The Only Story: A novel
Staff Reviews
The dust cover of Julian Barnes’s latest novel, The Only Story, hints at the subject matter: scattered around the title, in a smaller and different font, are the words “Love is.”
The book opens with a powerful question:
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? This is, I think, finally, the only real question.
Paul, the narrator, quickly points out that it is not a real question, because we don’t have the choice. He continues:
Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.
It’s the sixties. Paul, nineteen, is home for the summer from university. He is quickly bored with the sedate life of his hometown, a South London suburb known affectionately as The Village by all its residents. His mother encourages him to join the local tennis club. There, he quickly forms a friendship with the much older Susan Macleod. At first, their relationship is platonic. Susan is married, after all, and has two daughters, both older than Paul. But, as happens, their friendship quickly develops into a passionate love affair.
In the first section of the book, Paul tells his story of falling in love with Susan. Their affair upsets the conservative community in which they live. Paul and Susan are expelled from the tennis club, and run away to the city to set up a home together. In the second section, Paul reflects on his time with Susan, and on what he has learned about love, and what he is still discovering about life. In the final section, Paul distances himself as his relationship with Susan breaks down. There are flashbacks, new memories revealed, and fresh interpretations of what happened to their love and their lives. And why.
Barnes’s writing is hypnotic. The Only Story gently bubbles along, touching on this and that, but, in the process, revealing great insight into how a love can fill our lives and still leave us with questions.
Julian Barnes received the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. He has written twenty-one novels and his work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
The Only Story, a love story that captivated me from the very first page, tells of Paul, a young man who at the age of 19 falls in love with a woman almost 30 years his senior. Now in the sunset of his life, Paul looks back with tenderness on the life they had together, how everything fell apart, and how his life evolved as a result. I loved the author's reflections on love and found myself savoring his words, not wanting the book to end. A beautiful story from a superb writer.
Description
One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times
Most of us have only one story to tell . . . only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.
One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers.
Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how—gradually, relentlessly—everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory—and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another. Poignant, vivid and profound, The Only Story is a searing novel of memory, devotion, and how first love fixes a life forever.
Praise for The Only Story: A novel
“[The Only Story] combines complicated relationships with a limpid, unfussy style, brilliant wit with sorrow, an obsession with love and its shelf life, and a commitment not only to great storytelling but also to exploring how stories are told.”—Porter Shreve, San Francisco Chronicle
“Written with crystalline retrospection. . . . The youthful missteps that give shape to life is Julian Barnes’s great theme.”—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“Barnes’ prose is quietly elegant and adroit. . . . [The Only Story is] a thought-provoking meditation on memory and the seemingly endless complexities of love.”—Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Haunting. . . . A brilliant, rueful look at love—what we do for it, how we experience it and what makes it die.”—People
“A bleak and brilliant novel about memory and what ultimately matters most.”—Financial Times
“Vivid. . . . Mr. Barnes is a master of the novel that unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet interrogates itself as it is told.”—The Economist
“Much of the pleasure in The Only Story comes from the wit and verbal precision that Barnes allows his narrator. . . . Barnes’s switch from voice to voice is at once understated and dazzling.”—Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books
“Genius. . . . [The Only Story] drives a truck through romantic love’s ideal while unsentimentally affirming its power.”—Emily Donaldson, Maclean’s
“Exquisite and compassionate.”—Malcom Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Tender and touching. . . . The Only Story is a gracefully told and . . . honest rendering of the arc of a great passion.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Book Reporter
“Heartbreaking. . . . It’s a cliché to say the love is inexplicable, but the strength of The Only Story is Barnes’s willingness to explore the nature of that inexplicability, how it makes for honeymoons and tragedies alike.”—Mark Athitakis, Newsday
“Beautifully done.”—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Perplexing, profoundly enjoyable. . . . Lyrical and lasting.”—Thomas J. Millay, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Barnes’s novels, essays, and stories are among the most innovative works of literature of the past forty years [and The Only Story] is one of the best books of his career.”—Michael Magras, The Houston Chronicle
“The prose master paints a lovely, elegiac portrait of a young man’s disruptive love affair . . . forgoing the easy literary clichés of May-December romance for something much sadder, deeper, and more resonant.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Mesmeric. . . . The reader drifts along on Barnes’ gorgeous, undulating prose. Focusing on love, memory, nostalgia, and how contemporary Britain came to be, Barnes’ latest will enrapture readers from beginning to end.”—Alexander Moran, Booklist (starred)
“[This] deeply touching novel is a study of heartbreak. . . . By revisiting the flow and ebb of one man’s passion, Barnes eloquently illuminates the connection between an old man and his younger self.”—Publishers Weekly
“Consistently surprising. . . . It shows a novelist at the height of his powers [and is] a book that quietly sinks its hooks into the reader and refuses to let go.”—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times (UK)
“Often playful and always elegant, [it] propels us forward, first into joy, and then into despair, and there is no escape from the central story as it becomes bleaker. This intense, taut, sad and often beautiful tale may well be Barnes's best.”—Lara Feigel, The Spectator
“One to savour. . . . Emotionally acute, profoundly beautiful, as droll as it is deep.”— Hephzibah Anderson, The Mail on Sunday
“Gentle, bleak, and brilliant . . . His themes are the big, unfashionable universals—ageing, memory, above all love.”—Jon Day, The Financial Times
