Each of us has only one story, but how many ways to tell it!
Each national literature has not only its own "pain points", but also topics that are universal, while most often, nevertheless, they are touched upon in the books of writers of one or several countries. In modern British literature, one of these topics is memory or even the" tricks " of memory: in the case of Barnes or McEwan, this is an individual memory, Ishiguro is no less interested in collective memory. "One story" is an attempt to dissect one's own memory, in which the same one story lives-the story of first love.
The fact is that from his beloved, the novel narrator inherited the theory that we all have one story that left an imprint on the rest of our lives and made us who we are. The first love, whatever it may be: happy or unhappy, mutual or one-sided, platonic or quite earthly, passionate, becomes a starting point, a yardstick, an example or an anti-example that remains with us forever, and therefore if we tell only one story about ourselves, it is this one.
Barnes himself admitted that "One story" was born out of a frequent question to his past novel "A Premonition of the End": "they say, you, Mr. writer, gave us a story in which a young student was spinning a lamour-toujour with his beloved's mother, but somehow did not focus attention on this fact, but it would be worth it! Tell us, Mr. Writer, how did a young boy fall in love with a middle-aged lady?"
Therefore, in the 2018 sample book there is nothing but a love line, within which the story of 19-year-old Paul and 48-year-old Susan, who met at the tennis club of the small English town of Edyk in the 60s-70s of the last century, unfolds.
Naturally, Barnes is not Elchin Safarli, not Renat Valliulin, not Nicholas Sparks and not even Tony Parsons, so you should not expect from" One story " snot-drool, a sea of tears or, conversely, angels pouring rose petals on the reader's head and pouring honey molasses into his mouth, despite the loud "about love", this is not a love novel in which he and she will reflect on their feelings, sort things out or talk in the spirit: "I love you, bunny" - " My rhinoceros, I love you more!" - " No I!".
"One story" is divided into three parts, and no, Barnes did not change the narrator for each part or turn all the events "before" upside down, as is sometimes done in works that want to show the subjectivity of the characters ' perception of the world. In fact, this is one linear story in the middle of which there is a red line dividing it into "this is good" and "this is not very good anymore" and an additional part from the "after" area, in which there is almost no plot (because the story is over), but a lot of reflections on the essence of memory, time, love, life, human relations, responsibility and other things.
Actually, the key question of the novel is that we do not have a choice of a story, but there is always a choice in how to tell it, what to extract from the depths of our memory, what words to choose, how to build a narrative and place accents. We want to talk about eternal love in an unctuous voice or spray saliva and throw accusations, as if we never for a second threw out of our heads the fact that it did not work out and for whose reason it happened.
If a relationship goes through several stages, is it really worth talking about all of them? And will our story differ depending on who and what we are telling it for, or is it unchanged, like poems learned from childhood that we can mint at three o'clock in the morning?
Of course, all that Barnes is talking about is relevant not only for that very "one story", it is in this case an example that is understandable to the statistical majority, an occasion to start a conversation, to start a chain reaction in the reader's head. And this reaction really starts, you start thinking about how you select the information that you bring to the world, and how you form your memory yourself, sometimes getting rid of the inconvenient or, conversely, fixating on it, ignoring a lot of opposite things.
And if you enter the territory of subjectivity, you can stick for a very long time, because people perceive the same words and events so differently, the most seemingly simple, and not philosophical sayings with a mandatory reference to their own background, that sometimes you wonder: you said and forgot, but the person found something to be offended about, was offended, got cross and periodically returns to this-is it a familiar story?
Plot-wise, "One story" is nothing special, such a variant of stories, which can be thousands, and yet, even despite the fact that Barnes leads his reader along a very narrow, thematically limited corridor, fenced off from the big world, signs of time, the change of epochs, not allowing him to learn about the life of the characters a little more than what lies within their interpersonal relationships, it is quite interesting to read the book.
Her characters change a lot over the ten years of narration, very different notes sound in the story, the mood is perfectly transmitted from the narrator to the reader. After reading the first part, I tried to guess what to do next and somehow indicate my attitude to the characters, but I stumbled over one important thing, which eventually became the stone that destroyed the perfectly smooth water surface, letting voluminous circles run through it: for me, this is proof of the logic of both the plot and the structure, which are extremely important when you write not genre genre prose, but what some arrogantly call "real literature".
The only thing that I did not like in the novel was the content of the third part: I am convinced that a good writer does not need either the so - called "lyrical digressions" in which the author would teach readers about life or share his thoughts on any account, or something similar on behalf of the hero, a kind of monologue-reasonableness; a good writer will make sure that the reader will certainly come to certain thoughts and conclusions himself.
Simply following the plot, reading into the dialogues, conducting his mental work, for which his author only it pushes, to which it leads mentorically. And, of course, within the framework of my view of fiction, almost a hundred electronic pages with the narrator's thoughts, which may not coincide with the author's opinion, is a failure, a strange stuffing of what could have become essays, in which Barnes is also a master, into a separate chapter of the novel.
P.S. By the way, thanks to" One story " by Julian Barnes, I was convinced of the existence of the word "buzotery". I trust the translator Elena Petrova more in the question of word usage than our former governor, who pulled this lexeme out of the annals into rotation, although still in this text such a word looks strange.
572.832 SRY