Staring at the Sun

Fülszöveg

A fighter pilot, high above the English Channel in 1941, watchcs the sun rise; he descends 10,000 feet and then, to his amazement, finds the sun beginning to rise again. With this haunting imagejulian Barnes's latest növel begins. It charts the life ofjean Serjeant, from her beginnings as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China; we learn the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides 'This small, packed book is impossible ... to "summarize"; markers, merely, can be placed, to suggest its teasing fullness, its wit, incisiveness, gentleness and generosity' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'None of Mr Barnes's previous work ... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity ofStaring at the Sun. Flaubert's Parrot was certainly dazzling; his new növel goes one better: it... Tovább

Fülszöveg

A fighter pilot, high above the English Channel in 1941, watchcs the sun rise; he descends 10,000 feet and then, to his amazement, finds the sun beginning to rise again. With this haunting imagejulian Barnes's latest növel begins. It charts the life ofjean Serjeant, from her beginnings as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China; we learn the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides 'This small, packed book is impossible ... to "summarize"; markers, merely, can be placed, to suggest its teasing fullness, its wit, incisiveness, gentleness and generosity' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'None of Mr Barnes's previous work ... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity ofStaring at the Sun. Flaubert's Parrot was certainly dazzling; his new növel goes one better: it dazzles in depth' HARPERS & QUEEN 'I am delighted to salute, from Mexico, the universal English voice ofjulian Barnes, as he breaks barriers of conventional time and genre, creates characters from ideas and language, and stares not only at the sun but at the reader's intelligence' CARLOS FUENTES, NEW YORK TIMES 'A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny, and alsó genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head' DOUGLAS DUNN, GLASGOW HERALD ' An astonishing tour de force... I can't think of a morc ambitioús theme for a novelist. I can't think who but Julián Barnes could have pulled it off with such intellectual bravura and unforced pathos' BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 'Undoubtedly much too good to win the Booker Prizc' STANLEY REYNOLDS, PUNCH Vissza