{"id":5053,"date":"2013-10-09T02:45:03","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T02:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=5053"},"modified":"2013-10-09T02:45:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T02:45:03","slug":"journey-to-the-centre-great-middle-lines-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=5053","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I’ve found a book on my shelf which I’d forgotten about because it’s not memorable, despite its fame as a prizewinner.\u00a0 I’d bought it and read it because of an excellent piece I knew by the same author;\u00a0 it was about translating, a thing I love to do.\u00a0 So, I know he’s a great writer.\u00a0 I don’t think, however, that Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending<\/em>, the reflections of a self-indulgent older man, deserved a big prize.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it has a middle as all writing does, and the narration on pages 75 and 76, at the rough centre, is well-written, the work of a close observer.<\/p>\n

Here the narrator is lunching with his ex-wife, discussing an issue which has arisen about one of his ex-girlfriends, ‘The Fruitcake’:<\/p>\n

There was a silence.\u00a0 We ate.\u00a0 Then Margaret tapped her knife against my plate.<\/p>\n

“And if the presumably still-unmarried Miss Veronica Ford happened to walk into this caf\u00e9 and sit down at our table, how would the long-divorced Mr Anthony Webster react?”<\/p>\n

She always puts her finger on it, doesn’t she?<\/p>\n

“I don’t think I’d be especially pleased to see her.”<\/p>\n

Something in the formality of my tone caused Margaret to smile.\u00a0 “Intrigued?\u00a0 Start rolling up your sleeve and taking off your watch?”<\/p>\n

I blushed.\u00a0 You haven’t seen a bald man in his sixties blush?\u00a0 Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old.\u00a0 And because it’s rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I’ve found a book on my shelf which I’d forgotten about because it’s not memorable, despite its fame as a prizewinner.\u00a0 I’d bought it and read it because of an excellent piece I knew by the same author;\u00a0 it was about translating, a thing I love to do.\u00a0 So, I know he’s a great … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 10”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[487,488,2,462,463,21,226,489,270],"class_list":["post-5053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-great-middle-lines","tag-21st-century-literature","tag-julian-barnes","tag-literature","tag-middle-lines","tag-novels","tag-postaday","tag-postaday2013","tag-the-sense-of-an-ending","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}