Nothing to Be Frightened Of: A Memoir

I liked the book for what it was. It was not a book focused on the topic of death as much as it was a book about the author's thoughts about death and connected topics. The fear of death over dying is clear; personally, I fear the latter over the former.The realization that he will have a "last reader" is a strong one. There will be a "last" everything for all of us. Embrace what we have while we have it. Don't waste your last anything.

Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.

I've not always liked Barnes's fiction. Staring at the Sun did little for me and Talking It Over was not my cup of tea. I did enjoy A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters. But the book I admired most was his Flaubert's Parrot, a convoluted, sometimes rambling essay on history and writing and Flaubert's life and who knows what else. It was a Diderotian-type essay, than which I can say nothing better. Now Barnes has produced a mate to Parrot, not a match in theme but in approach to writing, and in the quality of his reflections. The theme is the fear of death. Barnes states that he used to be an atheist and is now an agnostic but I can't find the difference between the two in his reflections on life as racing toward (painful, undignified, purposeless and too soon) death. Flaubert wrote (Barnes quotes him): "No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to drop off." That's pretty much the theme of much of this exceptionally thoughtful book. The book drips with zingers gently delivered, some from Barnes's own pen, some from others whom he finds sympathetic. Here's Barnes: "Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly." And I love this one from Richard Dawkins: "When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix." Barnes does not rail against those who disagree with him, as have Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in recent books. He's never strident, but neither does he accept false comfort. For Barnes, life simply ends and on a cosmic or even historic scale, our lives are insignificant. They're only significant to us, and that is what is tragic about being a temporarily living, strong feeling human being. I can't stop myself from adding one more passage from Barnes. It doesn't illuminate the book's principal preoccupation. It's more in the nature of a by-blow, an extraneous thought tossed off en passage. But I love it! "Writers need certain stock replies for certain stock questions. When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, `It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.'" Now that's fine writing!

I've had this on my shelf (along with just about all of the author's books) for a few years, but only got round to reading it last week. Barnes contemplates death as an inescapable fact of life, and tries to approach it by first recounting the passing of his grandparents and (mostly) parents: how they endured the privations of old age and illness and how they approached their end (or vice versa).Lest the reader starts to think of this as a memoir, he warns that "there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them are dead, and quite a few of them are French" [p38]. One of them is Flaubert (long a favourite of Barnes) who points out "No sooner do we come into this world then bits of us start dropping off" [p207]; another is Jules Renard, who says (inter a lot of alia): "It is less cruel to never to visit the dead than to stop going after a certain time" [p248].Barnes also considers (and discounts) the possibility of life after death and the nature of old age ("as your ears get bigger and your fingernails split, your heart shrinks" [p174]). He considers various alternatives, one of which is that your body's compartments begin shutting down one by one - "lucidity gone, speech gone, recognition of friends gone, memory gone, replaced by a fantasy world" [p113] - until the only part that's left is the part that makes us fear death. To console us, he thinks there's always music ("the best way we have of digesting time", said Stravinsky [p38]), and the advice of the old - which, according to an anonymous French epigram on p83, is "like the winter sun: it sheds light but does not warm us". As for the moment of death itself, he quotes Freud: "It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators" [p138].As for God, Barnes identifies as an agnostic (his opening line "I don't believe in God, but I miss him" appears to be a catchy summing up of this belief), but keeps returning to this notion throughout the book: at one stage finding himself on the opposite side of an argument with a rationalist about the impossibility of the Resurrection where Barnes says "But that's *the whole point* - that it couldn't have happened. The point is, that if you're a Christian, it did." [p77].Like just about all of Barnes' books, I enjoyed reading this one, finding it stimulating and entertaining, with a strong impression of the author's voice in my head: wise, wry and companionable. Recommended.

This is a part autobiography in which Barnes explores his memories of his life with his grandparents, his parents, Jonathan, his brother, and their spouses. He draws a loving comparison between his philosopher brother and himself, a novelist, and claims that novelists may indeed be the ones to teach us about life – and death. This autobiography is intertwined, or rather, set in the context of death. Barnes examines possible ways of dying and the possible responses one might have to its impending arrival.Citing various authors and thinkers, Barnes tells us that it is only in learning how to die that we learn how to live. As in any serious discussion about death, he includes a critical examination of the idea of afterlife. Would the writer prefer to be remembered before his work is forgotten, or for his work to be remembered after he is forgotten, he asks? His study of scholars and well-known artists and musicians display his sense of irony, maybe because he sees clearly, how those subjects led an ironical life culminating in their ironical deaths. His discussion about eternal life, from the points of views of religion and humanism alone is good enough reason to get this book. He puts everything into perspective in this poignant, witty book written with exquisite prose. It can, perhaps, be counted as a philosophy book. Jonathan Barnes may be proudly amused.He constantly probes us with the question, ‘Do you fear death?’ If you are searching to find the answer for yourself, you can’t do without this book – in deed, you might wish to carry it with you to the grave.

A rather rambling book that loosely collects together the thoughts of a pretty random selection of historical figures, plus those of Mr Barnes mates referred to in a pseudo mystical way by a single initial and some less than kind observations about his own family - mainly his parents. On the positive side it does get around to covering a wide variety of ways to view death though not sure that really justifies its title. It did leave me thinking that I am a great deal less paranoid than many of his subjects so all good then.

Started well but ran out of steam towards end.

I enjoyed the book, but I've logged on purely to comment on the Kindle edition, which is littered with typos. The numeral 1 is often substituted for the capital letter I, r often appears instead of t, and there are numerous other errors scattered throughout. I can only assume the text was scanned in from a printed version, and nobody bothered to check the text properly afterwards. I expect better.