Staring at the Sun

Written by Julian Barnes

Narrated by Polly Lee

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes’s wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary
disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes—winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending—follows her from her
childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless
curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of
technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).

Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781980082927

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) se educó en Londres y Oxford. Está considerado como una de las mayores revelaciones de la narrativa inglesa de las últimas décadas. Entre muchos otros galardones, ha recibio el premio E.M. Forster de la American Academy of Arts and Letters, el William Shakespeare de la Fundación FvS de Hamburgo y es Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Reviews for Staring at the Sun

[Stephen Kastner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This has just ascended to one of my all-time favorite books. It's beautifully written containing the entire lifetime of a very modest woman. The audible version is exquisitely narrated by a very wonderful performer.

[robert3167 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting examination of what is courage and how we deal with death. The time frame moves from pre WW2 to an imagined future seen mainly through the experiences of a mother and her son.

[nandakishore_varma-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The really important questions do not have answers: and the really important answers do not need questions. Life is itself, not comparable to anything. And all the great miracles are present in the here and the now, if only we can see them... like staring at the sun through the gap between your fingers.

...Some of the things which I took away from this magical, unreviewable book.

Read it.

[clara53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book certainly gives one food for thought, in all directions and on different levels. And I quite understand why it is highly acclaimed ("A stunning book." - BOOKLIST calls it). What I minded, though, was the ever-present sense of morbidity throughout the narrative. I would have also wished for a more detailed account of the heroine's life - after all she lived almost a century. To me, her character was not sufficiently developed, somewhat hazy. Her son, the other protagonist, who sort of takes over in the last third of the book, is tormented by doubts about God, death, suicide - which adds to the less inflammatory quandaries that have bothered his mother since she was a young girl, and which, altogether, is the food for thought mentioned above.

[rcorfield_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To begin with this book had the strong feel of a cross between 'Spies' by Michael Frayn & 'On Chesil Beach' by Ian McEwan, (although of course it predates both), set in the 1940s initially and moving forward from there. I liked the feel of the book.The last third went a bit weird though, forseeing a slightly dystopian near-future, where euthanasia is legal and even encouraged, with a sort of 1980s vision of the internet/wikipedia dispensing knowledge, but as authorised by the government.Intersting ideas on death and religion are what kept me engaged to the end despite the slightly dated feel of the envisioned future.