Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Book | Julian Barnes
Barnes faces up to death and dying in a funny, insightful memoir.
Julian Barnes’s memoir is an often hilarious meditation on death, and if that sounds like an impossibility, it’s all the more reason to admire him. Barnes pulls it off. He confronts the prospect of his own extinction – which he admits he thinks about on a daily basis – unflinchingly, as an atheistically leaning agnostic who has no patience with pie in the sky. But he is honest about the horror that can make him wake up screaming in the middle of the night. He makes illuminating excursions into the attitudes of others, including his stoic brother, who has no truck with sentimental hogwash like fear of death, and the poet Philip Larkin, who was terrified right to the end. Barnes doesn’t neglect deathbed scenes, famous last words, and the deaths of his difficult parents. Like the good novelist he is, he writes beautifully about people, bringing them to life with insightful details and mordant quotes. The fact that Barnes’s beloved wife died suddenly soon after the book was finished only lends poignancy to his narrative.
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