Cross Channel by Julian Barnes

No one has a better perspective to see things from both sides of the Channel than Julian Barnes. He is not only one of the premier writers in Britain but his prize-winning work has long been admired and recognized 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 the country, our various and mixed reasons for being there and our sometimes ambiguous reception. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Julian Barnes has published nine novels, Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert's Parrot, Staring at the Sun, A History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters, Talking It Over, The Porcupine, England, England and Love, etc; one other book of short stories, The Lemon Table; and also two collections of essays, Letters from London and Something to Declare. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Midicis (for Flaubert's Parrot) and the Prix Fimina (for Talking It Over). In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation of Hamburg. He lives in London. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews 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 aperu 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 entre 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review 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 Fracisco Chronicle Fluently written, finely observed...delicately patterned.--New York Times From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Inside Flap 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.