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Just like Will Ferrell’s character in “Stranger Than Fiction,” you might find “yourself”—or your namesake, your avatar—spinning through a tale told by Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Ken Follett, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Alan Hollinghurst, Zadie Smith, Tracy Chevalier, Joanna Trollope, or another of the 17 authors participating in a fundraising event for the UK medical charity Freedom From Torture.

In this Literary Immortality Auction, participating authors have donated a character in a forthcoming work that will be named after auction winners.

Tracy Chevalier, author of the international bestseller The Girl with the Pearl Earring, said:

“I am holding open a place in my new novel for Mrs. (ideally a Mrs.) [your surname], a tough-talking landlady of a boarding house in 1850s Gold Rush-era San Francisco. The first thing she says to the hero is ‘No sick on my stairs. You vomit on my floors, you’re out.’ Is your name up to that?”

According the New York Times, Margaret Atwood is “offering the possibility of appearing either in the novel she is currently writing or in her retelling of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest,’ to be published as a Vintage Books series in 2016.”

Bestselling author Ian McEwan (Atonement) said:

“Forget the promises of the world’s religions. This auction offers the genuine opportunity of an afterlife. More importantly, bidding in the Freedom from Torture auction will help support a crucial and noble cause. The rehabilitation of torture survivors cannot be accomplished without expertise, compassion, time—and your money.”

Freedom from Torture notes on its site: “Seekers of a literary afterlife can place their bids online from 6pm this evening,” so get going.

Click here for your bid for immortality.

The real-time episode of the auction will take place at The Royal Institute of Great Britain in London on November 20th.

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A reflection on time, aging, memory, and remorse, The Sense of an Ending packs a giant sentimental (but not schmaltzy) punch. Beginning in an English boarding school (I am such a sucker for boarding school stories!), the book follows Tony Webster through school, college, relationships, marriage, work, and middle age. Tony is completely unaware of [...]

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What a wonderful little puzzle of a book is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. It reminded me a little bit of Lydia Davis’s book, The End of the Story. Both books are slim, both deal with relationships, and both play with the truth with the narrator rearranging it to suit her/ his preferences.

Barnes’s book is told by Tony Webster, a man in his late middle-age. When he was at school he had two good friends that eventually became three when Adrian joined the school. Adrian was a bright and philosophically minded boy while the other three were typical smart teenage boys. After graduation they went their various ways to different colleges but kept in touch through letters and the occasional meeting. Gradually the letters and the meetings became less and less frequent. During college Tony has a relationship with a woman named Veronica who then becomes his friend Adrian’s girlfriend after she and Tony break up. And then Tony learns that Adrian has committed suicide. All of this is pretty much forgotten and Tony goes on with his life until in his late middle-age he learns he is the beneficiary in Veronica’s mother’s will of 500£ and Adrian’s diary. Veronica is in possession of the diary and will not give it to him which leads Tony into all kinds of maneuvers to try and get the diary and piece together the puzzle of Adrian’s life.

We are warned throughout the book by Tony himself that his story is not reliable. On the very first page of the book he says:

what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed

And towards the end of the book:

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.

As Tony tries to puzzle out Adrian’s life and his role in it, Veronica keeps telling him he is wrong and asserting that he just doesn’t “get it.” And it is true, Tony doesn’t get it. Even in his middle-age, or perhaps because he is in middle-age and life has not turned out to be extraordinary, he finds himself in the grip of a boyhood fear:

that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.

And so Tony spins his tales about Adrian and why he might have killed himself and how it might have been – probably was – his fault because of a cruel letter he wrote Adrian after he let Tony know he was seeing Veronica. He comes up with various reasons why Veronica’s mother left him money in her will and, makes up various stories about what kind of relationship Veronica and Adrian had and who the mentally disabled man Veronica visits regularly really is.

Because we only know what Tony tells us, we don’t know what parts of the story are true tellings of events and which ones are edited in some way. We don’t know anything more about Adrian or Veronica than Tony does. No doubt there are kernels of truth in what he says and some things might be completely true, but we can’t know what they are.

As I am writing this I find myself wondering why Tony, who comes off as self-centered and completely clueless, didn’t inspire any kind of anger or dislike in me. To be sure, he made me exasperated, but I never once hated him. Perhaps it is because he is honest about how memory and time work together to change the past, how

when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

One wants to be the hero of one’s own life and we create our story accordingly. At the same

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Nielsen BookScan sales data tracking team has released a report studying the effects of the Booker bump in the UK. Novelist Julian Barnes saw a 473 percent increase in sales the week after he won the prize for The Sense of an Ending–jumping from 2,535 copies to 14,534 copies.

Here’s more from the release: “Looking at the sales of the entire longlist the impact following the announcement of the shortlist in week 36 is clear – combined sales of all titles jumped from 9,285 the week preceding the announcement to 21,499 the following week, an increase of 132%. The announcement of the winner has a similarly positive effect on sales. Sales of all longlist titles grew from 17,829 the week before the award announcement to 35,781 the following week, representing an increase of 101%.”

Oddly enough, sales for the entire Booker longlist saw sales rose week after the announcement, proving that winning isn’t everything. Follow this link to read free samples of all the books on the longlist.

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The pages of my copy of The Sense of an Ending, the gripping new novel by Julian Barnes, had not been cut.  I had to slip my finger in between each one as I lay reading at the close of a snowy weekend.  This pleased me greatly.  The feel of the paper against my skin.  The sound of a story unfolding.

I am always confused by critics of the short novel—by those who refer to the shorter novel as something lesser than.  I remember a conversation with Alice McDermott (Charming Billy, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes), in which she spoke of writing the kind of stories she herself liked to read—shorter and more compact novels, densified worlds, intimate places, landscapes of measured, studied sentences.

Yes.  Me, too.  The short novel may or may not be about plot, may or may not be commercial (whatever that is).  But when it is handled with the intelligence of an Alice McDermott or a Julian Barnes or a Julia Otsuka or a Kate Chopin or a Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter) or a Chloe Aridjis or a Kathryn Davis or an Anne Enright, for example, I personally think there is nothing finer.  Brilliant short novels have the impact of poems.  They are, most often, shorter precisely because the writer has taken the time to banish the extraneous and diluting, the self-aggrandizing or -indulgent.  There is a story to be told.  There is its core and there are those things essential to its core.  The brilliant writer of shorter novels holds that line, maintains his or her focus, goes blessedly deep, does not skip from this event to that—indeed, does not concentrate on "events" at all.  Character and meaning, language and symbol, the ripe stuff.  Brilliant short novels concentrate, primarily, on that.

I know many who would disagree, and that's the beauty of this literary community—the possibility of conversation, dissension.  (And of course I have many beloved books on my shelf that run past 300 pages, though I will admit that I don't have many favorites that run past 400.)  But I hope no one will disagree with me about this new book by Julian Barnes.  From the first sentence to the last I hardly exhaled.  The entire book was of such a piece that I felt certain that Barnes himself was sitting here, telling this story about a man, Tony Webster, resorting the memories of his youth.  Webster had thought himself a regular-enough student with a regular-enough first love affair.  He had gotten on with his life and lived it reasonably well.  But when he learns that he has been remembered in a will in an odd and oddly disturbing way, and when, over time, he is presented with evidence of who he really was as a young man, he is staggered in the way that we all are staggered when presented with contradictions of our own fine self-opinion.

Barnes, whose Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is a fine and teachable book of nonfiction, puts his philosophical genius on full display in this novel, his great capacity for going deep.  One example of many:

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhat between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.  All of it.  I had lost the friends of my youth.  I had lost the love of my wife.  I had abandoned t

5 Comments on On Short Novels, The Sense of an Ending, and Julian Barnes, last added: 11/3/2011

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Serena said, on 10/31/2011 5:04:00 AM

I am with you. I want a powerful economy of words, though I do love a Stephen King tome now and again...Like reading IT for the second time since I was 10...what a difference.

Melissa Sarno said, on 10/31/2011 6:35:00 AM

I like short novels. I like stories that get in and out of the heart the matter quickly and with tight language. I also wish that films were no longer than 90 minutes. I don't know what that has to do with anything. Just felt like sharing.

Wendy said, on 10/31/2011 6:53:00 AM

Oh, I agree, Beth - I think some of the best books are the shorter ones. Peirene Press puts out some terrific books (mostly in translation) which are less than 200 pages...two which I really loved were Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius...which spanned only 105 pages, and Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal which was only 126 pages. And Tinkers by Paul Harding (which won the Pulitzer last year) was amazing...and very short. Of course, I also include YOUR books in some of the best short fiction out there :)

Sarah Allen said, on 10/31/2011 9:18:00 AM

This made me feel better, in a way, because my first manuscript is looking like its gonna end up at around 85,000, which is totally fine, but still on the short side. I like the short ones too. I think all lengths have their place, and it matters more to me how well a piece is written then how long it is. That's the point, isn't it?

Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)

Lilian Nattel said, on 11/3/2011 2:40:00 PM

I love short novels. I'm putting this on my list.

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I try not to let things get beyond me in this life, but the last few weeks were dense with work and pressure.  I paid no attention to clocks, working as much as I could to complete a corporate project that has meant a lot to me.  I wrote a few talks, prepared a workshop session, took care of some magazine work for clients.

In between was a certain book stock crisis,  Google's announcement that my account (translation: my blog) had been violated and was no longer accessible, a lost camera, and lost glasses.  Piles grew tidal around me (which is not a happy thing for a neat freak).  The refrigerator emptied (save for a bottle of milk and a quarter stick of butter, perhaps a square of cheese, jello made in a moment of hunger).  Bills sat unpaid. I wore clothes from another era because the right-era clothes were, shall we say, indisposed.  I answered emails many days late, with what, I am sure, was an humiliating array of mistakes.  There should be a book:  Beth's Email Mistakes.  The sequel:  Beth's Blog Mistakes. 

And books—at least a dozen books—came into the house and were placed in a growing teeter on the living room table.  Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise.  A.S. King's Everybody Sees the Ants.  Peter Spiegelman's Thick as Thieves.  Philip Schultz's My Dyslexia.  Benjamin Markovits's Childish Loves.  Marc Schuster's The Grievers.  Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain.  Anna Lefler's Chicktionary.  More.

Can I just tell you how much I have missed reading books?

Today, on this freakishly autumnal snowy day, I will join my family of dance friends in the city to celebrate the joint 70 year old birthdays of a still-swinging couple.  We'll stay overnight and brunch the next day with beloved friends in a white city, then head to a museum.  I'm going to take one of these books with me.  And then, come Sunday night, leaning into Monday morning, I am going to lie on a couch and do nothing but turn pages and return to the reader I am.

Thank you for putting up with all the recent launch news of You Are My Only.  I'm eager to once again spend my time here talking about the books of others.  That is why I created this space.  That is what makes me happy.

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Alan Hollinghurst, whose novel The Stranger's Child was a surprise omission from the Man Booker shortlist this year, has been shortlisted for an award at the Galaxy National Book Awards 2011, with works by Ian Rankin and Keith Richards also in the running within the 11 categories.

Hollinghurst is up against Man Booker-shortlisted Julian Barnes and Carol Birch, as well as poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Anthony Horowitz, and Andrea Levy in the Waterstone's UK Author of the Year category.

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“For the young — and especially the young writer — memory and imagination are quite distinct, and of different categories. In a typical first novel, there will be moments of unmediated memory (typically, that unforgettable sexual embarrassment), moments where the imagination has worked to transfigure a memory (perhaps that chapter in which the protagonist learns some lesson about life, whereas in the original the novelist-to-be failed to learn anything), and moments when, to the writer’s astonishment, the imagination catches a sudden upcurrent and the weightless, wonderful soaring that is the basis for the fiction delightingly happens.

These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer’s world than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth.”

– Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
 

Previously:

On the melding of fact and invention in fiction

On the melding of fact and invention in fiction II

Welty v. Maxwell on autobiography in fiction

On creating the feeling you want the reader to feel

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Author Julian Barnes, shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending, has said it is "national self-mutilation" to damage the public library service.

Barnes said: "Like most writers of my generation, I grew up with the weekly exchange of library books, and took their pleasures and treasures for granted. The cost of our free public library system is small, its value immense. To diminish and dismantle it would be a kind of national self-mutilation, as stupid as it would be wicked."

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Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending (Cape) is comfortably the bestselling longlistee of one of the most popular Man Booker longlists since records began.

Barnes' concise novel has sold 9,700 copies at UK booksellers since the longlist was announced, almost double the number of the next most popular longlistee, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (Picador).

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William Hill has installed former Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst as the 5/1 favourite to clinch the prize for the second time for his novel The Stranger's Child (Picador).

The longlist was announced this afternoon and the bookmaker has moved quickly to lay out its odds. Julian Barnes is 6/1 second favourite for The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape).

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I am frustrated by a life that leaves me far too little time to read. Frustrated. Determined, though, I have carried Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened of with me from client to client. I've sat with it in the dentist chair. I've read it while on hold for conference calls. I've stood there stirring a pot, the book in hand. You'd have thought I'd have finished it by now.

And why am I fighting so hard to find the time to read a book that is, indeed, a meditation on death and dying—on how people die (which is of course bound up with how people live) and on what people think along the way? Fear or acceptance? Defeat or glory? Ungainly irony or something worse? Well, to begin with, this is Julian Barnes, and he's riotously talented—stewing memoir and wit and philosophy and literary biography and fine vocabulary into a chapterless not-outright diatribe, not-clinical exploration, perhaps controlled rant is the term, that is nothing if not (and you know this matters to me) brilliantly choreographed. He's assaulting you. He's appeasing you. He's on your side and then he's all caught up with himself, as if he may be the only one facing ultimate extinction. No such luck, Barnes.

If I were reading that paragraph above I'd think, about myself, Someone should tell Kephart that it's Christmas, the season of birth and winter wonder. That right about now is when a poor fool like her should be curling up with some light holiday fare. But the thing is this: It's a privilege to watch a mind like Barnes' work over, around, and through the inexplicableness of death. It's exhilarating, as a matter of fact. Intelligence is never overrated.

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