Details
Synopsis
With high wit and a complete lack of sentimentality, this collection of stories faces the facts of aging and death. Stories include "A Short History of Hairdressing," in which the narrator gets a haircut at three stages in his life, and notices how differently he is treated in each; "Hygiene," about an aging suburbanite whose only pleasure--an occasional tryst with a prostitute named Babs--comes to a sad end; "Things You Know," about two friends, both widows, who meet for their monthly lunch and a hefty dose of mutual pity; "Appetite," in which an old man's only hold on on reality is the recipes his wife reads to him; and "The Revival," about Turgenev as an old man hopelessly in love with a young actress. The book's title may come from the fact that the lemon is a Chinese symbol for death. Or it may denote Julian Barnes's somewhat sour--but bracing--view of the coming of old age. A New York Times Notable Book for 2004.
| Details | | Series: | Vintage International Series |
| Size | | Length: | 244 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Funny, sad, playful, savagely accurate about human relationships and failings, THE LEMON TABLE is vintage Julian Barnes."
Literary Review - Rachel Hore (03/01/2004)
"THE LEMON TABLE is very crisply done: there's pathos, there's humor...and, as you'd expect, there's a lot of fine writing."
London Review of Books - Christopher Tayler (04/15/2004)
"The best of these tales are beautifully wrought elegies for lost youth, lost promises and lost loves. They are stories that reveal an emotional depth new to the writings of the usually cerebral Mr. Barnes....While some of the tales in this volume are nothing but smartly crafted throwaways, the strongest ones attest to Mr. Barnes's growing depth as a writer, his newly embraced ability to create stories that are as affecting as they are cunning, as emotionally resonant as they are prettily fashioned."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (06/22/2004)
"Now 58, [Barnes] may be ideally positioned for the subject matter, just close enough to be agitated by its looming personal relevance and still far enough away for it to require the imaginative feats he performs in this compact book. THE LEMON TABLE, in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader's faith in literature as the truest form of assisted living."
New York Times Book Review - Thomas Mallon (06/27/2004)
"In Julian Barnes's new collection, one feels the satisfactions of novel-reading....THE LEMON TABLE can be thought of as a novel, experimental in form, about aging, one theme linking the stories into something rather like a musical composition, theme and variations, experienced as a whole....There are no verbal antics here. Some of the vigor of the writing comes from the absence of descriptive ornament; each phrase is instrumental, an occasional surprising adjective the only indulgence....But the power of these stories mostly lies in the relentless accumulation of the all-too-familiar details of aging."
New York Review of Books - Diane Johnson (10/21/2004)
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