A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
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Average rating4.1
Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss. My novel of the year' Nadime GordimerBeginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.
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Started off very promisingly, with a chapter about a woodworm telling the true story of Noah???s Ark, with criticism of humans and myths about Noah and all our preconceived notions about our superiority. Then it deteriorated. Some chapters were interesting, but ultimately foundered on their own cleverness. The point is made and brought home in the first few pages, but Barnes insists on carrying on with the clever ???joke??? for another 25 pages. Some were tedious from the outset, with the cleverness far too unsubstantial to sustain a 30 plus page point that didn???t justify one page. Certainly he can write, and switch genres, styles, centuries, viewpoints and characters with ease. But does he have anything to say that goes beyond ???Look at how clever I am??? and
???aren???t I iconoclastic and irreverent????. Worth a look at a later effort.
