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Cambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. It will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, travel-writing and other non-fiction. The series will be extensive and open-ended and will provide school students with a range of edited texts taken from a wide geographical spread. It will feature writing in English from various genres and differing times.A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes is edited by Ron Middleton of the University of Reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Pure Garbage in 10 and 1/2 chapters
I don't even know what to say about this book, except that is is so awful, so inane, so disjointed and ridiculous that this book is a SKIP! I read it for my book club and it is one of the most disorganized group of short stories masquerading as a cohesive novel that have barely a thread to keep this whole thing from falling apart. Simply the worst book I can recall reading (and...well, finishing!)

I suppose the first chapter about Noah's Ark was interesting enough and funny in moments, but I just couldn't wait to turn a page because the pacing is so plodding. I finally just ended up skimming over the unimportant parts (of which there are many). And just to be jerked from one story that has nothing to do with another story and peddling it as a novel is misleading.

A terrible book. I am loathe to give it even one star, because it doesn't deserve a half a star. What a waste of paper. If you see it i a book store, run away! FAST!!!! (I guess I'm a little bitter since this is my book club selection and I have to finish it. At least here, I have a place to vent before the meeting next week.

Loved it and hated it.
I liked most of this book, loved some and hated others.The book is interesting.
Julian Barnes has written a work of fiction, that is not really history in the strictest sense of the word.It is more an examination of Worldviews.The book is divided up into eleven sections, with the meditation on love being the half chapter in the title.The book opens with the perspective of a woodworm that slipped onto Noah's ark and gives the story from the animal's perspective.This story is quite humorous really.The second story is about a group of history tourists being hijacked by Arabs while on a cruise.This story is much more intense and sad than the first story.It is a radical shift in tone and feel of the book.The book does this over and over.There is the story of a nuclear attack that really is not.There is the story of 900 Jews on the St. Louis during the time of Hitler and the final solution.There is a reflection on the meaning of love that is not at all sappy and is perhaps the best part of the book.There a several other stories, all of which are good, but one.The one that I did not like at all was the one about Heaven.Heaven was almost Hell in Barnes' perspective.This ending weakened the whole book.
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Matthew Pateman's engaging study focuses on the novels themselves offering close readings that highlight the dominant ideas of each text. Barnes's writings constantly seek to push the limits of the novel form making him one of the most importamnt writers in Britain today. ... Read more

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As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudet’s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays“ate at the top literary table” during his lifetime (1840–1897). Henry James described him as “the happiest novelist” and “the most charming story-teller” of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also “a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics.” In the Land of Pain—notes toward a book never written—is his timelessly resonant response to the disease.

In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (“This is me: the one-man-band of pain”) and his treatments (“Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath”); about his fears and reflections (“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my science”); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (“Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners”); and about the “clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.”

Given Barnes’s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Surprisingly Beautiful For Such an Ugly Subject
It is very hard to review this book critically or give it a rating, because one can't judge it by the same criteria with which we usually evaluate books.It isn't a finished work, or even close.It's a collection of notes written for a planned book that never got beyond the note-taking stage due to the death of the author in 1897.

Daudet contracted syphilis at the age of seventeen, and at the time, there was no cure.By the early 1880's he was in the tertiary (final) stage of the disease, which in his case took the form of "tabes dorsalis,' which translates literally as "wasting away of the back."It is a form of neurosyphilis which attacks the spinal cord and column and is one of the slowest and most excruciatingly painful ways that a person can die.

I was interested in this book because my grandfather also died of syphilis.I never knew him - even my father barely remembers him because he was only a child when my grandfather was institutionalized due to his illness.From what few records exists, it seems he may have suffered from the same form as Daudet, as he also had blindness and ataxia.So reading this book felt like a way to connect with my unknown and long-dead grandfather.

It is easy to see why Daudet was so much-loved both as an author and a human being - a friend and a family man.Although known for his philandering (one wonders how he justified marriage and fatherhood, much less a series of love affairs, knowing full well that he had a fatal sexually-transmitted disease), his great love for his wife and children is evident.Not wanting them to suffer too, he exhibited an incredibly rigorous self-control in hiding his pain from his family.(We know this from the many notes written by his friends that are included in the book.)Instead, he channeled his expressions of suffering into his writing.The planned book was to be a journal of the progression of Daudet's pain and his journey into death.

Even unfinished and unedited, and concerning such a difficult and ugly subject, these writings are surprisingly poetic and beautiful.It makes me want to read some of his finished works, and wonder why - although highly popular at the time - they are mostly forgotten today.

The book also includes some important background information about the life and personality of Alphonse Daudet and about the medical manifestations of the disease of syphilis.

(87 pages)


Quotes from In The Land of Pain:

"Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.Everyone will get used to it except me."

"The walks I used to take around this land of pain.Could still find it in myself to laugh.Lunches.La Bellocquiére.Seen it all again in my mind's eye.Villemagne and the Pont-du-Diable.Felt like crying.I remember what Caoudal said:'And to think that I shall come to regret all this!'"

"Exchange between the bachelor and the married man.The problem of jealousy, when a man is no longer a man and becomes unable to defend his hearth and home."

Morbid Yet Poignant
You can approach this book in two ways, first as a looker and secondly as an insider. For all you malady of the month types, this will certainly satisfy your curiousity and would please any gothic type. For those looking for something deeper, you will find substance in this book. As a person with tardive dystonia, a motor disorder, I can empathize with the pain and muscle spasms that the author of this book describes and how every moment of each day is spent trying to fend them off.People have mentioned that the author's neurosyphillis could now have been treated by medication. But I see something of greater importance. It would be almost a century before people began to think of themselves as "disabled" instead of sick and the shame attached to being in a dysfunctioning body would no longer place you in a seperate category of almost an untouchable, perhaps starting with F.D.R. rehabilitating from polio. In the Land of Pain, vividly depicts the gradual lose of humanity that was part of entering the world of people with disabilities that plagued humanity for centuries. This work is more significant than all the after the fact pseudo-scientific works that want to attribute syphillis to everyone from Napoleon to Beethoven to Hitler. This is a first person account of what it is like to be faced with a disorder that you know will eventually destroy your life. To quote from the book,
"I only know one thing, and that is to shout to my children, 'Long live life!' But it is so hard to do, while I am ripped apart by pain."

Schadenrelief is my basic reaction to just about everything
ALPHONSE DAUDET SAID: "My poor carcass is hollowed out, voided by anemia. Pain echoes thru it as a voice echoes in a house without furniture or curtains. There are days, long days, when the only part of me that's alive is my pain."

Schadenrelief is a word I coined myself. (Somebody had to.) Schadenrelief is a slightly less sinister version of schadenfreude. Schadenrelief is the selfish relief you feel in reaction to someone else's suffering. It's the relief that's expressed whenever you internally say to yourself those 5 magic words: "I'm glad it wasn't me".

ALPHONSE DAUDET SAID: "Very strange, the fear that pain inspires nowadays--or rather, this pain of mine. It's bearable, and yet I cannot bear it. It's sheer dread; and my resort to anaesthetics is like a cry for help, the squeal of a woman before danger actually strikes."

Julian Barnes's own stuff suffers from a surfeit of Anglo-Saxon stuffiness. He's pretty much a parody of a stuffy Englishman. So this translation comes as a well-needed boost to Barnes's reputation. I'd be curious to see him translate Cioran's aphorisms and compare them to Richard Howard's translations.

ALPHONSE DAUDET SAID: "Pain has a life of its own. The ingenious efforts a disease makes in order to survive. People say: 'Let nature take its course.' But death is as much a part of nature as life. The forces of survival and destruction are at war within us and are equally matched. I've seen impressive examples of the skill with which disease manages to propagate itself. The two TB cases who fell in love: how passionately they clung to one another. You could almost hear the disease saying to itself: 'Now here's a perfect match!' And just imagine the morbidity it would give birth to."

Barnes has a mixed opinion of Harold Brodkey's book about Brodkey's illness. So I guess I'll take a look at Brodkey next. It's funny how Daudet doesn't say much about the temptation of suicide. It's too bad they didn't have barbituates in the 1800s. And it's too bad we don't have them now in the 2000s. (Barbituates have been replaced with non-lethal sedatives and it's just a darn shame.)

ALPHONSE DAUDET SAID: "You have to die so many times before you die."

"My Anguish Is Great, and I Weep As I Write"
Books about pain can be excruciating to read, and this is one of them. It is fragmentary, brutally honest, and as direct as an uppercut to the jaw.

Other works in the same genre include Montaigne's long essay "Of Experience" and Tolstoy's novelette THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH. Somehow we would all like to think that we will escape pain and die softly like a snowflake evaporating in pure air. If we were all Zen masters, we could die like the sages in Yoel Hoffmann's brilliant collection, JAPANESE DEATH POEMS:

Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight --
Thus I return to the source.
-- Gesshu Soko (d. 1696)

Though not well known to English-speaking readers, Alphone Daudet was considered one of the greatest French novelists of the late 19th century. A full forty years before his death, he contracted syphilis around the age of 17. Around the age of 40, Daudet's illness reached the tertiary stage; and he was bedeviled by a symphony of pain that attacked his various organs, sometimes with brief remissions before new and more awful symptoms appeared.

It is ironical that, were he alive today, Daudet would be cured by antibiotics; and Montaigne's kidney stones, possibly by medications, possibly by a routine surgery.

British novelist Julian Barnes edited this collection of fragments. It takes only a couple of hours to read, but I guarantee that this book will leave echoes in your mind about the battles you yourself may face as you reach the endgame.

Insightful, poetic view of pain, death and graciousness
Third stage syphilis is an unlikely subject for an enchanting book - but this it is.First, one is impressed by the precision of observation and expression.While the symptoms are shared with other patients, this is always the description of a particular victim of the disease. Second, one is impressed by the ever-changing attitude of Daudet to the progression and feared progression of the diease.Third, one is impressed by Daudet himself in his concern for those around him.The result is an enjoyable, informative introduction to Daudet as a person and as an example of human response to continuous pain.

Julian Barnes' translation is excellent - footnotes are provided that identify people, places, medicines that are unfamilar.Two short essays on Daudet and syphlis complete the book.

While this book may not appear to be high on the to-be-read-list, it deserves a place near the top. ... Read more

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Writers on Howard Hodgkin gathers together for the first time the responses of major contemporary writers to the work of Howard Hodgkin. Through the variety of voices it features and the range of literary approaches they employ, this collection provides remarkable new insights into Hodgkin’s work, as well as examples of some of the most incisive writing on art published in recent years.

Illustrated in full color, this is a unique combination of the visual and the written word and a fitting tribute to a remarkable artist. ... Read more

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Entre los chinos, el simbolo de la muerte era el limon. Y en Helsinki, a principios del siglo XX, en un bar frecuentado por Sibelius, los que se sentaban en la mesa limon estaban obligados a hablar de la muerte. En estos cuentos de mediana edad, los protagonistas han envejecido y ya no pueden ignorar que sus vidastendran un final. ... Read more

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Since 1990 Julian Barnes has written a regular 'Letter from London' for the "New Yorker" magazine. These already celebrated pieces cover subjects as diverse as the Lloyd's insurance disaster, the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the troubles of the Royal Family and the hapless Nigel Short in his battle with Gary Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Finals. With an incisive assessment of Salman Rushdie's plight and an analysis of the implications of being linked to the Continent via the Channel Tunnel, "Letters from London" provides a vivid and telling portrait of Britain in the Nineties. ... Read more