Letters from London

With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.

With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.

"[Julian Barnes] reinvents the wheel; I'm always fascinated to see what shape it's going to be next."—Jay McInerney

With the same brilliant style and idiosyncratic intelligence that have marked all his novels—and with a bold grasp of intricate political realities—Julian Barnes's ironic glance turns home. Letters from London takes in everything from Lloyd's of London's demise to Maggie's majesty to Salman Rushie's death sentence. Formidably articulate and outrageously funny, Letters from London is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.

Publishers Weekly

The essays in this collection of the celebrated British author of Flaubert's Parrot were originally published in The New Yorker and span the four years of Barnes's tenure as that magazine's London correspondent. From the debacle of Lloyd's of London's decline to the fatwa declared on Salman Rushdie, Barnes explores his topics with an innate curiosity and a merciless wit, using each event to explore the social and political landscape of modern London. If Letters from London has a shortcoming, it is one inherent in any such collection: lack of timeliness. With entries dating back to 1990, it is inevitable that portions of the book seem a bit stale. Some readers may be tempted to skip such missives as ``Vote Glenda!'' on actress Glenda Jackson's 1992 bid for a Parliamentary seat. But as Barnes notes in his preface, he is admirably ``wary of zeitgeist journalism and decade summarizing,'' and it is this refusal to proselytize or prognosticate that distinguishes Barnes's observations. On the 1994 ceremonial opening of the ``chunnel'' linking Britain and France, and the British anxiety over a possible resulting influx of rabid French animals, he notes, ``It was as if, lining up behind Mitterrand and the Queen as they cut the tricolor ribbons at Calais were packs of swivel-eyed dogs, fizzing foxes and slavering squirrels, all waiting to jump on the first boxcar to Folkestone and sink their teeth into some Kentish flesh.'' Probably of greatest interest to Barnes's many fans (and equally great numbers of Anglophiles), this collection is nonetheless a consistently pleasurable opportunity to watch a razor-sharp mind at work. (July)

In smart, rhythmic prose, Julian Barnes can deconstruct English-French relations, marriage, or simply the history of the world -- he can, and has, in a diverse and inventive body of work that includes Flaubert's Parrot, Metroland, and Letters from London.