Not For Everyone

Before it was named as one of The New York Times 5 best non-fiction books of 2008, I was intrigued by this book because of its subject matter. I doubt I could have read it a year ago. Surely I would have put it down after a few pages, had I even been willing to pick it up in the first place.

The book is Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, a writer I have inexplicably read nothing by. One of his novels sits on my bookshelf, but how it got there is anybody's guess. I'll be reading this novel soon because this guy's hilarious.

Barnes muses about death and dying in Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Despite the book's title, death frightens the bejeezus out of him. Barnes examines how other writers/philosophers/thinkers have viewed the act of dying, and what, if anything, awaits in the hereafter. He considers the deaths of his grandparents and parents. He tries to think about his own extinction, over and over again in 200-plus pages, but the nothingness of it all unnerves him.

Barnes grapples with growing older and what inevitably follows by remembering his close relatives in their dotage and decline, a look-see into his own awaiting fate. His use of the phrase "rickety-gnashered" to describe an elderly person's teeth had me hooked on page one. The book is full of pithy comments and leans toward an absurdist view of the world, a view I feel fairly comfortable with. Although I don't think Barnes has quite enough material to justify a full-length book (he repeats himself a lot, basically turning over and over the same stone and observing it in minute detail), he writes about memory and story-telling in, for me, compelling ways. His basic tenet that memory is as rickety a structure as a set of aged and decaying teeth, and therefore unreliable, is countered by the notion that one can reconstruct the past through re-imagining it. Barnes is after all a novelist, and hopes that his stories, though made up, reveal some basic truths about life.

My personal travels through the world of serious illness have actually made death-gazing somewhat easier for me. I've looked into the yawning pit that awaits us all and become somewhat more comfortable living with the idea of my/our inevitable fate. Not that I support it or look forward to it in any way. It's still an unglamorous and unfortunate end to a marvelous piece of work. My thinking about death has followed an evolutionary spiral resulting in abstract acceptance or at least resignation. A year ago, two years ago, even three, I wasn't so sanguine. Nor was I even looking in that direction.

In short, if you have the stomach to meditate a bit on death and dying, I recommend Nothing To Be Frightened Of. Maybe the author's repetitiveness is a deliberate literary device. Maybe we need to be repeatedly knocked over the head with sentences at once blunt and finely edged to make any dent at all in our inability or unwillingness to consider our own demise.