Details
Synopsis
A sequence of ten short stories about the experience British subjects in France.
| Size | | Length: | 211 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
"'Cross Channel', whether 'Post-Modernist' or not, strikes me as perhaps Barnes's most assured work so far."
London Review of Books - P. N. Furbank (01/04/1995)
"If you are not prepared to have your intelligence flattered or your ignorance highlighted by a few French literary allusions, you'd better give this one a miss....It is a rare thing to read a collection of short stories and, on reaching the end, be able to remember vividly each and every one."
Literary Review - Teresa Waugh
"...reconfirms Barnes's sympathy for those characters whose Englishness accompanies them, like a sensible mackintosh, into the unpredictable depths of France...Barnes's versatility as a parodist ensures a lively diversity of styles, and two of the stories are amusing enough as pun-laden, literary-historical jokes...The collection ends on an archly self-mocking note, that betrays a curious sense of weariness with its own subject-matter...it leaves us with the feeling that his imagination may have run temporarily aground."
Times Literary Supplement - Gerald Mangan (01/19/1996)
"Poised, understated, and ingenious--sometimes ironic, always elegantly written--these stories display all Julian Barnes's versatility."
Spectator - Euan Cameron (01/06/1996)
"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. This time, fiction, rather than biography or reminiscence, is the tool Mr. Barnes's hero uses to try to recover the past, a tool that enables him (and Mr. Barnes) to show off sleight-of-hand skills. Although Mr. Barnes coyly withholds this information until the end of the book, we are made to realize that the tales in this volume are not simply a random collection but a series of fictions supposedly written by the hero of the final story....It is only when the reader finishes the book and understands the overall shape of Mr. Barnes's narrative strategy that small, previously unnoticed details begin to pay off. In fact, 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..."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (04/16/1996)
"Despite his reputation as 'a novelist of ideas,' his interest in France and his Anglo-American suavity, Julian Barnes is a very English writer who is squarely in Forster's descent."
New Republic - James Wood (06/24/1996)
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