A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Softcover

Barnes, Julian

3.88

15,377 ratings by Goodreads

9780394221793: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394221796 ISBN 13: 9780394221793

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 1990

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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 10� 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.

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Review:

Fact, fiction, myth, opinion - Barnes's series of disjointed narratives about Noah's Ark, terrorist hijackers, shipwreck, woodworm, love and more is all of these. It leaves you torn between thinking that its sum is greater than its parts and that, then again, some of the parts are pretty damned good too, especially the half-chapter titled "Parenthesis". Somehow this pithy new Alex Jennings recording perfectly succeeds in combining the various "history is bunk" and "love conquers all" strands. --Sue Arnold, The Guardian

Book Description:

‘Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know’ Salman Rushdie, Observer

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