Sixteen-year-old suburbanite Chris Lloyd and his mate Toni
spend their free time wishing they were French, making up stories
about strangers, and pretending to be fl?neurs. When they grow up
they''d like to be "artists-in-residence at a nudist colony." If
youthful voyeurism figures heavily in their everyday lives, so,
too, do the pleasures of analogy, metaphor, and deliberate
misprision. Sauntering into one store that dares to call itself MAN
SHOP, Toni demands: "One man and two small boys, please."
Julian Barnes could probably fill several books with these boys''
clever misadventures, but in his first novel he attempts something
more daring--the curve from youthful scorn to adult contentment. In
1968, when Chris goes off to Paris, he misses the May événements
but manages, more importantly, to fall in love and learn the
pleasures of openness: "The key to Annick''s candour was that there
was no key. It was like the atom bomb: the secret is that there is
no secret." The final section finds Chris back in suburbia,
married, with children and a mortgage, and slowly accepting the
surprise that happiness isn''t boring. "It''s certainly ironic to be
back in Metroland. As a boy, what would I have called it: le
syphilis de l''?me, or something like that, I dare say. But isn''t
part of growing up being able to ride irony without being thrown?"
Far from renouncing the joys of language, this novel wittily
celebrates honest communication. --Kerry Fried
關於作者：
Julian Barnes is the author of eleven novels, including The
Sense of an Ending, Metroland, Flaubert''s Parrot, A History of the
World in 10??? Chapters and Arthur George; three books of
short stories, Cross Channel, The Lemon Table and Pulse; and also
three collections of journalism, Letters from London, Something to
Declare, and The Pedant in the Kitchen. His work has been
translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the
only writer to have won both the Prix Medicis for Flaubert''s
Parrot and the Prix Femina for Talking it Over. He was awarded
the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, the David
Cohen Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in
2011. He lives in London.
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