A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

by Julian Barnes

Overview

A “playful, witty, and entertaining” book (The New York Times Book Review) that offers an exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven—from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending.

It's a hilariously revisionist account of Noah's ark, narrated by a passenger who doesn't appear in Genesis. It's a sneak preview of heaven. It encompasses the stories of a cruise ship hijacked by terrorists and of woodworms tried for blasphemy in sixteenth-century France. It explores the relationship of fact to fabulation and the antagonism between history and love. In short, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a grandly ambitious and inventive work of fiction, in the traditions of Joyce and Calvino, from the author of the widely acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679731375
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/27/1990
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	1st Vintage international edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.23(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1946

Place of Birth:

Leicester, England

Education:

Degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford, 1968

Table of Contents

Introduction; Text; Glossary; Activities

Editorial Reviews

Stunning … a flawless diamond.” —Chicago Sun-Times

"Playful, witty and entertaining." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read." —Salman Rushdie, Observer

"At his best, Barnes is a dazzler." —Los Angeles Times

“It’s a book to keep the reader on his toes.” —The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

Barnes is an accomplished equilibrist; a reader who appreciates being made to work for his sense of balance will find in A History of the World special pleasures, special perils.

NY Review of Books

The many stories here are given their...humor, by an undercurrent of gentle, self-reflective irony.

New York Times Books of the Century

Barnes is an accomplished equilibrist; a reader who appreciates being made to work for his sense of balance will find in A History of the World special pleasures, special perils.

New York Review of Books

Mr. Barnes's concerns throughout are abstract and philosophical, though his tone is unpretentious....Given the principle of repetition, of permutations and combinations, it is inevitable that some of Mr. Barnes's prose pieces are more successful than others....''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' demystifies its subjects and renders them almost ordinary: ''Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.'' In so doing it deconstructs, perhaps even mocks, its own ambition. If the reader does not come to the book with certain of the expectations of prose fiction - that ideas will be dramatized with such narrative momentum that forgets they are ''ideas,'' and that complete worlds will be evoked by way of prose, not merely discussed - this is a playful, witty and entertaining gathering of conjectures by a man to whom ideas are quite clearly crucial: a quintessential humanist, it would seem, of the pre-post-modernist species. -- New York Times

Joyce Carol Oates