Cross Channel [Anglais] [Broché]

On the heels of Barnes's essay collection Letters from London, which included a searing account of Britain's xenophobic anxiety over 1994's ceremonial opening of the "Chunnel," comes this wonderfully wry short-story collection (his first) chronicling Britain's vexed relations with the French over the last 300 years. By turns dolorously indignant and wickedly funny, these 10 stories depict the manners, prejudices and historical purview of Brits traveling or living in France. The narrator of "The Experiment," a giddy literary mystery reminiscent of the author's novel Flaubert's Parrot, speculates about whether his hapless Uncle Freddy was an unnamed participant in Andre Breton's "famously unplatonic" sexual experiments. In "Evermore," a British proofreader, grieving 50 years later for the brother she lost in WW I, travels among the neglected French burial grounds, despairing over Europe's tendency to forget its own recent history. The closing story, "Tunnel," a thinly autobiographical account of a 60-ish man riding the Eurostar train directly from London to Paris in the year 2015 and reflecting on a life's worth of traveling, gracefully ties together the collection. Other pieces, like the somber "Dragons," about soldiers occupying a Huguenot village in the 17th century, and "Brambilla," a vernacular narrative by a working-class cyclist riding in the Tour de France, lack the dry, hectoring wit that enlivens most of the work here. But the entirety reads like an unusually fine Baedeker, exploring with great polish and nuance the vagaries of culture and personality that divide two unlikely bedfellows in an increasingly homogenous European community.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Noted British novelist Barnes (e.g., Flaubert's Parrot, LJ 4/1/85) revealed a decidedly cosmopolitan streak in his recent Letters from London (LJ 7/95), which included some devilishly humorous commentary on British fears of the Continent. So it's not surprising to see him build an entire story collection (his first) around a cosmopolitan theme: the British experience in France, the country that the British most dearly seem to hate?or at least love to complain about. In his typically luminous, literate, restrained prose, Barnes moves through history, from a British cricket team's trip to France in 1789 to the English railway builders welcomed by the French populace in the 1840s to a woman recalling a brother lost during World War I to a cranky English musician's dominance of the little French village to which he has retired. Throughout, Barnes exhibits a wonderful sense of time and place and an exactitude of historical detail; the railway workers, for instance, speak a language all their own that doesn't mimic contemporary speakers. Recommended for most collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Throughout his productive career . . . Julian Barnes has evinced a fascination with the unreliability of memory and the irretrievability of the past. His latest book, a thoughtful collection of new stories . . . is no exception . . . the overall effect of this book is musical: delicately patterned stories that are variations on a theme, stories that can only be fully appreciated in light of the final coda, which explains how and why they came to be composed in the first place.

The British characters in this collection of short stories set in France react to their "cross-channel" displacement with ambivalence: They feel foreign among the French, but intimate with them for all that. Each of Barnes' stories is based upon this central theme, but he builds very different narratives around it (ranging from the reminiscences of a futuristic traveler moving through the "Chunnel" in 2015 to an exploration of a loving, female couple who move into a chateau in the late 19th century), and we find it developing in surprising ways. Cross Channel offers some striking insights into how the play of familiarity and alienation structures not only the interactions of the French and English, but most other human relations as well.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.

In his last book, a collection of essays titled Letters from London , novelist Barnes analyzed certain ludicrous aspects of English society. He also considered the long-standing animosity between England and France, a mutual hostility not the least bit alleviated by the building of the Channel Tunnel. This cultural rivalry intrigued Barnes to such a degree that he was moved to create his first short-story collection. It consists of 10 extremely complex, impeccably composed, sometimes brittlely intellectual, often acerbically humorous tales about the history, and possible future, of this trans-Channel rivalry. Barnes examines the conflict from a serious, even erudite perspective in some stories, while taking wicked delight in the sillier aspects of stereotyping in others. The breadth of his knowledge and the suppleness of his imagination are extraordinary as he portrays a classical composer and his wife, English engineers building French railroads, cricket players, an Englishman who got involved with a group of surrealists, and a competitive cyclist. The more successful of these inventive narratives are devilishly clever, while others are just too mannered, but Barnes is a genuine talent and always worth investigating. Donna Seaman --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A first collection of ten thematically linked stories, each of which deals with Britain's experience of France, from a sophisticated observer of both countries. Barnes's Francophilia has previously found expression in such novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1985) and Talking It Over (1991). The stories range widely, from a hauntingly dramatic tale of the persecution of a 17th-century village's forbidden religious practices (``Dragons'') to a discursive medley of memories (in ``Tunnel'') indulged during a train ride to Paris in the year 2015 by the elderly English writer to whom we've been listening for longer than we'd suspected. The latter piece demonstrates the signal weaknesses of Barnes's fiction: a tendency to overload frail narrative situations with extravagant quantities of specific information (in this case, about the history, commerce, literature, viticulture, and Lord knows what-all-else of la belle France), and a self-conscious density of aper‡u and epigram so oppressive that the book fairly grows heavy in your hands. Such ostentation reduces to trivia a promising tale (``Experiment'') about a stuffy Englishman's ``undeserved entr‚e to the Surrealist circle'' and a snappish satire on literary conferences (``Gnossienne'')--and, conversely, swells to shapelessness the narrative of a cricketer whose visits to France climax in the unhappy year of 1789 (``Melon'') and an otherwise strongly imagined and beautifully structured story (``Junction'') about the building of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway. The better stories--often very good indeed- -include a wry account of two unmarried English ladies relocated in the French countryside and struggling to operate a vineyard (``Hermitage''); a compassionate (though overextended) portrayal of a lonely Jewish woman who mourns for many decades afterward the death of her brother on the Somme battlefields (``Evermore''); and the superbly witty ``Interference,'' which describes with delicious comic detail the final days of a vain and waspish English composer in the adopted country that good-naturedly attempts to tolerate him. A very uneven display of this very skillful author's obvious talents. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

A dazzling kaleidoscope . . . Barnes is Britain's wittiest and most cosmopolitan living writer.

"Barnes is a witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form...Cross Channel is in the best sense an artful book."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Fluently written, finely observed...delicately patterned."
--New York Times

In his first collection of short stories, Barnes explores the narrow body of water containing the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension which lies between England and France with acuity humor, and compassion. For whether Barnes's English characters come to France as conquerors or hostages, laborers, athletes, or aesthetes, what they discover, alongside rich food and barbarous sexual and religious practices, is their own ineradicable Englishness. The ten stories that make up Cross Channel introduce us to a plethora of intriguing, original, and sometimes ill-fated characters. Elegantly conceived and seductively written, Cross Channel is further evidence of Barnes's wizardry.

"Barnes is a witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form...Cross Channel is in the best sense an artful book."--San Francisco Chronicle


"Fluently written, finely observed...delicately patterned."--New York Times

Ten short stories that span in setting from the late seventeenth century to the year 2015 explore the unusual relationship between Britain and France and the British experience of France and its people. Reprint. 12,500 first printing. NYT.

Wise and witty collection of stories of British in France
In these exquisitely crafted and turned stories spanning several centuries, Julian Barnes takes as his universal theme the British in France, our fascination with that country, our various and mixed reasons for being there and our sometimes ambiguous reception. These clever, wise and imaginative stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel. The No.1 bestseller from one of Britain's finest writers. "Love, sex, art, literature, wars, religion, wine, spirit, the steam engine and, yes, Eurostar: they are all there. All the emotions, attitudes, pursuits and endeavours that typically seem to link Britain to France feature in the first collection of short stories by Julian Barnes...A delightful book" Thierry Naudin, European; "The book is a delight...Undoubtedly Barnes's best book since Flaubert's Parrot" Allan Massie, Scotsman --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"Barnes is a witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form...Cross Channel is in the best sense an artful book."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Fluently written, finely observed...delicately patterned."
--New York Times

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and educated in London and Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times and the Observer. He is the author of eight novels, a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and is the first Englishman to have won both the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. In 1988 he was made a Chevalier and in 1995 he became an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.