Le dernier des trois textes qui porte sur le deuil et le chagrin vaut son pesant d'or.
J'ai appris aussi beaucoup sur la vie émancipée de Sarah Bernhardt (ésecon texte) ( )

Barnes mette a nudo il dolore per la perdita della sua compagna, preparando la strada all'introspezione con un racconto di un amore che non ha raggiunto la felicità. Sfruttare questo racconto e le metafore che porta con sé significa per Barnes mostrare che l'amore è il rischio più grande che corriamo nella nostra vita e che vale sempre la pena di correrlo. ( )

Levels of Life is a series of three connected essays that Julian Barnes wrote in memory of his wife. He first looks at life above the ground, writing about the dawn of the aeronautical age and its impact on human technology and philosophy. Then he segues to life on the ground and discusses love and its potential disappointments, using an Englishman’s courtship of Sarah Bernhardt as his exemplar. Finally he moves to the real point of this book: life below the ground, what happens after the death of a loved one. While the first half of this book is interesting and chatty, it does not prepare you for the second, where the author changes gear. Barnes writes a compelling and moving treatise on grief, as he experienced it. It is full of wisdom and deep feeling. Very much worth reading. ( )

As a fairly recent widow, I think that this book captures what grief is and how it feels better than anything else I have read. If you are looking for a way out of grief, or for a way to make it less painful, there is little comfort here. Barnes is an atheist who does not belief in an afterlife, so that escape route is closed off. Nor does he understate the solitariness of grief, the loneliness, and the impossibility of making sense of loss. But he does say what grief is like, and that is something to hold on to -- recognizing that one is not alone. I skimmed through the other essays, I am ashamed to say, being rather narrowly focussed these days. ( )

The death of a loved one is the kind of pain everyone can understand and no one can explain to someone else. This peculiarity of grief is examined in Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life (2013). His slim, tightly woven book discusses the rise of ballooning, the complicated charm of Sarah Bernhardt, and the pitfalls of aerial photography in fin de siècle France and England as a means of exploring his grief over the death of his wife. Grief is like that: diverse topics that initially serve as distractions can bring us back to our own narrative; we seek to find, or impose, meaning at a time when life seems meaningless. Alternating between detached, wry commentary on the lives of others and an unsparing self-reflection, in his elegant and erudite style Barnes holds a mirror up to how we process loss.

Barnes writes: “Every love story is a potential grief story.” Ruminations about loss are, by nature, meditations on love. After a 30-year marriage, his beloved wife’s sudden death leaves him feeling angry and adrift, but most of all, diminished: “what was taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. “

The book is strongest when it fails to move the reader with a description of loss that doesn’t resonate, or with an assertion that doesn’t ring true. Amid moments of fulsome agreement (yes, that’s how it feels!), we then acknowledge our own, different experience of mourning, confirming Barnes’ observation that grief is at once both universal and singular. ( )