{"id":658,"date":"2013-04-08T10:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T18:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=658"},"modified":"2013-04-05T06:53:19","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T14:53:19","slug":"658","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/08\/658\/","title":{"rendered":"England, England– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"England,<\/a>England, England<\/a> by Julian Barnes<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

England, England<\/em> is a book about an island created to capture the essence of England, ostensibly to attract tourists and make its founders a lot of money. This \u201cfake\u201d England, we are assured, is more \u201creal\u201d that the country it\u2019s based on, as it distills Englishness down to its recognizable parts and puts them all in the same, convenient place. England, we are told, is its history, artifacts, and iconography. This is pop-culture for those who thought Any Warhol wasn\u2019t being in the least ironic.<\/p>\n

A book like this, then, is itself about England, via its characters: a self made man and an almost-but-not-quite-bitterly cynical woman. The former is the visionary who builds England, England<\/em>, the latter his assistant who keeps his vision grounded in reality. Sir Jack Pitman, not content with having it all, decides he wants to be in charge of it all as well, and thanks to Miss Cochrane, he only earns that right after having been defeated by his own hubris.<\/p>\n

So then there\u2019s the fake England, and the stereotypical English, and that\u2019s all well and good. But a thing becomes calcified as soon as it gets a label, and that\u2019s what happened to England itself, thanks to the non-English. Anyone and everyone who\u2019s ever had this Englishness foisted on them has an idea of what England is, and they\u2019re all most certainly wrong. England isn\u2019t English anymore than China is merely Chinese. According to Barnes, Derrida was wrong.<\/p>\n

And while, I, personally, got bored reading this after a while, thanks to long passages of introspection about love and the meaning of life, I did like how the book\u2019s coda sums up what it means for a place to have a fabric and texture\u2014once the real England has its history, artifacts, and iconography drained from it, it ceases to be part of the world-context that defines it, and ironically, once again becomes utterly English.<\/p>\n

My apologies for prattling on like a sophomore struggling to write a book report. I desperately want to enjoy Julian Barnes\u2019 books. I thought A Sense of an Ending was excellent, and I found Flaubert\u2019s Parrot<\/em> quite challenging\u2014so my head is looking for ways to justify my having read England, England<\/em>. It got me thinking, I suppose, so kudos for that. I just wish it was shorter\u2014blame my American shallow attention span.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

England, England by Julian Barnes My rating: 3 of 5 stars England, England is a book about an island created to capture the essence of England, ostensibly to attract tourists and make its founders a lot of money. This \u201cfake\u201d England, we are assured, is more \u201creal\u201d that the country it\u2019s based on, as it … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “England, England– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s24y52-658","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}