Review by New York Times Review
Julian barnes has disregarded the conventional boundaries between literary genres for as long as he's been publishing books. So it should come as no surprise that "Levels of Life," a putative grief memoir about the loss of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, is part history, part meditative essay and part fictionalized biography. The pieces combine to form a fascinating discourse on love and sorrow. Each of the three essays - "The Sin of Height," "On the Level" and "The Loss of Depth" - begins with the same concept: that of putting together "two things that have not been put together before." In the first essay, the 19th-century photographer and inventor Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, later known simply as Nadar, combines photography and aeronautics as the first aerial photographer. In the second essay, Barnes narrates an imaginary affair between the actress Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby, an English traveler and adventurer. In the third essay, love unites Barnes and his wife - and persists even after Kavanagh's death. A series of coincidences links the three essays: Burnaby and Bernhardt also rode in balloons; Nadar photographed Bernhardt several times; Nadar was a devoted husband despite his many affairs, and he nursed his wife in her last illness, as Barnes nursed his. Elements from the book's first two sections reappear as metaphors in the third: "You feel absurd, like one of those dressed mannequins, surrounded by skulls, that Nadar photographed in the Catacombs. Or like that boa constrictor," belonging to Bernhardt, "which took to swallowing sofa cushions and had to be shot dead." But the facts of Barnes's life without Kavanagh don't need metaphors. "I look at my key ring (which used to be hers): it holds only two keys, one to the front door of the house and one to the back gate of the cemetery," he writes. "I used to rub oil into her back because her skin dried easily; now I rub oil into the drying oak of her grave marker." Kavanagh doesn't appear until the last of the three essays. She casts a shadow over the playful and digressive preliminary chapters, and in this new, lower light they seem a defense against grief's identity-warping madness - as if Barnes worried that writing about the death of the beloved might kill her all over again, this time in prose. The third essay, bracingly precise, is the emotional center of the book. Barnes here is simultaneously wise, funny and devastating: "When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you." When he sees his Congolese postman, moved to a new route, for the first time after Kavanagh's death and must explain that she is gone, he observes, "I was thinking, even as I was speaking : now I'm having to do it all again in French." During a late-night cab ride home, Barnes's driver asks: '"Your wife, be asleep, will she?' After a silent choke, I gave the only reply I could find. 'I hope so."' Memoir is often accused of being the most indulgent literary genre, and the first two essays, intellectually and imaginatively rigorous, provide a kind of apology for the third. But despite all expectations, those two are the ones that occasionally wax sentimental; the dialogue between Burnaby and Bernhardt can blush somewhat purple. In the third essay, Barnes refers to the dangerous lure of grief's "self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn, an egotistical exceptionalism: all aspects of vanity." His articulation of his anguish is well served by his leeriness, as the book's last section is one of the least indulgent accounts of mourning I have ever read. I almost wish "Levels of Life" consisted only of its 56 shattering pages. SARAH MANGUSO is the author, most recently, of the memoir "The Guardians."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Barnes, who won the Man Booker Prize for his most recent novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), is a stealthy essayist. His tone is urbane and wry, his style pared and sure, but his emotions are stormy. As in his previous essay collection, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), death is Barnes' theme. Though one wouldn't think so at the outset as he describes three nineteenth-century balloon flights in England and France enjoyed by three intriguing, eventually interconnected balloonatics. There's rascally Colonel Fred Burnaby; Felix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the pioneering aerial and portrait photographer; and the Divine Sarah Bernhardt. Barnes muses on why being airborne is exhilarating, in spite of one's being at the mercy of wind and weather. The profound metaphorical resonance of Barnes' fascination with ballooning emerges as he addresses the sudden death of his wife of 30 years and his painful plunge into mourning. This bright wand of a book is testimony to Barnes' commanding artistry, delving intelligence, and high imagination as he writes of being griefstruck with stunningly vital and tonic perception.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British novelist Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) offers a delicately oblique, emotionally tricky geography of grief, which he has constructed from his experience since the sudden death in 2008 of his beloved wife of 30 years, literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The "levels" of the title-a high, even, and deep "moral space"-play out in the juxtaposition of two subjects that are seemingly incongruous but potentially marvelous and sublime together, as Barnes delineates through his requisite and always fascinating historical examples: the 19th-century French photographer Nadar's attempts to unite the evolving science of aeronautics ("the sin of height") with the art of photography for the first astounding aerial views of Earth; and English traveler and avid balloonist Colonel Fred Burnaby's passion for the bold, adventurist French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The shocking death of Barnes's wife left him feeling flattened and suicidal. In his grieving turmoil, he questions assumptions about death and mourning, loss and memory, and he grapples eloquently with the ultimate moral conundrum: how to live? (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
British novelist, essayist, and Man Booker Prize-winning author Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) stitches together three very different essays into a meditation on love, death, grief, and survival. The first piece is a collage about ballooning and photography and establishes the metaphorical motifs that will frame the work as a whole. Indeed, ballooning aptly describes this book's arrangement: Barnes opens with an objective, bird's-eye account of three famous aeronauts and then begins his descent, first toward the ground and then, finally, into his interior thoughts. By the end, his narrative closes completely the psychic distance between the reader and himself. Barnes's wife, Pat Kavanagh, to whom he had been married for 30 years, died suddenly of cancer in 2008. He describes his grief as aimless, disorienting, and unending-as if being carried by the wind, in a balloon. Truly dedicated "To Pat," these essays recall Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which is also about the bereavement for a spouse. Yet Barnes offers a work that is more universal, illustrating how desire expands and elevates the human condition and yet, paradoxically and necessarily, also promises suffering. Verdict This book will resonate most with those who have suffered the death of a loved one, but readers who have deeply loved-and therefore deeply grieved-will also understand and appreciate it.-Meagan Lacy, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Libs. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A book about the death of a spouse that is unlike any other--book or spouse--and thus illuminates the singularity as well as the commonality of grieving. Having provocatively addressed the matter of mortality (Nothing To Be Frightened Of, 2008), the award-winning British novelist brings a different perspective to the death of his wife. There is actually little about his long marriage to literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who was successful, respected and private. "Grief, like death, is banal and unique," he writes, with the sort of matter-of-fact precision that gives this book its power. In the two early sections, on ballooning, photography and love, Barnes employs an almost mannered, incantatory tone that seems more like a repression of emotion than an expression of it, making readers wonder how these meditations on perspective might ultimately cohere. "You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not," he writes about a doomed love affair between a famous actress and balloon adventurer. "They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves." Just as it took five years for Barnes to address his wife's death in print, it takes two sections of establishing tone and perspective before he writes of his mourning directly, though of course, he has been writing about it from the start of the book. "I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely," he writes. Ultimately, he finds some resonance in opera, which had never interested him before, as he discovers that "song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word--both higher and deeper." The perspectives of height and depth tie the first two sections to the third, where love and death can't ever be resolved but rather, somehow survived. Barnes' reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.