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August 18, 2004

Book Bites #3

It feels inaccurate to say I finished Julian Barnes’s The Lemon Table last week because it’s the kind of book to return to at different stages in life, finding new truths. It’s a collection of 11 stories about the awareness of mortality, a subject that rarely loosens its grip on me.

Some selections, like “The Story of Mats Israelson”—about an unacknowledged but mutual love—take place in far off countries in olden times; others, like “Knowing French”—in which a frank nursing home resident strikes up a correspondence with, well, Julian Barnes—are more ruminative than narrative-driven. Even the stories not set in England are shot through with British humor and a kind of farcical resignation in the face of physical decay that American culture could do well to embrace. In “The Revival,” the Russian playwright Turgenev gracelessly falls for a much younger actress; in the final and most resonant story, an unnamed composer whom musical detectives might recognize as Sibelius embraces “The Silence.” “[M]usic must come from silence,” he says. “Come from it and return to it.”

The “lemon table” comes from that last story, inspired by the Chinese idea of the lemon as a symbol of death. Together these tales form an imaginative space to hold that uncomfortable image in mind. To some, morbidity is an oft-investigated literary theme; to me, it is the theme that matters most. Barnes treats it with elegance and depth.

Posted by Rachel at August 18, 2004 12:46 PM

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