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Nothing to Be Frightened of (Vintage)

3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 · rating details · 1,582 ratings · 299 reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of death is “the most...more

Paperback, 256 pages

Published October 6th 2009 by Vintage (first published 2008)

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Sep 07, 2008 brian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i almost like your book. almost. it's a fun synthesis of a bunch of death related topics, there're some great historical and personal anecdotes, tons of interesting hypothetical situations and philosophical either/ors... but i object to your britishness, y'know? that whole mannered and clever and cautious thing...? this is death, man! the end! finito! skull and crossbones! grim reaper! "nothing more terrible, nothing more true!"

sure, there are gems throughout, but ultimately your book about dea...more

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Jan 25, 2009 David rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009

MASSIVE FURBALL ALERT!!!!

In this massive eructation of self-indulgent, rambling, repetitive prose, Julian Barnes contemplates his mortality. At considerable, punishing, length. Where does it get him? To paraphrase another writer: And the end of all his exploring is to arrive where he began. Despite the purgatorial length of this hideous hairball of a book, he never really arrives at any conclusion. The reader isn't even offered the courtesy of a chapter break. The book just meanders on with no...more MASSIVE FURBALL ALERT!!!!

In this massive eructation of self-indulgent, rambling, repetitive prose, Julian Barnes contemplates his mortality. At considerable, punishing, length. Where does it get him? To paraphrase another writer: And the end of all his exploring is to arrive where he began. Despite the purgatorial length of this hideous hairball of a book, he never really arrives at any conclusion. The reader isn't even offered the courtesy of a chapter break. The book just meanders on with no evident direction until (mercifully) it finally just peters out.

"But surely", I hear you ask, "this is Julian Barnes, a man of such wit and erudition, he cannot fail to be delightful company along the way".

That’s what I thought, gentle reader, but I was mistaken. I believe the relevant phrase is epic fail. The biographical stuff is faintly interesting at best, and Barnes – obviously a very private man – is careful to avoid anything genuinely revealing about his personal life. Anecdotes about various friends and acquaintances, and their thoughts about death, are tediously pointless. They are rendered all the more irritating by Barnes’s referring to the people involved as ‘P’, ‘S’, ‘A’ etc., a device that should have been outlawed after the death of Kafka, and that lends the text all the crackling excitement of a proof from Euclid. Barnes's rehashing of what other writers have written about death is equally soporific.

This is a baffling and irritating book. There is no apparent reason for it to exist at all - if Mr Barnes has nothing to say to us, why not leave us in peace? Whatever made him feel impelled to torment us with these vacuous scribblings? Reading this book feels exactly like watching your favorite cat cough up a particularly dense, matted hairball. It takes forever, and you feel vicariously exhausted when it’s all over. I know that, in mediaeval times, magical healing properties were attributed to such animal hairballs, or bezoars. But the best that can be said for this one is that you won’t have to clean up the carpet afterwards.

Try Henry Alford’s infinitely more engaging “How to Live” instead.

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Apr 07, 2010 Books Ring Mah Bell rated it 2 of 5 stars

On and on he goes! Where he stops, no one knows!

With a great title like that and a cover showing me a grave, I expected sooooo much more. What a bummer.

What I got were the rambling thoughts of the author on his eventual demise, the demise of his parents, what (drop in big name -preferably French- philosopher/artist here) thought, and what his friends C., G., H. and T. think about death. (I hate that initial shit. Make up a name if they want to be anonymous.)

None of this seemed to flow or come to...more

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Oct 14, 2008 Christy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I haven't read any of Mr. Barnes's fiction, but this work of prose (an "elegant memoir") has been a joy to read. Barnes muses on death by integrating ideas of mortality, memory, family history, questions about religion and the after-life, literature and philosophy (mostly French philosophers). "Nothing to be Frightened of" is not nearly as earthy as Thomas Lynch's "The Undertaking." Lynch is fully aware that mortality rate of humans is always 100% and he seems unfrightened to confront that final...more

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Oct 21, 2008 Bruce rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Does arriving at “a certain age” predispose one to thoughts of dying? Is it because I have retired that I think about death every day? I doubt it, since I have thought about it every day for as long as I can remember, for decades. Does having been a physician keep the idea of death in my mind, even after I am no longer in practice? I don’t know whether it is true of other physicians or not, nor do I know whether non-physicians have the same experience – I suspect the phenomenon is vocation neutr...more

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Oct 19, 2008 Maha rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another gem from Julian Barnes, perhaps best characterized as a memoir in essay form.

By which I mean, it doesn't have a narrative arc or set out to take us through Barnes' life or any particular chronological section of it. In fact, it leaves lots out--his marriage and his professional life are noticeably absent.

Instead, it begins the way a magazine essay on mortality might, with some musings about how we cope with death in a post-religious society (keep in mind, this is England, not evangelic...more

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Mar 28, 2013 John Alt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In reading this book I was reminded of William Hazlitt's essay, "On the Fear of Death." Hazlitt observes that we have no fear of the time before we were born, so why should we be afraid of a time after death? For Julian Barnes it is not that simple. Against Hazlitt's quite rational argument there is that old animal at the bottom of the brain that does not know reason. Emotion comes first; reason second. We feel and only after that might we be able to summon the will to over-ride the feeling.

Barn...more In reading this book I was reminded of William Hazlitt's essay, "On the Fear of Death." Hazlitt observes that we have no fear of the time before we were born, so why should we be afraid of a time after death? For Julian Barnes it is not that simple. Against Hazlitt's quite rational argument there is that old animal at the bottom of the brain that does not know reason. Emotion comes first; reason second. We feel and only after that might we be able to summon the will to over-ride the feeling.

Barnes can find no refuge in faith yet feeling is first. He recognizes its primacy when he misses "the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands."

He is, then, a modern person with what is left: science, and those who would make a surrogate religion of it. Yet science is not enough. According to it all your loves, your passions, your sense of the sublime while watching a sunset--all of that arises out of a hunk of meat inside your skull.

What then, of consciousness itself? Nothing more than that which arises out of many neurons. Of course, this is where science falls short. How can it explain what it feels like to be you? To be me? To be a bat? (See Thomas Nagel's famous essay with "bat" in the title.) Put it this way: A brilliant but totally color-blind scientist spends years studying the optics of color--light spectra, wave frequencies, the whole bit--and writes a work of genius on the subject. When she is done, does she really understand color?

The night my father died the EMT team applied shock paddles to his chest as he lay on the living room floor. Then he was ambulanced to the ER where physicians worked on him. I and my family sat in the waiting room. Finally, a doctor came out, apologized, and said they did all they could. I took one last look at my father there on the table as the doctor pulled the sheet from off his face. I didn't know how to explain it then and I don't know how to explain it now. This death, it has no feeling, no heft, nothing I can get my mind around. Yeats spoke of his soul fastened to a dying animal. I don't know and nobody does.

Julian Barnes doesn't know either but he does have feelings for people and he loves some of them. If we have nothing else, we do have that and it, like consciousness, cannot be explained away as resultant from meat.

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Feb 13, 2012 Vishy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I got ‘Nothing to be Frightened of’ by Julian Barnes a few years back. I haven’t read a Julian Barnes book before – I had read bits and pieces of ‘A History of the World in 10 ½ chapters’ and liked it, but I hadn’t finished it. The first page of ‘Nothing to be Frightened of’ started with this sentence – “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put.” It grabbed me and so I wanted to read the book as soon as I went home. I read a few pages and they were as go...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Sve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Обожавам го. Изящен език и тънък хумор :)
Книгата е много по-мъдра отколкото бих могла да възприема на първо четене. С много литературни и философски препратки, освежени от тънкия хумор на Барнс.
Не мога да си представя как може да се говори толкова леко за нещо "тежко" като смъртта. Но ето че той успява.

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Feb 06, 2009 Terence rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy

It takes 185 pages (in my edition) but Julian Barnes finally manages to define what “life” means to him: “a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well call for the moment free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to li...more

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Oct 13, 2011 Edward rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The "nothing" of the title refers to death, something that most people are very frightened of, primarily because it is something that our rational and ego-centered selves have no control over. Barnes speculates on what death means, drawing heavily on French authors such as Flaubert, Montaigne, Jules Renard, and others. It usually takes more humility and wisdom that most of us have to admit that in the billions of years of our universe's existence, our deaths, and lives, amount to very little His...more

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Oct 25, 2008 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

4 and 1/2 stars

I was drawn to this book because of Barnes' writing and because of the topic. And if it sounds odd to say one enjoyed a book about the fear of death/complete-annihilation, so be it. Barnes is entertaining, erudite, and even chuckle-out-loud funny in this book. He also writes of memories of his childhood, how they differ from those of his brother, how narrative/story both shapes and changes what we remember or what we think we remember, and contemplates the idea of memory = identit...more

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Dec 31, 2008 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So ends the reading year of the "friend" named "Steve." If the last day of the year fell as it should on the winter solstice, that darkest of all days, then this would be a fitting end: Julian Barnes humorous, learned, and poignant meditation on death. Despite the title, Julian Barnes is convinced that death is something to be frightened of and that all the little games we play, or are at least instructed to play, to take the sting out of death are not very successful, at least not for those of...more So ends the reading year of the "friend" named "Steve." If the last day of the year fell as it should on the winter solstice, that darkest of all days, then this would be a fitting end: Julian Barnes humorous, learned, and poignant meditation on death. Despite the title, Julian Barnes is convinced that death is something to be frightened of and that all the little games we play, or are at least instructed to play, to take the sting out of death are not very successful, at least not for those of us who love life. The irony is that on the very day I finished this book, today, I also came across Karen Sprague, one of the university's best biologists, who told me that there is very serious research going on just now on the "problem of immortality" and that there will be startling breakthroughs in this area in the next few years: "There really is no reason that cells must die," she said, "And we are very close to unlocking the secret of at the least keeping bodies in suspended animation indefinitely" (and not by freezing). Wow! Hope surfaces, for a second or two, and then I remember Barnes on this very possibility: "Suppose they find a way, even after you are dead, of reconstituting you. What if they dig up your coffin and find you're just a bit too putrified . . . What if you've been cremated and they can't find all the grains . . . What if the State Revivication Committee decides you're not important enough . . . And so on--up to and including the scenario in which you've been approved for a second incarnation, and are about to be brought back to life, when a clumsy nurse drops a vital test tube, and your clearing vision hazes over eternally" (pp. 192-93). Yes, I can hear the decision now: "We have decided to revive the ten top American sinologists of the latter half of the twentieth century. Steve Durrant ranks eleventh. Probably best to say, bravely, with Daudet, "Farewell wife, family, the things of the heart. Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct." (less)

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Dec 01, 2008 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Barnes's subject is death ("mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness") and his goal is to carry himself (and his readers) to a point whereby the thought of one's last end is ... well, nothing to be frightened of. Half memoir and half meandering treatise, this book by one of contemporary Britain's most elegant and respected writers should strike a chord with everyone. It's a philosophical, playful, and even humorous treatment of ideas, fears, and rehearsals every human being obsesses over (so...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir-biography

Most readers I see below were disappointed by this book, though I'm not sure why; its tone, style, erudition, and recursive consideration of ideas seems pretty much in keeping with his body of work. It's a Julian Barnes book, first and foremost, and it feels like his work in just about every particular. I don't share his fear of death (at least, not yet), so those musings resonate much less with me than do his portraits of living with those around him who are dying, and about the perfidy of memo...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Rene Stein rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

O román nejde. O rodinné vzpomínky také ne. O smrt ano.
Barnes píšící o smrti, o různém přístupu k smrti, o čistě osobní i o kolektivní celoevropské thanatofobii. "Vážné" téma smrti je vyvažováno výsměšným šklebem, který je leitmotivem celé knihy, že smrt nemusí být to nejhorší, co nás v životě potká. Možná k zoufalství stačí i život sám a když ne, tak námi nevybraní příbuzní a ve stejném průsečíku času se nachomýtající známí nám záminku k zoufání určitě rádi poskytnou.

Konfrontace teoretických i...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Pascale rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is many things: a compendium of anecdotes about death, dying and the last words of famous people; a reflection on the unreliability of memory; an attempt to grasp how the latest scientific discoveries about the human brain alter our views of free will and the afterlife; a straightforward family memoir dealing with parents and siblings. Unsurprisingly, some of the strongest passages derive their energy from the author's resentment against his mother and brilliant older brother, the phil...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Belle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is not the perfect book in terms of structure or clarity, but it is a perfect book in how the thoughts will resonate through your life and preparation for death, or lack of preparation! Nothing like a restless, worried mind to dig through literature and find out how everyone he admired and loved came to an end. Barnes learns that no one gets to chose how they die, though they can certainly articulate aspirations on how they wish to die. But we never know and we are not in control of our fin...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Iris Asllani rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As we get inundated by end-of-the-year best list of this and that, I thought of posting my reading disappointment of the year: Nothing To Be Afraid Of, by Julian Barnes. The thing we are not supposed to be afraid of is dying, but the book is really about Barnes terrifying fear of dying and his work being forgotten. At some point he all but pleads with the reader not to forget him, which makes for a pathetic kind of writing.
Barnes writes very well and his use of words is compelling, which can be...more

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Mar 30, 2012 Kurt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy

It’s probably appropriate to tackle a “review” of Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of in the same spirit in which it is written – personal and slightly rambling, if always on target (I can only hope for that last bit). My wife had read it in the midst of my friend Anthony’s long decline and suggested I would like it – 'like,' here, being a catchall word that might mean “find it valuable” or “insightful” or that I would appreciate another’s thoughts on the matter of death. That is, after a...more

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Aug 29, 2011 Monthly Book Group rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The majority opinion was that of admiration – some grudging, some less so – for the cleverness of the book, mingled with substantial reservations about it. More specifically, there was admiration for the precision and concision of his language, in tandem with a chatty style. We liked the wealth of anecdotes and the breadth of ideas (from the latest scientific thinking about the nature of the brain, to quirky facts such as that your nails do not actually continue to grow after death). We liked th...more The majority opinion was that of admiration – some grudging, some less so – for the cleverness of the book, mingled with substantial reservations about it. More specifically, there was admiration for the precision and concision of his language, in tandem with a chatty style. We liked the wealth of anecdotes and the breadth of ideas (from the latest scientific thinking about the nature of the brain, to quirky facts such as that your nails do not actually continue to grow after death). We liked the nimbleness of his mind, and the range of literary, artistic, and biographical reference. Some found the book funny (as in the anecdote of the man who hailed a passing hearse asking if it were free), while others found more irony, some of it rather bitter, than laugh-out-loud humour.

One major reservation for many was the length of the book, padded out with irrelevant anecdotes and repetition. “If a student gave me this,” one opined “I’d tell him to cut the length by at least half ”. Related to this was the chapterless lack of structure and proper conclusion. “If you cut the book up and threw it on the floor, you couldn’t put it back in order. Nor indeed would it matter what order you read it in.” “Barnes records” observed another, coldly putting the boot in, “that Oxford told him he did not have the right kind of mind to study philosophy. They were right. There’s enough that’s good in this to encourage me to read another Barnes’ novel, but not another rambling quasi-philosophical book like this. ”

Another reservation was that, in the process of resolutely knocking down every possible means of consoling himself about death, you felt that Barnes did not actually value anything in his godless world. He contrived to sound unenthusiastic about life in general, his interest in football (oh well, Leicester were doing badly then), about novel-writing, about relationships, about beauty, about the natural world, and even about his daily bottle of wine Not for him the spiritual dimension that many still find in a godless world. It was not that we found the book depressing; it was that Barnes seemed depressed. And his endless, abstract cleverness served finally to muffle the real horror of death.

The oddest thing about the book, the most energetic, and the one that had attracted most public attention, was the autobiographical material included about his family. It had an emotional charge which suggested unresolved conflicts. You could admire the novelist’s skill he brought to the descriptions of his family, and to imagining what might be the story of his grandfather’s war. You could also admire his honesty in examining and recording his own feelings. But – really – did he have to write so bitterly about his mother? Did he need to unburden himself in this way? What was the relevance to a book about death?

And where was the novelist’s capacity for empathy when he thought about his family? He excoriated his mother for a solipsistic view of the world, and then devoted reams to his own solipsistic worries about when readers would finally stop reading his books….

This is an extract from a review at: http://www.monthlybookgroup.com/ Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/

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Apr 30, 2011 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In one of our bathrooms we keep a drum of water which is usually half-filled and always uncovered. Occasionally, for reasons I do not know, a rat would fall into it. There'd be no way for it to climb back out. And as no one in our household is plucky enough to handle a live rat, we'll just let it stay there until it tires and finally drowns. The big black ones succumb faster than the smaller ones. The record holder of sorts was a really tough, brown, less-than-medium-sized rat athlete who kept o...more In one of our bathrooms we keep a drum of water which is usually half-filled and always uncovered. Occasionally, for reasons I do not know, a rat would fall into it. There'd be no way for it to climb back out. And as no one in our household is plucky enough to handle a live rat, we'll just let it stay there until it tires and finally drowns. The big black ones succumb faster than the smaller ones. The record holder of sorts was a really tough, brown, less-than-medium-sized rat athlete who kept on swimming for almost three days. It robbed me of at least two chapters of the book I was then reading because instead of the book keeping me company while I take a dump, I was watching this rat frantically trying to keep its nose above water, its four feet in a nonstop climbing motion, unaware of the futility of it all.

Julian Barnes here, a multi-awarded novelist (see my review of his "Flaubert's Parrot" which gave me so much pleasure that it made me finally read Flaubert's Madame Bovary), did something like one of these rats in our drum of water. In the end he likewise drowned. Many readers disliked this book for this but I am giving his performance here five stars for it was far from a 244-paged monotonous rat swim. He exhibited vastly different strokes, leaped in the air like a dolphin, dove underneath the water, tried to climb the slippery wall of the drum, cried, laughed, reminisced, joked, prayed, cursed the meaningless void, expressed hope, shouted his despair, danced, and told anecdotes about his friends, family and writers (and oh, what stories he tells about them, both the living and the dead!).

He was already over 60 years old when he wrote this book. Apparentlly still healthy but with constant thoughts of his mortality and certain (for him) permanent obliteration. His maternal grandparents, his parents and his only sibling (a brother who teaches philosophy) were all either atheists or agnostics. He himself does not believe in God or in the afterlife ("Dead is dead," said Gertrude Stein, an author which Julian Barnes surprisingly never referenced). He explains his reasons, but does not preach or attempt to convert. Rather, with his humor, intelligence, wit and keen mind he explores every angle of life's big questions about God, death, the act of dying, absurdity versus meaning, eternal life, oblivion, existence and the void.

A brave effort and a mesmerizing performance.(less)

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Mar 13, 2011 Trevor rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, philosophy, psychology

I generally don’t read other people’s reviews of books before I write my own – I worry that I will end up so affected by their review that I will never know if what I have to say after reading them will really be my reaction to the book or to their review – worse, of course, is to then go on to write a review that says much the same as they have said while thinking of them as my own thoughts. But for some reason I read what one of the best reviewers on this site had to say about the book: http:/...more I generally don’t read other people’s reviews of books before I write my own – I worry that I will end up so affected by their review that I will never know if what I have to say after reading them will really be my reaction to the book or to their review – worse, of course, is to then go on to write a review that says much the same as they have said while thinking of them as my own thoughts. But for some reason I read what one of the best reviewers on this site had to say about the book: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... (he hated it) and then one of my other favourite reviews said that they loved the book http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..., what now?

I really enjoyed this book. Like David I’ve read other Barnes novels and enjoyed those books too. However, unlike David I thought this was amusing, interesting and thought provoking – but again, as David says of himself, this may say more about me than it does about either David or the book.

This book is a manifestation of an obsession with death – something so many of my favourite composers seem to share (Shostakovich, Ravel, Stravinsky). When I started on good reads I began reading the collected essays of Montaigne and, although I’ve never finished them, really enjoyed his essay on death – the main idea being that to truly live one must face death down everyday. For many people, it seems, death is a constant presence in their thoughts. I’m not one of those people – but then, death has been very kind to me to date. I’m more than happy for death to go on being kind to me in much the same way – even though I know the odds are against continued luck in this regard.

Barnes does not believe in a God – and so much of this book is also a discussion of his relationship with death given his near certainty that this is all there is and the end will be The End. I found most of this wonderfully intelligent and at least as amusing as his History of the World novel (a book I would recommend without reservation) – which is also about remarkably similar topics.

At one point in this he mentions that we are our memories – when he says this it is in reference to everyone’s purest of all horror fates, the idea of degenerative mental illnesses, where we slowly forget the basic facts of our lives – ‘I think you were my wife’, being one of the more poignant lines mentioned here. However, from this point on the rest of the book is an extended essay not so much on death, as on just how little we can truly rely on our memories. We get things wrong – and not just occasionally or about things that don’t really matter, but constantly and about even the key facts.

I don’t think it is going too far to say our lives are the unintended lies we tell to help explain just how we got here.

I’m serving on Jury Duty at the moment. I am not allowed to tell you any details of the case, but I’m going to anyway. One man was trying to break up a fight and a friend of his rushed over to his assistance. Together they stood between the fighting parties. The man who rushed over to help his friend had his girl friend there with him. She repeatedly called out to him not to get involved, not to be so stupid and to come back to her. So, a friend comes to stand beside you in your time of need – you might think you would remember such an action and even be grateful. Except the person who was assisted in this way remembers nothing of the assistance at all. In fact, he barely remembers the other person at the scene – never mind his coming over to help. The court case is based in a very violent act – many people witnessed this act. No two of those people saw something anything even approximating the same thing. The differences are as remarkable as they are fundamental. And it is not just memories affected by self-interest. Many of the witnesses knew none of the people involved. It is frightening just how different all their stories are – frightening because it is like watching whatever grip on truth that is allowed us being snatched from our very fingers. How do we get things so wrong?

There is a scene in this book where Barnes’s grandparents are doing their party piece – where they would get out their separate diaries and flick to a pre-decided date some years before and then read out to each other what they had written for that day. The entries are filled with the banalities of everyday life – with the grandfather saying something like, “dug potatoes all day in the garden.” However, that is where the trouble starts – with the grandmother saying, “Well, you couldn’t have – it rained all day”.

The point is that we are not ‘our memories’ – rather, we are the stories we create to make sense of what we like to think we have become. I really enjoyed this book – not least because I think this idea, that our memories are so flawed, is a terribly important one for us to understand and to always remember (if that is not a paradox).

And whilst it is nice that Bruce more or less agrees with me in his review, I can also see why David may not have liked this book too.

This morning when I started this review I read over Bruce’s review and then noticed I had already voted that I had liked it. I couldn’t remember even reading it before. Then I went into the review itself and saw that not only must I have read it, but even commented on it. Oh dear. How much easier it is to believe in the fallibility of the memories of other people – in much the same way as it is easy to believe in their inevitable deaths while not quite fully believing in our own.
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Sep 12, 2010 carissa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

as a Christian, i feel like i've given death a lot of thought for someone this far from the average life expectancy. Nothing to Be Frightened Of is written from the perspective of someone who has also thought a lot about death as his time inevitably winds down, but whom answers elude. a lifelong agnostic, he's denied even the comfort of being sure of annihilation. Barnes is very private, proper, hestitant, and otherwise thoroughly English throughout this memoir/collection of essays. some might f...more

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May 04, 2010 Judith rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I kept dog-earing the pages of this book because the author says so many thing so well that I wanted to go back and read them again. This book is not for the faint of heart and is definitely not a page-turner. And you don't want to pick it up in the middle of the night hoping to be lulled back to sleep. His descriptions of the universal human terror of staring into the abyss of death is enough to keep you wide awake, if not terrorized. Why, then, would anyone give this book 5 stars? Because Juli...more I kept dog-earing the pages of this book because the author says so many thing so well that I wanted to go back and read them again. This book is not for the faint of heart and is definitely not a page-turner. And you don't want to pick it up in the middle of the night hoping to be lulled back to sleep. His descriptions of the universal human terror of staring into the abyss of death is enough to keep you wide awake, if not terrorized. Why, then, would anyone give this book 5 stars? Because Julian Barnes is pretty brilliant and has written a fascinating book about how we perceive death; how philosophers and artists and musicians and authors have variously viewed death, facing their own and their loved ones' deaths. He has a dry wit and much of the book is very funny. He tells lots of little anecdotes about his own parents' aging and deaths. I know that doesn't sound very funny, and humor is not the point of the book. It is really a philosophical and soul-searching book.

For example, he argues that for all our sophistication, learning, and advancements, our deaths will be no better than those who preceded us, even centuries before. "If we have enjoyed our time, made provision for our dependents, and have little to feel sadness over, then looking back on life will be more bearable. But that's a different matter from looking forwards to what is immediately ahead: total extinction. Are we going to get any better at that?"

My thoughts exactly, though I guess when the baby boomer generation starts to die off we can expect to see a host of books in the self-improvement section regarding how to die.

He mocks American Christianity for its version of the speedy resurrection. "Old Europe took a more leisurely approach to the final arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven---a long mouldering in the grave before resurrection and judgment, all in God's good time. America, and Extreme Christianity, likes to hurry things along. Hence such fantasies as The Rapture , in which the righteous, while going about their daily business are instantly taken up to Heaven, there to watch Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out down below on the battleground of planet Earth. "

On this subject, there has apparently been a lot of playful bantering throughout the centuries between the atheists and those who believe in Heaven, as presented in Sunday School, along the lines of "would you rather"-----be proven wrong about your atheism if it meant being subjected to an eternity of "I told you so" from your Christian friends.

What I learned from this book is that the fear of death is a rational "healthy" fear (our species wouldn't have survived long without it), and it's never going to get any better or go away. With that in mind, there is no reason to worry about the fear itself. It's not going anywhere, and maybe the only consolation is that death will at least eliminate the fear of death.

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Mar 29, 2010 Al Bità rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Julian Barnes is getting older... We are more conscious of coming to 'the end'... How do we deal with this reality?

Barnes approach is to present a kind of memoir, an examination of his family, himself, his philosophical brother's comments, on this subject — but he does it in a witty, amused and basically lighthearted fashion. He examines what other writers have written about it, and compared that with their actual ends. He examines particularly the French writer Jules Renard, and what he has to...more

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Jun 10, 2009 Nathan Hobby rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: britain, death, humour, read-in-2009, biography-and-memoir

I couldn’t put this memoir down. I didn’t mean to read it all but I couldn’t help it. I could discern no structure at all, but just followed Barnes for two hundred pages of reflections on death and God through the lens of his family. The whole memoir has the sort of wistfulness of the opening line quoted in the title of this post: ‘I don’t believe in God but I miss him.’

Despite the constant humour, it is a frightening book to read. I have never thought through so fully the consequences of not be...more I couldn’t put this memoir down. I didn’t mean to read it all but I couldn’t help it. I could discern no structure at all, but just followed Barnes for two hundred pages of reflections on death and God through the lens of his family. The whole memoir has the sort of wistfulness of the opening line quoted in the title of this post: ‘I don’t believe in God but I miss him.’

Despite the constant humour, it is a frightening book to read. I have never thought through so fully the consequences of not believing in life after death. Even in my moments of strongest doubts about Christianity, I haven’t sustained the outlook that death means the permanent extinguishment of my consciousness. No wonder he’s even more scared of death than me. I think it’s immensely brave of atheists and agnostics to live with hope, meaning and purpose. I don’t know how I would. (Indeed, at times Barnes seems to be suggesting that he has to suspend thinking about the way things actually are in order to live with meaning.)

The title is even cleverer than it sounds; it’s nothingness, extinction that he’s frightened of.

He mentions his wife only once, yet about the time the book was published, she died. I wonder if he wrote with a knowledge that she was dying. If he did, he is a remarkably disciplined writer, probably marshalling all the insights his wife’s dying brought him, but recasting them to protect her privacy. The amazing achievement of the memoir that seems to tell all, that so casually reveals so much about his mother, father, brother, self – and yet keeps hidden bigger parts of his life that he didn’t want to or couldn’t tell us about.

Perhaps my favourite passages were the ones reflecting on the art of writing from the perspective of not only our own deaths but the ultimate forgetting of our work. Every work, he tells us, must have a final reader:

For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a wrtier’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (225)

Barnes then addresses his last reader, at first thanking them but then realising that by definition this last reader has not passed on his work to anyone else, and so cursing them. A sobering thought.(less)

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Apr 11, 2009 Thermalsatsuma rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-a-week-2009

There is one thing in life that we can be certain of - we are all going to die, sooner or later, and there is nothing that we can do about it.

In this book the author Julian Barnes muses on his own mortality, his fears about death and the process of dying, the unreliability of memory and the temptation to try and apply a narrative to your life. He considers the lives of his parents and their respective declines into infirmity and death, as well as the life of his grandfather about whom he knows l...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Sheri rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I really enjoyed The Sense of an Ending and stumbled upon this book in the library and thought it would be lovely to read Barnes' thoughts on death. Unfortunately, he really only has about 100 pages worth of thoughts on death, but felt the need to extend this book to a full 243 pages. There is so much repetition in this book; he re-quotes people several times, just a few of which are the examples of his parent's in their final moments; Dodie Smith; Stravinsky; Ravel; and Beyle/Stendhal. I think...more I really enjoyed The Sense of an Ending and stumbled upon this book in the library and thought it would be lovely to read Barnes' thoughts on death. Unfortunately, he really only has about 100 pages worth of thoughts on death, but felt the need to extend this book to a full 243 pages. There is so much repetition in this book; he re-quotes people several times, just a few of which are the examples of his parent's in their final moments; Dodie Smith; Stravinsky; Ravel; and Beyle/Stendhal. I think if he had better organized this book it would have been more pleasurable to read (albeit much shorter since he couldn't completely retell things several times). It reads like a rambling old man...maybe he is more like his mom post-stroke than he wants to believe.

Certainly the theme of false memory carries throughout (and reminded me of the Stone Diaries, which I just finished..actually Daisy's death reminded me of Julian's mother as well, but that's a entirely separate discussion); as does the different stages of death (immediate death, then death of all loved ones who once knew us, then death of us in memory, and eventually..for the author..death of the last reader of his work). I did like the idea that writers are more prone to fear death; in my personal experience I have noted that creative people tend to have (in part) their motivation to create from this desire to leave an impression which cultivates from a fear of death (see there, I just matched..including the parentheses..the rambling tone of the book).

Overall it was very francophile (certainly in part because his dad was a french teacher?), reminded me of the first chapter of Christopher Hutchen's book (he had the decency to leave the topic to a concise 30 pages) and I wondered if these were the same Friday lunches (British writers of similar ages, class, and temperment). I also thought that Alex Brilliant was probably the prototype for the brilliant suicide in Sense of an Ending, but of course that is one book he did not mention (despite mentioning his first novel about 10 times throughout).

Despite my complaints, there were a few (I only mention four here) quotes/thoughts that I really liked.

I have never come across (deficiency in my own education, no doubt) the Pascalian wager before, but agree with it whole-heartedly. As a child in a very religious household (now an agnostic, despite Dawkin's criticism that agnostics are worse than believers because they are wishy-washy), I often wondered what the harm was in believing just in case. Of course, the trouble is that if you are pretending to believe, just in case, then you aren't of course, actually believing.

"You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you?" I love the criticism that people who determine what is "right for them" or "works" for them do not in fact have the power to determine what God is...certainly part of belief would include that you have no control over the determination of God's form/thoughts/abilities, etc.

I like his hierarchy of death/religious feeling (maybe simply because I fall into the first category), those who don't believe and yet still, don't fear death. I found this humorous and true (which of course, that is what makes anything humorous...the truth).

I have often pointed out that my lack of a fear of death is the same as my inability to care about the fact that I was not present during the middle ages. This also came up in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; and is something that I had always thought was a pretty solid logical argument. Barnes puts a nice turn on it though, but pointing out that the time leading up to my fabulous birth was exactly that...leading up to my birth. So far from not concerning me, it was leading to me. And so, I do have to care about everything that went before and certainly can't claim to not care about everything that comes after as a lovely mirror image.

So, it gets a three star...some of it was interesting, but a lot of it felt like unnecessary name dropping, repetition of details, and just rambling.(less)

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Apr 23, 2012 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british, death

Yet. Still. And finally, yet still? In this slim volume, Barnes has amassed musings on death from a quarry of the world’s greatest thinkers and added his own. Despite the brainpower, energy and spin expended all that’s known is it defies preparation and is inescapable. The 'yet still' being death’s rhetorical rattle.

Acerbic in tone with a smattering of poignant anecdotes, one gets the impression that this is a personal dialog and accounting; he, too, comes haltingly to the conclusion that there...more

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About Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize--- Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005), and won the prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

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“When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.” — 59 people liked it

“Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.” — 30 people liked it

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