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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife–their fates become inextricably connected.
In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain to create his most intriguing and engrossing novel yet.
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| | Product Details | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 84 reviews |
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 Elemental, mi querido George.- Aug 16, 2008
Mientras esperamos que llegue a tierras americanas la última novela de Julian Barnes llamada "Nothing to be Frightened of", una excelente manera de comenzar la vigilia es disfrutando de "Arthur & George" (2005) del mismo autor, a quien tuvimos la suerte de tener por nuestras tierras en el verano recién pasado dando claras muestras no sólo de su calidad como escritor, sino sobre todo de su buen humor.
La edición leída es la que nos entrega Anagrama en su Panorama Narrativas con sus habituales aspectos destacados: el clásico y elegante amarillo pálido continente de la obra y la agradable letra y compaginación de los textos y, como contrapartida, su principal y desagradable punto en contra: la excesiva españolización de sus traducciones.
Entrando ya en la historia, nos encontramos a comienzos del siglo veinte en la localidad de Great Wyrley, pueblo rural cercano a la ciudad de Birmingham, Inglaterra. Ahí vive la familia Edalji; Shapurji es el padre y Charlotte, la madre. Él es un parsi que se convirtió al anglicanismo y no sólo se quedó en ello, sino que llegó a ser párroco del pueblo. Ella es escocesa, de Edimburgo. El primogénito es George, un mestizo de color que se siente profundamente inglés y tiene tantos problemas de timidez como de vista. Será abogado. De él trata principalmente la historia. También se hablará de Horace y Maud, hermano y hermana respectivamente.
"Irlandés de ascendencia, escocés de nacimiento, educado en la fe de Roma por jesuitas holandeses, Arthur se convirtió en inglés". Él será médico de la Universidad de Edimburgo; se especializará en oftalmología y se dedicará a escribir. De Arthur (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) también trata principalmente este libro.
"Arthur & George" es una novela que podríamos llamar jurídica; hay cartas anónimas amenazantes y obscenas por un lado y animales mutilados por el otro; el pueblo se conmueve y alguien tiene que pagar por ello. Así, es gracias a la (in)justicia de una acusación, un juicio y una condena que los destinos de personas tan disímiles convergen. Una víctima y un héroe que tratarán de reestablecer el imperio de lo justo, una justicia que no se hace explícita sólo en un juicio: eso sería lo obvio, lo fácil. El trabajo de Barnes es mostrar la justicia de manera más sutil, desde la forma narrativa, contraponiendo los personajes -una bilateralidad de la audiencia ejemplar diríamos quienes estamos familiarizados al Derecho y las leyes- hasta el cuestionamiento sobre preguntas fundamentales tales como raza y racismo e (in)necesidad de la religión y de una vida más allá de la muerte, planteando respuestas antagónicas para cada una de ellas.
La contraposición, tanto en la forma como en lo sustantivo, se transforma en un antecedente estructural y dinámico de una lectura trepidante. En Arthur todo es explícito, desde el deporte hasta su vida afectiva y, en cambio, en George y su entorno se ve claramente la "Teoría del Iceberg" que Vila-Matas nos enseña en "París no se acaba nunca" hablando de su añorado Hemingway: lo importante, la gran masa de hielo, es lo que no se ve, lo que está bajo el agua. Lo no dicho de George es tanto o más que lo dicho de Arthur, y he ahí uno de los mayores atractivos de esta novela: su capacidad de interpelar al lector constantemente. Más de quinientas páginas para dejar más preguntas que respuestas; una delicia.
Cerrando esta reseña, sólo un par de cosas a modo de comentario. En primer lugar, decir que "Arthur & George" no es sólo una novela, sino también un trabajo de investigación sumamente profesional. La ficción se enlaza con los hechos históricos y ello entrega un ambiente de veracidad a la historia que asombra y además entretiene. En segundo lugar y final, cuesta encontrarle puntos bajos a esta novela que merezcan ser mencionados aquí; espero que este hecho -la regularidad en un alto nivel de esta novela- sea un aliciente para quienes se entusiasmen con la lectura; creo firmemente que será una gran inversión.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 an eloquent turn of phrase and a gripping story Jul 25, 2008
This was my first Julian Barnes book so I didn't know what to expect. What I did not expect was to be continually stopped by a sentence, so well phrased, that I had to go back and read it over and over, to savor the pleasure of how Barnes strings words together. Here's an example, from the beginning, the fourth sentence in, describing a curious child: "He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy". Who but Barnes would ever consider linking "tourism" with "instinctive" and all of it as describes an "infant"? Yet it is an absolutely perfect description of childhood discovery.
And then there is the story, which does not disappoint. It starts out slow and informative, picks up speed and becomes more interesting, lags a little in the middle, as characters are filled out, and then it really takes hold, difficult to put down until all is revealed.
And the brilliant approach. I have read about how creatively Barnes plays with the form of the novel - writing novel novels! I can't compare to his previous books, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one, with one chapter named "George" the next "Arthur" eventually followed by "Arthur and George" or "George and Arthur" and an occasional "Campbell" or "Anson". No chapter numbers, just a book in four parts, also cleverly named: "Beginnings" "Beginning With an Ending" then "Ending With a Beginning" and finally, "Endings". Just wonderful througout.
I love this book, and I am very much looking forward to reading it again one day.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Flat-footed Fictionalization Jul 05, 2008
The strange case of George Edalji, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's quest to prove him innocent after years of public humiliation and imprisonment, is an interesting one -- I just don't think Julian Barnes is the right author to tell it. His approach is an intellectual and chilly one, when I think a little more emotion and heart would have done more to draw the reader -- at least this one -- in. And Barnes is inconsistent in his storytelling. After having Conan Doyle agonize at length over how his children will react to his potential remarriage, Barnes never tells us; the wedding and wedding party are presented in laborious detail (including a description of the bride's gown that seems to have been copied verbatim from accounts of the time), and yet not a word from the kids. Oh, well, I guess it wasn't important after all.
I'm a fan of mysteries, so I found the section in which Conan Doyle plays Sherlock Holmes quite rewarding. But the book is ultimately done in by Barne's pedantic, scholarly approach. He's obviously done his research, but does he have to include every piece of it? (An insignificant cricket match is described in an excruciatingly detailed play by play; what's the point, and why should we care?) And when Barnes tries for poignancy and profundity (particularly in the endless epilogue), the results are generally perfunctory and flat. Additionally, the headings that Barnes has given to the book's individual parts strive for meaning, but are just mystifying and pretentious.
All in all, I think a non-fiction approach (from a Sebastian Junger, perhaps) would have been a much more effective way of telling this fascinating story.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
just good enough to read to the end Jun 01, 2008
Well-written, but slow moving; knowing it's based on a true story adds to the interest, and I was grateful for the note at the end that tied up all the endings. The author is no doubt a good writer, but gotta wonder if this could have been quite a bit shorter, and still a good story.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Elegant Writing, Bold Structure, Deliberately Diffuse May 27, 2008
Julian Barnes is an elegant writer with an interesting mind. From paragraph to paragraph, these qualities are fully apparent in ARTHUR & GEORGE, especially as Barnes examines the emotional issues his characters face. Here is George Edalji at 54, roughly 25 years after he was wrongly incarcerated and a cause célèbre.
"...But most nowadays had never heard of him. At times he resented this, and felt ashamed of his resentment. He knew that in all his years of suffering, there had been nothing he longed for more than anonymity. The Chaplain at Lewes had asked him what he missed, and he had replied that he missed his life. Now, he had it back; he had work, enough money, people to nod to in the street. But he was occasionally nudged by the thought that he deserved more; that his ordeal should have led to more reward. From villain to martyr to nobody very much--was not this unfair...."
Barnes has divided A&G into four sections. These are BEGINNINGS, BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING, ENDING WITH A BEGINNING, AND ENDINGS. Within each, Barnes has tucked appropriate narrative material.
For example, BEGINNINGS, shows the young Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji establishing themselves in life. It also shows the start of an ugly and threatening letter writing campaign against the Edalji family and the first glimmer of hostility toward the Edaljis from the police.
Meanwhile, BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING, provides, among other things, a disturbing picture of the police, who begin an investigation of animal mutiliations with the ending--that is George Edalji is the perp--and then create evidence to fit their theory. What I'm saying, in other words, is that Barnes has created a narrative with content that fits, on reflection, into four buckets.
This description makes A&G sound like a tightly organized book. But for this reader, the structure suggested by these section titles doesn't really capture the reading experience. Indeed, this novel actually seems to progress from a slightly stiff examination of young male lives in an imperfect Victorian world, to a long police procedural and courtroom drama, to a biographical tale of a manic gentleman as he fights injustice and his tendency to depression, to a sad summing-up. For this reader, A&G, while always elegant and interesting, reads like a hodgepodge with Barnes unwilling to settle on a single narrative perspective to tell his story.
Here, I say "unwilling" because this hodgepodge-like quality struck me as a deliberate narrative strategy. Proof for me exists in Barnes's frequent mention of the disappearance and then unsolved murder of Dr. Sophie Hickman, a crime concurrent with the mutilations. It's just a small story point. But through this loose end, Barnes seems to be saying that facts in life don't really fit into an easy narrative structure.
So, in the final analysis, I'd call this a bold novel, organized in concept but deliberately messy in the execution. In a way, A&G is the opposite of an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, where every messy fact narrows the case and leads the ingenious Holmes to a neat and inevitable solution.
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