Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A novelist and critic, best known for the prize-winning novel 'Flaubert's Parrot', a blend of biography, criticism and fiction.
On the island
Eight records
June Anderson, Cecilia Bartoli, Sinfonietta de Montréal
one of the most beautiful works I've discovered in the last few years... if, at a point about twenty-five seconds in, your heart doesn't turn over, then I think there's something wrong with you
Jacques Brel / Jean Corti (orchestration)
A the voice, B the fact that I saw him, and C if I'm going to be on a desert island somewhere in the South Seas
Simple Gifts (from Old American Songs)
William Warfield, Columbia Symphony Orchestra
a tremendous sort of hopefulness that in the nineteenth century and earlier people could go off and start a new life elsewhere in a different way, according to their own principles
Struttin' with Some Barbecue / Sugar Foot Stomp
King Oliver / Louis Armstrong (traditional)
doesn't remind me of America... reminds me of France... driving through French countryside... I will often play this particular record, and I'm sure on my island it would return France to me
String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18 (2nd movement)
Yehudi Menuhin, Robert Masters, Cecil Aronowitz, Ernst Wallfisch, Maurice Gendron, Derek Simpson
the connection is between mortification of the flesh over six, seven, eight, nine, ten miles, and then getting in to your car and the first thing you put on the radio is Brahms's sumptuous first sextet
a piece of wonderful late Romanticism... when you get to late romanticism and a sort of soaring and swooping emotions which seem to sort of burst the form in which they're in are displayed in a comparatively austere form like the violin sonata
Requiem, K. 626 (Dies irae)Favourite
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists
music to die with, if not to die for
Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Hot Club de France
Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle / Django Reinhardt (arr.)
if I saw a sort of little flicker on the horizon, I would turn up the volume very loud and play them
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:14Do I take it from that, Julian, that you just don't like being interviewed?
It depends on the interviewer.
Presenter asks
1:26Have you very firm professional reasons to justify not liking being interviewed, or is it simply that you find it an uncomfortable experience?
I find it vaguely uncomfortable. There's a sort of presumption of intimacy, which is false. The other thing is that if you're a writer, you're often asked questions about your books which invite you to simplify your books. The question that you're often asked is, what were you trying to say in such and such a novel? To which the answer is, what I was trying to say was what I did say.
Presenter asks
2:23But there is a lot of autobiography in your novels, isn't there? … You said yourself that novel writing is one of blending your own personality into a world of your creation. So you're in there.
I wrote the books, that's true, and at times there are moments when my own personal experience might be used untranslated. But what's interesting about fiction writers, it seems to me, is what they make up, how they transform what they see rather than what they see.
The keepsakes
The book
Gustave Flaubert
I'd like to take Flaubert's letters rather than any of his fiction. Uh I'd be writing my own fiction and I thought it would be helpful to pretend that um he was writing to me, that I could read two or three letters a day and imagine that um that I was getting post from the outside world.
The luxury
It would have to be writing equipment, electric typewriter if I'm allowed it, um, lots of paper, stuff like that.
Presenter asks
2:59Let me try out on you then what I think I have spotted in your novels about the writer Julian Barnes. I conclude … that he has an enormously high regard for Flaubert, that he is an atheist, that he's an ardent Leicester City fan, that he enjoys sex, that he thinks love is more important than anything else in the world, and that he fears, above all things, death. Is that a fair summary?
I fear death, that's true, and I fear Leicester City getting relegated. I don't think I'm an atheist, I'd say I'm an agnostic.
Presenter asks
5:21Did you always intend to write, Julian? Was it always on the cards?
No, it wasn't on the cards. I was brought up in a household where there were books and books were respected. Both my parents taught French. … But it wasn't a background in which it seemed an obvious or defensible thing to do to actually practice the arts rather than enjoy them.
Presenter asks
5:48You went up to Oxford and were 'spectacularly inactive' you said. Do you think more so than most?
Yes, I think more so than most. You know, I didn't work particularly hard. I didn't do all those things you're meant to do.
“I find it vaguely uncomfortable. There's a sort of presumption of intimacy, which is false.”
“What I was trying to say was what I did say. And the answers are really in the books.”
“What's interesting about fiction writers, it seems to me, is what they make up, how they transform what they see rather than what they see.”
“I think about death every day, yes. … It's partly natural distaste for not being here. It's partly egotism. It's probably partly some sort of chemical thing in my brain. I'm surprised that most people don't think about death more than they do. I think it's one of those things that we aren't meant to think about now, or you're not meant to think about them until it's nearer the time. You know, it seems to me that it's always nearer the time, it's always too damn near the time.”
“I think I'll probably go mad and die, if you want the honest answer. … Probably mad first, yes. I mean, however nice and comfortable you make the island for me, it's still solitary confinement, isn't it? And while as a writer I like being alone at my desk, that's again dependent on the idea that, you know, at the end of the day or the week or whatever, I will have society. And if you've only got an albatross for company, I don't think it's going to be much fun.”