"We live at ground level, in the plain, and yet we aspire to elevate ourselves. Terrestrial, sometimes we ascend as high as the gods. Some rise through art, others through religion, most through love. But as we rise we can also plummet. There are a few soft landings. [...] Every love story is potentially a story of affliction. If not at first, later. If not for one, for the other. Sometimes for both."
It's already the second time I've read Standards of Living and I think this time has been even more special than the first time. I think that's what's going on with Julian Barnes. He's a writer who, as you read each of his books, you like more and more. Or maybe what happens is that I feel more and more identified and reflected in his novels, which are leaving so much mark on me.
Although it is true that I began reading this author at the beginning of 2019, with The Only Story, I have to admit that, once I started, I couldn't stop. And I think it was the best literary discovery of the year, along with Maria Oruna and Victor Del Arbor. I think this is one of the writers I have empathized with the most through words, through each of his thoughts and reflections on paper. Julian Barnes will never leave you indifferent, as it enters your mind and your deepest desires and longings. And he will dig... I tell you, he digs. Sometimes too much.
And Living Standards I think is one of his deepest and special novels. It is divided into three parts, quite well-differentiated and with different narrators. In them, he delves into different feelings such as love, loneliness, death, pain, and loss. And it's not easy to talk about it all without getting deeply involved. And it does! And there comes a time when he no longer tells the story of distant and fictitious characters (even if the reader does not feel them as such), but focuses on his personal circumstances and tells us a painful event in his own life: the loss of his wife. And when you get to that moment in the book, when you've experienced with his characters the love, illusion, disaffection, and fantasy that sometimes floods our lives, the novel gets even better.
And although perhaps this part is the hardest thing I've ever read, it's brilliant and can't have a better ending. It's incredible how Barnes shows us his weaknesses and how he opens his heart to us through words, something that's not easy at all, and that he himself admits. There are feelings that the human being is unable to express through words. But he gets it and drags you along with him. There are emotions that can only be transmitted in literature, and there are people who are only able to show all the pain they have inside through the word. That is their true power. And Julian Barnes is a genius at this.
"[People say] you'll get over it. [...] And in the end, you get over it, it's true. At the end of a year, out of five. But you don't get over it in the same way a train gets out of a tunnel, with a sudden rise to the sunny landscape on the other side of the Downs, to start the fast, rattling descent into the English Channel; you get over it rather the way a seagull finally gets rid of the sticky oil stain. Tarred and feathered for life."
And that's really the pain of loss. And this is the real footprint it leaves because there are people, situations, memories... that are never forgotten. That remains inside us until the end of our lives, ready to torment us and make us smile for everything we have lived in equal parts. This is the magic of life, the strength of our most private memories, more ours. For do we have the ability to choose what makes us happy? That which, as Barnes expresses, makes us elevate ourselves and abandon our most terrestrial essence.
If I had to recommend an author, it would undoubtedly be Julian Barnes (and I have already done so a few times). And if I could choose a "famous" character to meet, it would be him. I'd like to ask him so many questions and talk about so many subjects. And yes, maybe I'm idealizing him. But I don't think so... after reading so many of his novels and interviews, I can't feel any closer to him and his way of seeing life. His passion for living and the values that accompany it, as well as the torment expressed through his characters, are totally sincere and I believe that this is, especially, what has made him one of my essential authors.