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Book Reviewed by:Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart.
"You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed..."
Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as "an unparalleled magus of the heart." This book confirms that opinion.
So it is with love. Barnes creates a metaphor between love (found and lost) and the intrepid adventure of hot air ballooning and lays the groundwork for talking about the death of his wife. Initially, the connection feels somewhat unnatural, however Barnes’s thoughtful writing and rich illustrative comparisons carry it through...continued
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(Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes creates an extended metaphor between the trials of hot-air ballooning and the experience of love found and lost. In one example he writes:
Grief is vertical – and vertiginous – while mourning is horizontal. Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction. But since you are now in enveloping cloud, it is impossible to tell if you are marooned or deceptively in motion. …You are a first-time aeronaut, alone beneath the gasbag, equipped with a few kilos of ballast, and told that this item in your hand you've never seen before is the valve-line.
From Greek mythology, to Shakespeare, to Star Wars, ...
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