But just as there will be that last person who remembers you and visits your grave, there will be, at some point, the last reader of a Julian Barnes book. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. When confronted with religious art, for example, his response is primarily aesthetic. Nothing to be Frightened of | ISBN 9780099535874 direct en eenvoudig te bestellen bij Boekhandel De Slegte. by Studs Terkel. He might have sensed that Albus, who looks so much like his father--a phenomenon with which Harry is familiar--is afraid of the expectations that come with being Harry Potter's son. Here’s where he really scares the bejesus out of you. A writer like Barnes, who is childless, at least leaves behind his collected prose. Quotes Nothing To Be Frightened Of There. All believers, including fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise, are dismissed as 'credulous knee-benders'. All rights reserved. Nothing to Be Frightened of. Some years later, the wireless is replaced by a television set that is “the size of a dwarf’s armoire, and guzzle[s] furniture polish.” On the screen is Gielgud, or a show in which a field marshal explains his wartime exploits, or a nature program, which gets Barnes to thinking about the current popularity of penguins, which are reminiscent of humans but, he notes, are unconscious of an afterlife. bookforum.com is a registered trademark of Bookforum Magazine, New York, NY. Uniek aanbod (tweedehands) boeken. Find that passion and let it kill you. — He is working hard to believe that Hogwarts is safe now--after all, his first-born has apparently been attending without major incident for three years. Hogwarts will be the making of you, Albus. The pick-and-mix philosophy of contemporary religiosity provokes an asperity worthy of Barnes's formidable mother: 'The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. ', The sardonic Mrs Barnes seems to have passed on her deadpan style of delivery to her younger son, together with her love of the conversational pre-emptive strike and the ricocheting epigram. The closest he permits himself to go to the abyss is the recycling scenario observed at his brother's funeral by French writer Jules Renard, who watched a fat worm emerge briskly from the edge of the open grave: 'If a worm could strut, this one would be strutting.'. Barnes is master of this kind of cool. I think Harry has worked hard to convince himself of these things. Quotes About Fear “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. The author treats his sibling as if he wasn't there - an offstage intellectual stooge with no personality or individual existence beyond a handful of basic facts, such as his age, geographical location and the characteristically Barnesian first words of his elder child ('Bertrand Russell is a silly old man'). I promise you, there is nothing to be frightened of there. In so far as this book is a family memoir, its personnel - parents, grandparents, only brother and a handful of all but anonymous friends - are, by definition, dry and two-dimensional. I promise you, there is nothing to be frightened of there. First published on Sun 2 Mar 2008 00.06 GMT. Barnes's mother inspired altogether livelier feelings of rage and resentment, tinged occasionally with reluctant respect. Terms & Conditions. “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish,” wrote Jules Renard, one of the death-obsessed French writers whom Barnes considers his “true bloodline.” Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a kind of commonplace book, scattered with quotes from Flaubert, who believed that “one must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it,” and Montaigne, who encouraged us to “have the taste of death in your mouth and its name on your tongue.” Barnes might panic about what lies ahead, but his chatty, zigzagging essay steps neatly into their tradition of equanimity and generosity. Christianity in his book has dwindled to the vestigial observances (scripture lessons at school, brief, secularised church services at social functions) of the attenuated Protestantism into which he was born. The residue of mystery possessed by all real as opposed to invented human beings leaves him cold. Hogwarts will be the making of you, Albus. 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. Not a day passes but he thinks of death. A “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic. -- Eleanor -- Dorothy Thompson, Fear yours." expectations He wants to teach us, as Montaigne did, to die better. Inanimate objects are more tenderly treated. anxiety Revelations of American funeral practices. Available for everyone, funded by readers. The soft centre of this book is a sodden leather pouf belonging to Julian Barnes's parents, who stuffed it with their love letters and left it to rot at the bottom of their garden. The reader may ask, what do radio and TV have to do with all this? (CC1: Cursed Child Act 1). A sample handful of pages begins with the Barnes family, circa the ’50s, listening to a radio show featuring book and theater critics. Buy Nothing to Be Frightened of at the Guardian bookshop. Peter Terzian is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Small consolation. Like all good novelists, Barnes believes fictional characters to be intrinsically superior - sharper, clearer and more cohesive than their counterparts, with the added advantage that all there is to know about them can be confined within the pages of a book. Harry Potter 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. And I think he wants to encourage Albus and himself by saying that Hogwarts will be the making of him. Sun 2 Mar 2008 00.06 GMT *except when in the presence of dementors or, vaguely, when having a nightmare, Tags: The Harry Potter Lexicon is an unofficial Harry Potter fansite. And no depersonalized afterlife, thanks: “I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction.”, The deaths of Barnes’s passive father and difficult, manipulative mother (who tells her son that, given the choice, she would rather go deaf than blind so she could continue to keep up her nails) are his main points of reference. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” – Yoda “All men are frightened. When she entered hospital for the last time, her son's attempt to soften the blow of the consultant's verdict was forestalled by a grim salute from the far side of the ward, where his mother raised her one good arm with its thumb turned down. 'I fear the catheter and the stairlift, the oozing body and the wasting brain,' he writes, elegantly sidestepping a 2,000-year tradition of perturbation and panic. fear Having watched his parents depart this world, he realizes, now that he’s in his sixties, that his own days are numbered. Nothing to Be Frightened of is his own contribution to the genre, not so much a memoir, more a modern equivalent of the mixed bags compiled by antiquarians in the past, a mordant, melancholy cross between Thomas Browne's Urn Burial and John Aubrey's Brief Lives, Like Browne and Aubrey, Barnes makes a hobby of visiting graves and deathbeds (once he lost his footing and found himself spreadeagled on a sort of stone chute leading from the bedroom where Montaigne may or may not have died). “Life is a matter of cosmic hazard,” Barnes writes, that “unfolds in emptiness.” To reckon with this “is what growing up means.”. As kindly as Harry means it, this statement turns out to be kind of grim foreshadowing, as Albus ends up struggling a great deal both with magic and relationships, then abruptly trying to prove himself and nearly heralding in a new era of Voldemort, in which he does not even exist. Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a kind of commonplace book, scattered with quotes from Flaubert, who believed that “one must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it,” and Montaigne, who encouraged us to “have the taste of death in your mouth and its name on your tongue.” © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. His mind runs on old age, mortality and extinction. But wait—that field marshal turns up again 138 pages later. Will the Circle be Unbroken? Cape £16.99, pp256. “Stop worrying about what can go wrong, and get excited about what can go right.” Top synonyms for nothing to be frightened (other words for nothing to be frightened) are nothing to fear, nothing more to fear and nothing left to fear.