Book Review
'The Lemon Table': Lives in twilight, full of longing and resignation

By Valerie Ryan
Special to The Seattle Times

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In Shakespeare's sonnet No. 73, he encourages his reader "to love that well which thou must leave ere long." The characters in "The Lemon Table," Julian Barnes' short-story collection, are growing old and facing death — in different ways, different places, different centuries.

The unifying theme of the collection is that each in his or her own way is trying to love well — and/or with the regret, bitterness or resignation that has informed the life now fading.

Given the subject matter, one might expect the tone to be sepulchral. Not so: Two of the stories are laugh-out-loud funny, and all of them have a vestige of humor, or at least Barnes' trademark wit and irony.

"Vigilance" is ostensibly about people who make noises at concerts: coughing, sneezing, program-rattling. We find out that the narrator ran afoul of his lover at a concert when he was caught chatting up a young boy. They never go to concerts together again and cease being lovers. All concerts are now poisoned, and extraneous noise must be the problem. Barnes makes his case in the cleverest possible way.

"The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece — and Western Civilization" by Julian Barnes Knopf, 256 pp., $22.95

In "The Revival," Turgenev sees an old play of his revived and is completely taken by a young actress. The Russian writer worships her from afar, except for one 30-mile train ride, at the end of which he kisses her hands. That is all. Says Barnes: "If we know more about consummation, they knew more about desire ... if we know more about sex, they knew more about love." The stories abound with such percipient epigrams.

In "Hygiene," a retired soldier makes his annual trip to a military dinner and to run errands for his wife. For years, he has also visited a lady of the evening on this trip. This time, the experience is quite different.

The final story, "Silence," is narrated by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius as he is dying of throat cancer. He goes for a walk each morning, looking for cranes, but sees only wild geese. "Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist," he says. In this story we learn that "Among the Chinese, the lemon is the symbol of death." Sibelius joins the "lemon table" with old friends where it is "most companionable" to talk about death. One morning, he sees the cranes: "I walked slowly back to the house. I stood in the doorway, calling for a lemon."

This collection is filled with longing, poignancy, wisdom, humor and the knowledge that time is of the essence.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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