Talking in the Library Series 2 - Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes became world famous as the author of Flaubert's Parrot, and has gone on to consolidate his reputation as one of the most subtle writers of his time, both as a novelist and an essayist. Although a star guest on French television, the bilingual author is seldom to be seen on small screens in Britain, because the atmosphere of a standard studio is one he would rather avoid. Talking in the library, he shows us what we have been missing, in a conversation that will fascinate his admirers all over the world.

[@user-xn2hf9re8r]

I love this library series and wish it was available in full somewhere rather than fractured in various people's accounts

[@Amphy002]

It's all available on Clive James' website which is www.clivejames.com/

[@SweetMintPie555]

Musa Bloom thanks for this!

[@user-xn2hf9re8r]

@@Amphy002 thank you

[@christopherreynolds4446]

Barnes is a fine speaker but his works, after History of the World, are trivial. I know “The Sense of Ending” won the Booker but I thought a slight work at best

[@JohnSmith-fr1xm]

😂 if YOU say so…

[@nickwyatt9498]

Poor Jools, he’ll be gutted.

[@michaellabram5980]

👍

[@Velvet0Starship2013]

Humorous: the only thing Julian and Martin have in common now is Finnegans Wake...?

[@Velvet0Starship2013]

Tracking the fate of (eg) the "post modern" in Literature, it has become obvious to me that writers are, painfully, even more weakly social (herd) animals than the masses at large (depending, as they do, not only on the "love" of those near but on the "love" of thousands, and more, they'll never know) and therefore follow the moods of the readership slavishly. Any young writer who started off a "post modernist" in, say, 2000, very probably soon learned to tone things down to the YA level (if he/she ever got published) by the late Aughties. The mood just isn't there to support the intellectually "experimental" in real numbers, now, and only the geniuses, most of whom are doomed to obscurity (unless they make influential friends, like JJ did), persist in their obsessions; the geniuses and the dilettantes.
What too often looks likes individual genius concentrated in a celebrated work of music, lit or art is really only a reflection of a brilliant Zeitgeist ... genius crystallizing, cyclically, in the governing trends of the Collective Unconscious: Paris in the '20s, London in the '60s, NY in the '70s. Ie: the * '60s itself* was Genius but many individual contributions (Ginsberg's Howl, say, or Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots) didn't, in frankness, hold up after the Era moved on. Critics who continue to rave over Bellow, for example, are, in my opinion, reminiscent of certain men, now in their late middle age, who consider Gary Numan a visionary. The long view says no. Critical ego must learn to correct for this, even as writerly ego can't be expected to.
berlin8berlin.wordpress.com/

[@liammcooper]

Boo

[@mattpopemusic]

Why don't you just say who you're talking about ? You're talking about me aren't you

[@HkFinn83]

Are there any young ‘post modernists’ though? In fact how many literary novelists in general are there under 40 who have any degree of success?