The Only Story: A novel Hardcover – April 17, 2018

Every now and then I come across a novel that I wish had been written by someone else--and this is one of those novels. Barnes is a wonderful writer who deserves the Man Booker, but this novel--in the guise of a reflective memoir--depends much too much on telling and not enough on showing, as they like to say in the workshops. It’s the early 1960’s in a suburb of London where a 19 year old middle-class college student and a 48 year old married woman meet at the local tennis club, fall in love and eventually live together for some ten years--that’s the fictional premise, but the characters are uninteresting, the story banal, and there’s so little dramatization of events that it felt more like reading a long sententious essay with some pretty phrases about love and life than a novel about real flesh and blood people. The only character who comes across as vivid and dynamic is, oddly, the novel’s villain--the woman’s boozed-up and abusive husband. After I finished--it is Julian Barnes, after all--I began to picture what this “love story” would have been like in the hands of John Updike, Philip Roth, or William Trevor. I can’t imagine that they would leave us with such shadowy and thinly-drawn lovers; instead, they would have dramatized the deterioration of such a lopsided relationship without copping out and resorting to the woman’s sudden emergence as a dysfunctional alcoholic? Her new-found alcoholism was unconvincing and struck me as merely a convenient way for Barnes to evade the hard work of dramatizing the inevitable conflicts and collapse of a love affair that--as anyone could tell--had little chance of surviving. It’s disappointing that The Only Story isn’t more of a story.

"Most of us have only only story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling."Like much of Julian Barnes' work, this novel is deceptively brief, yet so fully developed in its "prehistory" (a word the narrator likes, and which takes on overtones alternately ominous, tiresome, and clinical, depending on context) that it exists as its own three-dimensional organism, which is not, alas, reassuringly self-contained, but which instead sends probing tendrils into every hairline crack of the reader's consciousness; the results are similar to ivy on a brick wall--depending on your structure, this book will either cause you to crumble, or you'll assimilate it, and it will change color with the seasons, and perhaps even bond with its host, creating greater stability.You may make of this comparison what you will, but the fact remains that this is a wildly unsettling, deeply necessary, shockingly perceptive book. It has a plot, yes, but that plot is as irrelevant to the reality of the novel as a person's face is irrelevant to the truth of the soul. And so it hardly matters what the book is about--despite the repeated assertion that there is one story in each life, and this is the narrator's.And yet, the assertion leads the reader to examine what the point is of storytelling. Why do we choose the stories we choose? What purpose do they serve? If you were to meet a complete stranger and you had to give that person a thirty-second honest precis that would reveal who you are, what would you say? When you start to think about this question, you realize that story lends credibility to truth. If you told the truth about yourself to a stranger, they wouldn't believe you. If you told the truth about yourself to someone who knows you, chances are they'd believe you even less.So that is what story does--it clothes and animates truth, or some version of the truth, so that people can see it, which allows them to come closer to believing it. But of course, every truth has a vast wardrobe of stories it can wear, and even if you're telling only one story, you'll never tell it the same way twice."The Only Story" is, among other things, an examination of how we choose to inhabit the story we choose to tell. It's an examination of how the ways in which the story is told can change the story; even how shifting the lens of the camera from first person to second to third radically changes perception of the same events. And thus, it leads the reader to consider how outcomes can shift depending on how a story is told.You can read this book as the world's most depressing love story. You can read it as a cautionary tale about emotional and psychological maturity. You can read it as a warning about the ways in which people are inevitably trapped by circumstance. You can just sit and inhale the scent of the scorched earth after the full impact of it hits you.Or you can take from it the idea that story is what the storyteller makes of it, and remind yourself that "Little Red Riding Hood" may well be the tale of a werewolf-hunter, rather than a story about a basket of treats and a dark wood.What's your defining story? How do you plan to tell it to yourself? Because really, you're the audience who matters.

I never thought I'd give any Julian Barnes book less than five stars, but this item's caliber is not as high as EVERY other Barnes writing miracle I have enjoyed. In relationship to his other works, this somewhat interesting, but, otherwise, almost story, just doesn't live up to Mr. Barnes usual witting, somewhat biting works. In spite of all that, various quirky characters' remarkss within the book and its final two sentences saved it. I'm looking for more like "The Sense of an Ending", "The Noise of Time", "Flaubert's Parrot" (his masterpiece), "Pulse" (embracing all sorts of quirky circumstances), "The Lemon Table" (loved it) and the brilliance of entertainment in his brief "Levels of Life" (either enhanced or destroyed Sarah Bernhardt's reputation for many) and "Love, etc." (the reader becomes a part of it). In spite of, or because of all this, I'll still purchase the next Julian Barnes endeavor!!!

Exhausting self-indulgent pompous musings on "love". If this is love, it's the most masochistic self-loathing version of it ever written. I did get through it despite it becoming more ponderous and plodding as it went so slowly and depressingly along. Wow. Alcoholism aside. Martini. Please!

Paul, a nineteen-year-old student, falls in love with Susan, a forty-eight-year-old mired in a failed marriage. Their decade long relationship disintegrates when her alcoholism drives her young lover away. This is the straightforward plot of a novel that romanticizes love while seizing on the misery that love often causes. Julian Barnes, in deftly written prose, posits a harsh irony: Love is "the only story" in one's life, the ultimate source of meaning. Yet, those who love are doomed to tragedy. In telling this story, Barnes pokes a finger in the eye of propriety by coupling a young man with an older woman. However, he might have developed their relationship further to intensify the drama and deepen our understanding of the heartache that the star-crossed lovers endure. Still, this novel is well worth reading.

This is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old man-boy who fell in love with Susan, a 42-year-old married woman with two daughters about Paul’s age. The story is told, in the first person, but midway through, it shifts into the second, and then the third person. Does that signify the narrator’s attempt to distance himself from his own story? It is s powerful story about how the ecstasy and tragedy of love dissolve in each other. Paul begins his story by telling us how he met Susan and they fell in love. He tells about the ways in which they conceal that love, first from each other, then from their friends and families. Julian Barnes uses his impressive mastery of the language to bring us to feel, without abhorrence or condemnation; in fact, we might find ourselves cheering on this pair of love-birds. Then, just as we are getting comfortable with them and their love, Barnes starts to pull at our heart-strings, and before we know it, he tears them asunder. Is it better, he asks, to love the more and suffer the more, or to love less and suffer the less? He leaves us an important hint as to how to approach this question – and that, is the role that chance plays. No matter who we are or how much we plan to take control of our affairs; no matter how much we rationalise our actions, we lose to the fickleness and callousness of chance – or do we? Follow this story through the years. If you are a young reader, read it again when you are in your 70’s. You will be sure to see it differently, as you would your own life, in retrospect. The audio cd format was very well narrated by Guy Mott. Motts brings the sensual dimension of the audible thought to accentuate the wide range of emotions that Barnes intended to convey in the book.

I found this book fairly boring and dated . Barnes’s use of phrases like “played out generation” and “fancy boys” stuck the book and it’s protagonists and their experiences too firmly in mid twentieth century England and so alienated me somewhat. This was exacerbated by no real explanation of what draws a nineteen year old sexually to a forty eight year old and I found the relationship difficult to believer in. The later chapters descend into platitudes and my patience with both of the main characters evaporated. However the writing saves it - otherwise I don’t think I could have finished the book.

Barnes writes really nicely, of course; style is never noticeable. Except I wondered about his shifts in narrative point of view. He moves from first, to second, to third person. It works, I think. The second person parts suggest that the narrator, who is getting old in the narrative present of the novel, is looking back on his younger self as a differential person, almost - it distances him from his earlier self.I enjoyed this - it’s a novella about a nineteen year old boy whose first love is an old married woman, and how this, his ‘one story,’ shapes and defines his entire life.It’s not for everyone- it’s wouldn’t be a page turner for most people. It’s very grey and very English, but that’s exactly what I was looking for. It’s a sort of meditation on love as a disaster.

Julian Barnes is a great writer, but this is not a great novel. Young man starts relationship with older woman is a somewhat trite plotline. Even the mechanism for the telling of the story is rather banal. It could have been rescued by inciteful character development, but the protagonists remain essentially two-dimensional. Other characters suffer the same lack of development; indeed, most are mere caricatures rather than fully-fledged actors in the narrative. The story comes across as one that Julian Barnes wanted to write, but you are left with a feeling of emptiness (and also relief) as the final paragraph ends. Maybe that is how JB meant it to be, but the lack of depth is very disappointing.

Julian Barnes gives us here quite a contemplative and also rather exquisite novel. As I started to first read this I couldn’t but help notice certain similarities to Ford Maddox Ford’s novel ‘The Good Soldier’. There the narrator was unreliable, and we have the same sort of scenario here, with Paul, our narrator thinking back over the years, and reminding us that memory can play tricks with us over time, and we see this here, as well as bits being added to our understanding as the tale progresses.After a short philosophical discourse on the matter of love, so this opens as Paul returns from university for the break, and at only nineteen has time on his hands. As he joins the local tennis club in his hometown in Surrey, so we see him start to get rather friendly with married Susan, who is not only wed, but is a mother to two daughters, and is over twice his age. This is where we have really the first weak part in the story (the other being how Susan can have the money for buying another place) in that Paul falls in love, rather than just having an affair before going back to his studies.As the reader we can see the cracks appearing in the relationship long before either Paul or Susan do, thus giving us the opportunity to think about why these are appearing, and what can be done to make things easier. This story thus brings us into the actual tale, making us more than conventional voyeurs, instead making us interact somewhat with what is happening. As we see a descent into alcoholism on one side and the inevitable decline and other events that this leads to so we can see that Paul is in many ways blinkered to reality. After all we all carry a certain amount of psychological baggage around with us, and Susan being that much older than Paul, and also married with children when this opens, has a lot more.Quite philosophical at times, and giving us a good psychological study, so this also reminds us of the realities of real life, compared to people’s more imaginary ideas and beliefs. This is the next read for my local book group, and I must admit that I am looking forward to it, as there is a lot to discuss with this novel.