He said: "Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation – Martin Amis, McEwan – leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world.Anyone who can read Flaubert's Parrot or Arthur and George says volumes about himself and nothing about Julian Barnes. It must be hard for largely irrelevant academics who live in the shadows of authors like Barnes, Amis, McEwan and Rushdie.
The journalist took a few sentences from one chapter of a fifteen-chapter book, an expansion of an essay that originally appeared in the TLS, robbed those words of their nuance and context, and, on the basis of three telephone conversations in which I tried in vain to explain to her that I was not interested in personalities but in certain large and general literary and cultural issues, passed the whole thing off as an interview. In the wake of the Guardian piece I was rung up by the Evening Standard and Radio 4’s PM, and emailed by Newsnight, all wanting me to elaborate on what I had allegedly said in the Guardian. When I told all three that I would do so only on condition that I did not talk about personalities but set the record straight about the content of my book, I was told that in that case they were not interested. Ironically, one of the points the book was making was that the English were so obsessed with turning every issue into one of personality that serious debate of cultural questions was now almost impossible.posted by twirlip at 11:05 AM on August 13, 2010 [2 favorites]
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posted by oulipian at 3:56 AM on July 29, 2010