“I’d rather spend time with the living.” #julianbarnes #nothingtobefrightenedof

Back in March BBC4 showed a couple of interviews with Julian Barnes, an author whose work I love and who I’ve been reading since my twenties. One was a repeat of an older programme and one a new interview, and they reminded me that I still have some of his books on the TBR. I was in the mood for some non-fiction, and so I decided I would take a look at his “Nothing To Be Frightened Of” from 2008. The blurb on the back sounds as if it’s not quite sure what the book is actually about, and it’s given the category of ‘Biography/Literature’. Frankly, having read it, I don’t know that that either helps or does it justice! “Nothing….” is centred around mortality, specifically in Barnes’s case his lifelong fear of it. He professes no religion, stating early on in the book “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him”, and therefore from an early age he was faced with the concept of an atheist’s death. Although denying that the book is a memoir, in much of it Barnes uses that form to explore his…