I don’t know about this book. I was sucked in at first by how beautifully written and scholarly its meditations on memory, life etc are but I can’t overlook the blatant misogyny, unflattering descriptions of women and clear hostility towards them. As a youngster, members of the opposite sex are for the protagonist either prim virgins, tarty shop-girls or VD-riddled whores and as an older man, he actively pesters and antagonizes his former lover to get something he wants. There’s something of the incel about Tony Webster who thought life might be literature (p.s. it isn't, see Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, 1752) whose 'self-rebukes never really inflicted much pain’ but who pulled all the vitriolic stops out when it came to being led on (or was he?) by his girlfriend. The book examines the fallibility of memory and perception. The narrator (as Barnes does) lives his life as if all his memories are true, then in part two all these ‘lies of the victors & self-delusions of the defeated’ are undermined as he realises his life is merely the story he’s told himself; his brain has erased so much from the record. Reading, I was thinking about what Irish poet Eavan Boland once remarked about history, that it’s for heroes, but the past is where the whispers and shadows live. The arrogance of self-seeking men like this who believe life is all about them not considering for one moment that someone else might be hurting, or that their thoughtless acts might have repercussions for another.
Do all our male writers have to be so crass and offensive?