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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
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Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review
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Dense & Difficult But Rewarding
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Publisher's summary
A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world”, how does one contend with it? An atheist at 20 and an agnostic at 60, Barnes looks into the various arguments for, against, and with God, and at his own bloodline, which has become, following his parents’ death, another realm of mystery.
Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.
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Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost, and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate.
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Fascinating plot, superb performance, psychological depth
- By Doctor George on 12-05-16
By: Javier Marias, and others
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
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I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Uncle Vanya
- By: Anton Chekhov, David Mamet, Vlada Chernornirdik
- Narrated by: Josh Radnor, Stacy Keach, Martin Jarvis, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 8 mins
- Original Recording
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Adapted by David Mamet from a translation by Vlada Chernornirdik. In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth. But Vanya is enchanted by the professor’s new wife, while Sonya has fallen for the town’s melancholy doctor. Includes a conversation with Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life.
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Poor American soap
- By tyrone on 10-22-17
By: Anton Chekhov, and others
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In the Light of What We Know
- By: Zia Haider Rahman
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
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dreadful
- By sam on 06-05-15
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
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A nice petite primer on Proust
- By Darwin8u on 02-20-13
By: Alain de Botton
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Before She Met Me
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Not his best effort
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Not his best effort
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In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody.
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Julian Barnes pens a kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar’s search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert and the obsession of this detective, whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.
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Strange and quirky story
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'You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...' Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart'. This book confirms that opinion.
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Every love story is a potential grief story.
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Staring at the Sun
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Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes’ wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes - winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending - follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts his audience with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the 21st century (when the absolute truth can be universally accessed).
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The Forgotten Waltz
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Irish novelist Anne Enright won the coveted Man Booker Prize for her eloquent novel The Gathering. In The Forgotten Waltz, Enright crafts a stunning tale about a Dublin woman’s affair and its heartrending consequences. Gina Moynihan is already married when she meets Seán Vallely. But longing and desire soon overtake them - and their lives begin to crumble shortly after.
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Perfect Marriage of Novelist and Reader
- By Elizabeth on 01-02-17
By: Anne Enright
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Elizabeth Finch
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We'd like to introduce you to Elizabeth Finch. We invite you to take her course in Culture and Civilisation. Her ideas are not to everyone's taste. But she will change the way you see the world. Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration—always rigorous, always thoughtful. With careful empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centers of seriousness. As a former student unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years.
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Another masterpiece!
- By Davis Perkins on 08-23-22
By: Julian Barnes
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Out Stealing Horses
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- Unabridged
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Multiple award-winning author Per Petterson delivers an eloquent, meditative novel. 67-year-old Trond Sander lives secluded in a far corner of Norway. Casting his mind back to 1948, he recalls a horse-stealing prank with his best friend that turned tragic and changed his life forever.
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Quiet and powerful
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Talking It Over
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Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.
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The Narrative Gimmick Works
- By Alan on 11-22-11
By: Julian Barnes
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The Assassins' Gate
- America in Iraq
- By: George Packer
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The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point?
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Highly Recommended
- By Drapeau on 02-01-07
By: George Packer
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The Lemon Table
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- Unabridged
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In a collection that is wise, funny, clever and moving, Julian Barnes has created characters whose passions and longings are made all the stronger by the knowledge that, for them, time is almost at an end.
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A Real Downer
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By: Julian Barnes
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Through the Window
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In these 17 essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq
By: Julian Barnes
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Arthur & George
- By: Julian Barnes
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- Unabridged
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This novel is based on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life fight for justice. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer, George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age; George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
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Never Ignites
- By John on 11-03-23
By: Julian Barnes
What listeners say about Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mitzi
- 09-01-23
Brilliant
I love Julian Barnes, and I'd buy anything Simon Vance reads. So this Audible title was a no-brainer.
This is a non-fiction title: a personal disquisition on the existence of God, the fear of or confidence in an afterlife, and discordant family relations.
I loved listening to it and will do it again in a year or so... to refresh my memory, to absorb more than what I probably caught at first-listen.
Highly recommended.
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- jon orourke
- 11-06-23
Excellent
Excellent meditation on mortality. I highly recommend it for all readers. It is interesting, thought-provoking and humorous in parts.
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- Akos Szilvasi
- 09-21-23
For everyone over sixty 😉
I am about the same age as JB when he wrote this book and I also started contemplating mortality.
The narration couldn’t have been better.
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