mandm

Jan 27 2012, 04:08 AM

Speaking of de Botton

Utter vapid fool.

Quote:

 

The paucity of action gives Tony ample opportunity to reflect on — and enact — the self-serving and self-deceiving workings of memory. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time, ” Tony declares in one of several reiterations of the book’s central ideas.

These ideas might better be termed commonplaces. But while commonplaces tend to dress themselves up in their Sunday best to assume greater weight, Barnes has always treated them lightly so that, by a kind of negation of the negation, they are taken . . . seriously! (Note Barnes’s pre-emptive body swerve: announced early on, one of Adrian’s pet aversions is “the way the English have of not being serious about being serious.”)

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Jan 31 2012, 08:15 PM

Obviously people commit suicide

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Apr 5 2012, 12:22 AM

i'm a bit tired of the way that disability still gets to be colonized in fiction, but only a bit, because i'm so used to it by now. It takes a good deal to make me angry, and i suspect the barnes book might make me a bit angry, since he seems to be speculating in a currency of fear, aside from anything else

Flower

Apr 5 2012, 12:30 AM

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Apr 5 2012, 12:22 AM

i'm a bit tired of the way that disability still gets to be colonized in fiction, but only a bit, because i'm so used to it by now. It takes a good deal to make me angry, and i suspect the barnes book might make me a bit angry, since he seems to be speculating in a currency of fear, aside from anything else

I actually think he is doing a great job in getting people to think about what they have actually read and their assumptions and the difference between the two. Also questioning how you would react to disability without forcing anything down the reader's throat.

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Apr 5 2012, 06:21 AM

As described the book appears to be a piece of brutish opportunism, Lone. It would be lovely if people read, thought, for the purpose of illumination, insight, but better still if people would stop treating "us" as though our best purpose in life is to provide "them" with a) an educational experience, or b) a set of liberating/intractable metaphors with which they might explore/forgive/antagonize their own humanity. It's dull, greedy and too cheaply bought.

Canox

Apr 5 2012, 05:28 AM

Flower

Apr 5 2012, 12:30 AM

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Apr 5 2012, 12:22 AM

i'm a bit tired of the way that disability still gets to be colonized in fiction, but only a bit, because i'm so used to it by now. It takes a good deal to make me angry, and i suspect the barnes book might make me a bit angry, since he seems to be speculating in a currency of fear, aside from anything else

I actually think he is doing a great job in getting people to think about what they have actually read and their assumptions and the difference between the two. Also questioning how you would react to disability without forcing anything down the reader's throat.

I think, maybe, this reading is because you are the owner of a much more pleasant mind than Barnes', I think you're reading him generously, witha degree of generosity he maybe doesn't deserve (as I said above, I'll largely reserve judgment until I read his nonfiction thing), because despite the open end, the book makes very definite use of disability. Regardless of how you and I would react to disability, formally, Barnes' novel uses disability as a lynchpin for the development of the narrator. Again, all this varies depending on how much you trust the narrator etc., and how much is imagined etc., but the mere formal fact, undeniable, of the use of disability as a great revelation that carries the weight of personal epiphany for the (white, male, able) narrator, this is unpleasant. Well, it is for me. It's not about Barnes' or the narrator's general attitude to disabled people, it's about the formal and structural colonizing of a certain kind of otherness that doesn't sit well with me. Again, maybe it's just me. I'm weird.

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Apr 5 2012, 04:58 PM

i think i've sampled enough of the ridiculous Tony as deployed by Barnes (i read enough of the prose to get a sense (!) of Barnes' calculation as to tone, and Tony) and i again read the epiphany bit and if anything it's worse than i remember. Nothing to be done

He might also - like Singer - be playing the divide and rule riff as to different kinds of disability, i hope not because as written the novel is bad enough.

byrd9999

Apr 5 2012, 09:05 PM

And to think Barnes does all of the above in a mere 150 pages of functional prose! I don't see The Sisters Brothers, for example, causing anything like the amount of literary discussion as The Sense of an Ending has done, so maybe it is deserving of its Booker prize (above those others shortlisted that year) for this reason?