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History of the World in 10½ Chapters (Picador Books)

By: Julian Barnes
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 0330313991
ISBN-13: 9780330313995
Released: 27 Jul 1990
RRP: £7.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Yup. - By: O. Brown, 30 Sep 2007
An honestly brilliant book. There's a section toward the end where the author slips into a first person narrative & talks about his wife subconsciously 'baring the nape of her neck for him'. It very nearly brought me to tears on the train whilst I read it. Utterly human, empthatic & masterly. This fictional biography of the earth is somehow completely ridiculous at the same time as being very believable. I don't read as much as I used to but I'm delighted that I picked this up last year.
Believe the hype, this book is fabulous - By: Sam J. Ruddock, 14 Mar 2007
Subverting history should not be this much fun. But somewhere in the midst of stowaways aboard Noah's Ark, an absurd trial in Medieval France, & a visit to heaven, we come to realise just what a ridiculous species Human Beings are. Absolutely ridiculous. Even the Earthworms think so. 10 ½ stories, 10 ½ narrative voices covering the entire scope of humanity. This is a secular history more divine & inspirational than any dogmatic text could ever be. I believe in Julian Barnes, he has earned my praise.
A really interesting take on history - By: Mrs. Suzanne Ravenhall, 02 Aug 2006
We alll take history to be factual; well, I did anyway! Then I grew up a bit, & realised that there are two sides to every story. Julian Barnes cleverly presents a third viewpoint - one that might have happened, set in a brilliantly quirky & yet astonishingly believable perspective. I was so taken with the chapter on the Wreck of the Medusa, I went to visit the actual painting in the Louve, Paris, & marvelled at how Barnes had come up with his version of events. Well worth a read. In fact, read it two or three times!
Original perspective on "history" - By: , 20 Jan 2006
What a great read! Original & quirky without the irritation of pretension. This novel manages to make you think about history & how it is presented apparently without effort (though I'm not at alll sure it is without intention)yet avoids becoming too heavy or bogged down simply by changing the subject every chapter. Starting with story of Noah as never before seen & working his forward gives the author ample scope for choice which he deftly uses to gives us tales of a biblical, historical & personal nature apparently as the whim took him, their only connecting feature being repeated references to the ark, & curiously, to woodworm.
This said, I feel the author is trying to make us think about the way history is told, percieved & perhaps created.
If you fancy somehting engaging & different, you could do a lot worse than this book.
No half measures - By: Budge Burgess, 03 Aug 2005
Julian Barnes is a former lexicographer & journalist whose novels have earned that most elusive cachet - critical acclaim from both the English & French side of the Channel. His 1984 work, "Flaubert's Parrot", is part travelogue, part literary criticism: its narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, journeys through France & his own autobiographical detail, painting a novel in a pastiche of narrative forms.

Barnes felt he had found a substantial vehicle in Braithwaite & considered having him write a guide to the bible - an acerbic, agnostic travelogue through its pages. Instead, he developed "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters", beginning with the conceit of seeing history as re-beginning with Noah's Ark.

Barnes' first chapter presents the unexpurgated story of the Ark. How could one smalll ship have carried the Earth's vast variety of animal life? He has Noah as admiral of a flotilla of ships. The bible, here, is propaganda, fudging the truth in favour of a good story. He creates a paradigm for historical enquiry: alll history is partial, is told from a particular perspective; alll history involves editing out what the historian sees as chaff; if the bible doesn't give you the whole story, who can you believe. History, then, is a perspective, never a fundamentalist truth.

History, of course, is written by the victors, is written from the perspective of those with the power to claim that their vision of the truth is the only coherent, logical one. While the image of alll formal world histories is that the author has encapsulated the truth of human life, Barnes presents history as a personal interpretation. His history of the Ark is written from the perspective of the powerless. It is the voice of the dispossessed, made no less emphatic by its fictional form.

Barnes goes on to emphasise that while historians present their material as a logical continuity, history is, in fact, a series of discontinuities & conflicting perspectives. He leaps straight into a second maritime chapter, its narrator being a guide on a cruise liner, taking tourists on history tours around the Mediterranean. History, here, belongs to those who have the time, money & curiosity to buy it in packaged form. The vessel is hijacked by terrorists, & the tour guide is left to explain his own role in this little footnote to history.

Surely law can establish truth? Barnes now explores a medieval court case, reducing the pursuit of truth to so much sophistry, to be bought & sold according to political will & power. He reintroduces the Ark's stowaways - can they claim a god-given purpose if their only purpose seems to be the destruction of man's creations?

A young woman recognises that alll life is interconnected, that there is a world ecology which links the lies about Santa Claus to the lies about nuclear power. She seeks escape to sea & pursuit of an island paradise ... only to be haunted by the false fantasies of her dreams & her delusions that she can find safety.

Barnes returns again & again to various cultural distinctions between the 'clean' & the 'unclean', who shalll live, who shalll die, who shalll have power, who shalll be consumed?

He exhumes the story behind a famous French painting of a Napoleonic shipwreck, posing the question of how you turn disaster into art, & thence into triumph. Art, too, presents a snapshot of history, capturing a moment. But Barnes demonstrates that art, like history, can be critiqued, can be deconstructed, can be shown to be only an opinion, an illusion rather than a certainty.

History, then, is an anachronistic concept. It is a claim to know god's hand. But if even the bible, the supposed word of god, is partial & partisan, who can claim to know the hand of god?

A Victorian lady ascends Mount Ararat in search of the remains of the Ark. A survivor of the Titanic is tormented by a sceptical youth. Human remains are found on Ararat. Could this be Noah?

Barnes spins together, if not a series of short stories then a melange of essays. He treats history as an assemblage of information & constructs a novel as a juxtaposition of ideas. Its an incisive & disorienting experience. As a reader, you search for themes & continuity. The narrative is accessible to the reader only in the way that history is accessible to the archaeologist. You have to dig for it then make sense of it.

This is a superbly funny, provocative work. Despite its intellectual sophistication, it is remarkably accessible. It is a good read, itself an ironic commentary on the pretensions, cerebral flatulence, & impenetrability of so much history, or, indeed, art or literary criticism.

He concludes with a 'half' chapter, a conclusion in which he sets aside his own thoughts in parenthesis, delivering a personal vision of heaven as a statement that if history is presented as an attempt to understand the past, should we not be attempting to understand the future? Should we not be trying to decide where we are going, how we want humanity to evolve? It's a plea to put politics & overt values back at the heart of history rather than to pretend that it represents some sort of neutral stance, some sort of expansive balance.

And he's leaving you, as reader, to add your own parenthetical addendum to the novel, to piece together your own values & perceptions & those excerpts from your own personal history which have shaped who you think you are. Exciting. Stimulating. Highly entertaining.