenuity in the way the various sub-plots and sub-threads are linked and associated, I don't think I could do it. This is just Julian Barnes, that's the way he is, and we just have to take him or leave him as we feel inclined. In fact this book does not annoy me in the way Flaubert's Parrot did, and I suppose I am having to recognise that talent of this order doesn't grow on trees and that if I chose to ignore Barnes I would be missing out on something major.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Breaktakingly good prose, from a true master.
A book that tells the 100 year story of one woman, taking us from the nineteen twenties to the twenty twenties. It is enormously sympathetic. The book poses many questions about life, and credits the reader with the intelligence to find his or her own answers.
Moving, and ultimately quite melancholy, it is the sort of book that will leave you feeling emotionally richer.
There is a review quote on the back of the book which says "Undoubtedly much too good to win the Booker prize"
No kidding.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One of the blurbs on the back says this novel is 'much too good to win the Booker Prize', but while it is undoubtedly true that some very mediocre books have won the Booker, this statement is as misleading as most back-cover blurbs.
Ostensibly this is about the 100-year life of Jean Serjeant, though in fact we flit rapidly through most of her life, touching briefly on a friendship with a fighter pilot in 1941, then her lousy marriage to a policeman, then her relationship with her son, all of it fairly cursory. Uncle Leslie keeps popping up, but not for any obvious reason.
This isn't the first book I've read where the plot appears to be a flimsy framework from which to hang a few otherwise unrelated ideas, but it is one of the most obvious cases. The author wants to say something about tourism in China, so he has Jean take a holiday there. This also provides an excuse to make a few comments on flying and death. Barnes wants to say something about the Grand Canyon, so he has her go there too. He obviously doesn't want to say much about most of her life, so we skip huge swathes of it, leaping across decades in a matter of a seconds.
Right from the beginning of the book, with the fighter pilot watching the sunrise twice by diving 10,000 feet, I'm thinking, okay so what's the significance of that? Where is it leading? I'm expecting some great coming together later on, some point to it all, like the bit where Jean can't get pregnant for 20 years, but then suddenly she does, a year after her periods stop. Surely there's a point to that? But no, apparently not. It's just a random event. Perhaps that is the point, that things happen for no reason. But in a novel we like the dots to get joined up a bit. In this story they never do.
And why, even when Jean is fretting about her ignorance of sex, does she never seem to talk to her mother? We know she has a mother, but she is strangely absent from the pages of this novel, and therefore from her daughter's life.
In the final part of the book Jean is a hundred years old and we have zoomed into the future, giving Barnes the opportunity to make various predictions about the way things are going. We have the old joke about cigarettes finally being accepted as good for you (Woody Allen did it many years earlier) and we have various ideas about computer data bases, much of which becomes tedious.
For such a short book it gets quite repetitive too: several times we have some variation on the theme; If that is the answer, what is the question? Another recurrent question: what is a good death? Death seems to be an obsession of Barnes'.
I'm all for addressing the big themes of life, questioning the existence of God, religion, suicide, death etc, but one person's contemplations don't necessarily make interesting reading. All in all, this book lacks a plot, has very weak characterization, and as far as I can see it lacks a point. It is also becomes extremely boring towards the end.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised it didn't win the Booker Prize.
Ostensibly this is about the 100-year life of Jean Serjeant, though in fact we flit rapidly through most of her life, touching briefly on a friendship with a fighter pilot in 1941, then her lousy marriage to a policeman, then her relationship with her son, all of it fairly cursory. Uncle Leslie keeps popping up, but not for any obvious reason.
This isn't the first book I've read where the plot appears to be a flimsy framework from which to hang a few otherwise unrelated ideas, but it is one of the most obvious cases. The author wants to say something about tourism in China, so he has Jean take a holiday there. This also provides an excuse to make a few comments on flying and death. Barnes wants to say something about the Grand Canyon, so he has her go there too. He obviously doesn't want to say much about most of her life, so we skip huge swathes of it, leaping across decades in a matter of a seconds.
Right from the beginning of the book, with the fighter pilot watching the sunrise twice by diving 10,000 feet, I'm thinking, okay so what's the significance of that? Where is it leading? I'm expecting some great coming together later on, some point to it all, like the bit where Jean can't get pregnant for 20 years, but then suddenly she does, a year after her periods stop. Surely there's a point to that? But no, apparently not. It's just a random event. Perhaps that is the point, that things happen for no reason. But in a novel we like the dots to get joined up a bit. In this story they never do.
And why, even when Jean is fretting about her ignorance of sex, does she never seem to talk to her mother? We know she has a mother, but she is strangely absent from the pages of this novel, and therefore from her daughter's life.
In the final part of the book Jean is a hundred years old and we have zoomed into the future, giving Barnes the opportunity to make various predictions about the way things are going. We have the old joke about cigarettes finally being accepted as good for you (Woody Allen did it many years earlier) and we have various ideas about computer data bases, much of which becomes tedious.
For such a short book it gets quite repetitive too: several times we have some variation on the theme; If that is the answer, what is the question? Another recurrent question: what is a good death? Death seems to be an obsession of Barnes'.
I'm all for addressing the big themes of life, questioning the existence of God, religion, suicide, death etc, but one person's contemplations don't necessarily make interesting reading. All in all, this book lacks a plot, has very weak characterization, and as far as I can see it lacks a point. It is also becomes extremely boring towards the end.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised it didn't win the Booker Prize.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good book so far!
I bought this book for my mum, and couldn't resist flicking through it before giving it to her. I read the first coouple of pages, and literally didn't want to put it down - it... Read more
Published on 8 Feb 2010 by Ms. J. Sequeira
Don't ask
Like other reviewers, I don't quite get Barnes either. Nor did I quite get this book - the last third caught me completely by surprise. Read more
Published on 30 Oct 2009 by Mr. David Cheshire
Maybe There Is an Absolute
There are some questions that men and women have been asking since questions were formed and given their name. Read more
Published on 23 Nov 2002 by taking a rest
A book of wondrous things...
it follows the life of a young woman from the II WW up to her last days in the following Century. A book that leaves one, though slightly melancholy, with a warm feeling inside. Read more
Published on 23 July 2001
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
