Levels of Life (Barnes) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Searching, angry, plangent and beautiful. . . . Only a writer of Barnes's stature could sublimate personal pain into something artistically exquisite.
Malcolm Forbes - Minneapolis Star Tribune
 

A tour-de-force masterwork. . . a stunningly intricate book that combines history, fiction and memoir in a hybrid form you're unlikely to forget.
Doug Childers - Richmond Times-Dispatch

 
Both a supremely crafted artefact and a desolating guidebook to the land of loss.
John Carey - Sunday (London) Times


Spare and beautiful...a book of rare intimacy and honesty about love and grief.  To read it is a privilege.  To have written it is astonishing.
Ruth Scurr - (London) Times


This complex, precise and beautiful book hits you in the solar plexus and leaves you gasping for air.... It's an unrestrained, affecting piece of writing, raw and honest and more truthful for its dignity and artistry, every word resonant with its particular pitch. It defies objectivity. Anyone who has loved and suffered loss, or just suffered, should read this book, and re-read it, and re-read it.
Martin Fletcher - Independent


As the slim volume progresses, something not quite central to your vision builds, so that by the end you are blindsided by a quiet devastation. . . . Levels of Life would seem to pull off the impossible: to recreate, on the page, what it is like to be alive in the world.
Emma Brockes - Guardian


A luminous meditation on love and grief.
Jane Shlling - Telegraph


A precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid of non-fiction, 'fabulation,' and straightforward reminiscence and contemplation.
Joyce Carol Oates - Times Literary Supplement
 

A remarkable narrative that is as raw in its emotion as it is characteristically elegant in its execution.
Eileen Battersby - Irish Times


A book whose slimness belies its throbbing emotional power.
Leyla Sanai - Independent


At times unbearably sad, but it is also exquisite: a paean of love, and on love, and a book unexpectedly full of life.... In time [this] may come to be viewed as the hardest test and finest vindication of [Barnes's] literary powers.
Rosemary Goring - Herald (Scotland)


[A] delicately oblique, emotionally tricky geography of grief, which [Barnes] has constructed from his experience since the sudden death in 2008 of his beloved wife of 30 years, literary agent Pat Kavanagh.... The shocking death of Barnes’s wife left him feeling flattened and suicidal. In his grieving turmoil, he questions assumptions about death and mourning, loss and memory, and he grapples eloquently with the ultimate moral conundrum: how to live?
Publishers Weekly


Not a conventional memoir—What did you expect from the multi-award-winning author of The Sense of an Ending?—this book aims to "put together two things that have not been put together before, and the world is changed." Barnes talks about ballooning and Sarah Bernhardt, then reflects on his own life to convey an experience of heartrending loss.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A book about the death of a spouse that is unlike any other—book or spouse—and thus illuminates the singularity as well as the commonality of grieving. Having provocatively addressed the matter of mortality (Nothing To Be Frightened Of, 2008), the award-winning British novelist brings a different perspective to the death of his wife. There is actually little about his long marriage to literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who was successful, respected and private. "Grief, like death, is banal and unique," he writes, with the sort of matter-of-fact precision that gives this book its power. In the two early sections, on ballooning, photography and love, Barnes employs an almost mannered, incantatory tone that seems more like a repression of emotion than an expression of it, making readers wonder how these meditations on perspective might ultimately cohere. "You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not," he writes about a doomed love affair between a famous actress and balloon adventurer. "They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves." Just as it took five years for Barnes to address his wife's death in print, it takes two sections of establishing tone and perspective before he writes of his mourning directly, though of course, he has been writing about it from the start of the book. "I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely," he writes. Ultimately, he finds some resonance in opera, which had never interested him before, as he discovers that "song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word--both higher and deeper." The perspectives of height and depth tie the first two sections to the third, where love and death can't ever be resolved but rather, somehow survived. Barnes' reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.
Kirkus Reviews