The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"When I was thirteen, I discovered a tube of contraceptive jelly in the bathroom cabinet. [...] the small print, flaked of a few letters, told me what I didn't want to know. My parents still did it. Worse, when they did it, there was a chance that my mum might get pregnant. This was, well, inconceivable."

Imagine the horror of an adolescent boy who learns that his parents - these sad antiques, relics of the past - still do it. The entire consciousness of an adolescent boy is focused on "it," wanting "it," dreaming about "it," imagining "it," and all the while these ridiculous old folks do it. It offends common sense. This is viciously funny, not even to mention the brilliant pun at the end of the quote. Yet the entire story, The Fruit Cage is way more serious; it is a story about discovering one's parents' secrets.

The Fruit Cage is the 10th of the 11 short stories that compose Julian Barnes' collection The Lemon Table (2004). As usual, I find it impossible to review a set of short stories in a meaningfully holistic way; I am only able to focus on these stories that struck me as highlights of the collection. The only common aspect that I can see is the evident mastery of Mr. Barnes' prose: the writing is wonderful.

From my choice of epigraph it may seem that the stories in The Fruit Cage are funny. Certainly not! In fact two of the stories - for me the best in the collection - are extremely and painfully sad. The beautifully written The Story of Mats Israelson is a tale of mutually unrequited love, stifled by rigid cultural norms in the late 19th century Sweden. The terse prose, devoid of any dramatics and histrionics, underscores the human tragedies of hopes dashed and lives wasted. The reader who likes the illusion of happy endings will be disappointed. Mr. Barnes writes about real life rather than about Disney's fake reality.

Hygiene is even more desperately sad. Wonderful prose emphasizes the tragedy of old age, of human insignificance and transience, of hidden tears shed by geezers when they are alone, of terminal loneliness and hopelessness. The "golden years" are exposed as what they really are - a sham: it's just waiting for merciful death to end the suffering.

The Real Journey, based on events from the life of Ivan Turgenev, is a meditation on love. A passage from that story struck me as one on the more bitterly cynical definitions of love:

"If love, as some assert, is a purely self-referring business, if the object of love is finally unimportant because what lovers value are their own emotions, then what more appropriate circularity than for a dramatist to fall in love with his own creation?"

Cynical or not, there certainly is a grain of truth in the observation that lovers may love their emotions more than the lovee.

I also remember that I quite liked Knowing French the story composed of a set of letters of a highly educated, intellectual woman in her 80s, residing in an old people home, written to a certain Julian Barnes. Yet the overall problem I have with this collection is that I liked the stories much more when I was reading them. Now, several weeks from the time I finished, I can't recall much about six or seven of them and I am hesitant to rate the collection highly even if the writing is outstanding and the sadness that the stories provide is true to life.

Three stars.

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