A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 101/2 CHAPTERS
LITERATURE/FICTION
"By turns funny, harrowing, satirical, consolatory, absurd...What gives pleasure ...are the author's ventriloquism, his skillful narrative pacing, his waspy intelligence, the tight lacing of the book's motifs and ironies" - Washington Post Book World
It's a hilariously revisionist account of Noah's ark, narrated by a passenger who doesn't appear in Genesis. It's a sneak preview of heaven. It encompasses the stories of a cruise ship hijacked by terrorists and of woodworms tried for blasphemy in sixteenth-century France. It explores the realationship of fact to fabulation and antagonism between history and love. In short, A History of the world in 101/2 Chapters is a grandly ambitious and inventive work of finction, in the traditions of Joyce and Calvino, from the author of the widely acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot.
"Barnes writes with a quiet, disillusioned wit and a special gift for change of pace that makes his prose crack like a whip." - The New York Review of Books
"Barnes writes with such intelligence and fluency, the result is never less than entertaining." - The New York Times