Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.*
First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention.
As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human heart.
**
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of April 2018: In Julian Barnes’s ruminative, finely wrought, and often wryly funny novel, The Only Story is the story of love: the ideal of love, and love as it is lived. In this case, it’s the story of Paul and Susan, who are, respectively, 19 and 49 when they meet. As in his Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, Barnes is preoccupied by memory’s lapses and the subjectivity of truth. This is also a novel about drinking, and Barnes serves up a quintessentially late-career cocktail. Leave sweet drinks to the young, he seems to say. The mature palate calls for bitters.
“Most of us have only one story to tell,” says Paul. “I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.” It begins more than fifty years ago, in the kind of London suburb where stockbrokers play cricket on the Village Green on Saturdays. When a new delicatessen opens, residents view it as “subversive in its offerings of European goods.”
Paul meets Susan at the local tennis club, and at first their 30-year age difference doesn’t seem to matter. “In terms of – what shall I call it? The age of her spirit, perhaps – we aren’t that far apart.” As time darkens the lovers’ initial exuberance, Paul’s narration, which began with the immediacy of the first person voice, shifts, heartbreakingly, to the second, and ultimately, when he feels “rebuked by life,” to the third. Though readers will marvel at the sophistication of this and other novelistic strategies Barnes employs, their end result is that though we might wish The Only Story had a sweeter ending, the one Barnes gives us feels deeply true: bitter, yes, but satisfying, too. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review
Review
“[Barnes] returns to the themes of his first novel in this story, of an affair told from two vantage points, with captivating results. . . . The ending is quietly breathtaking, evidence of the subterranean magic that’s wrought by those seemingly austere sentences.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian
“Immensely powerful.” —Alex Clark, New Statesman
“Mr. Barnes is a master of the novel that unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet interrogates itself as it is told.” —Jonathan Cape, The Economist
“[The Only Story] is a novel that quietly sinks its hooks into the reader and refuses to let go. . . . As a feat of narrative control it shows a novelist at the height of his powers. As an exploration of whether love is indeed ‘the only story,’ and if so whether that word ‘only’ may reveal itself to mean miserably restrictive rather than happily unique, it is quietly devastating.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
“[B]eautifully succinct. . . . This is not an easy story. . . . Told with particular heartbreak, The Only Story allows us to consider exuberance and its partner in crime, grief. In this work, Barnes forces us to reflect on the very essence of what makes a love story. Of course, he raises more questions than he answers but, surely, this is his gift to us. The Only Story will lead you to ruminate, pleasurably. Truly.” —Chris Gordon, Readings (Australia)
“Barnes’s superbly restrained and haunting contemplation . . . mirrors the way one remembers and thinks, circling backwards and leaping forwards as the mind tries to make sense of what is, eventually, unfathomable. . . . Certainly this is not a big book, but in depth and ambition and effect, it is the opposite of small.” —Rosemary Goring, The Herald
Description:
*THE SUNDAY TIMES *BESTSELLER*
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.*
First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention.
As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.
Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human heart.
**
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of April 2018: In Julian Barnes’s ruminative, finely wrought, and often wryly funny novel, The Only Story is the story of love: the ideal of love, and love as it is lived. In this case, it’s the story of Paul and Susan, who are, respectively, 19 and 49 when they meet. As in his Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, Barnes is preoccupied by memory’s lapses and the subjectivity of truth. This is also a novel about drinking, and Barnes serves up a quintessentially late-career cocktail. Leave sweet drinks to the young, he seems to say. The mature palate calls for bitters.
“Most of us have only one story to tell,” says Paul. “I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.” It begins more than fifty years ago, in the kind of London suburb where stockbrokers play cricket on the Village Green on Saturdays. When a new delicatessen opens, residents view it as “subversive in its offerings of European goods.”
Paul meets Susan at the local tennis club, and at first their 30-year age difference doesn’t seem to matter. “In terms of – what shall I call it? The age of her spirit, perhaps – we aren’t that far apart.” As time darkens the lovers’ initial exuberance, Paul’s narration, which began with the immediacy of the first person voice, shifts, heartbreakingly, to the second, and ultimately, when he feels “rebuked by life,” to the third. Though readers will marvel at the sophistication of this and other novelistic strategies Barnes employs, their end result is that though we might wish The Only Story had a sweeter ending, the one Barnes gives us feels deeply true: bitter, yes, but satisfying, too. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review
Review
“[Barnes] returns to the themes of his first novel in this story, of an affair told from two vantage points, with captivating results. . . . The ending is quietly breathtaking, evidence of the subterranean magic that’s wrought by those seemingly austere sentences.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian
“Immensely powerful.” —Alex Clark, New Statesman
“Mr. Barnes is a master of the novel that unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet interrogates itself as it is told.” —Jonathan Cape, The Economist
“[The Only Story] is a novel that quietly sinks its hooks into the reader and refuses to let go. . . . As a feat of narrative control it shows a novelist at the height of his powers. As an exploration of whether love is indeed ‘the only story,’ and if so whether that word ‘only’ may reveal itself to mean miserably restrictive rather than happily unique, it is quietly devastating.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
“[B]eautifully succinct. . . . This is not an easy story. . . . Told with particular heartbreak, The Only Story allows us to consider exuberance and its partner in crime, grief. In this work, Barnes forces us to reflect on the very essence of what makes a love story. Of course, he raises more questions than he answers but, surely, this is his gift to us. The Only Story will lead you to ruminate, pleasurably. Truly.” —Chris Gordon, Readings (Australia)
“Barnes’s superbly restrained and haunting contemplation . . . mirrors the way one remembers and thinks, circling backwards and leaping forwards as the mind tries to make sense of what is, eventually, unfathomable. . . . Certainly this is not a big book, but in depth and ambition and effect, it is the opposite of small.” —Rosemary Goring, The Herald