PULSE（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　After the best-selling Arthur & George and Nothing to Be
Frightened Of, Julian Barnes returns with fourteen stories about
longing and loss, friendship and love, whose mysterious natures he
examines with his trademark wit and observant eye.
　　From an imperial capital in the eighteenth century to Garibaldi’s
adventures in the nineteenth, from the vineyards of Italy to the
English seaside in our time, he finds the “stages, transitions,
arguments” that define us. A newly divorced real estate agent can’t
resist invading his reticent girlfriend’s privacy, but the
information he finds reveals only his callously shallow curiosity.
A couple come together through an illicit cigarette and a song
shared over the din of a Chinese restaurant. A widower revisiting
the Scottish island he’d treasured with his wife learns how
difficult it is to purge oneself of grief. And throughout, friends
gather regularly at dinner parties and perfect the art of cerebral,
sometimes bawdy banter about the world passing before them.
　　Whether domestic or extraordinary, each story pulses with the
resonance, spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly
heralded.
　　

　　Julian Barnes is the author of two previous story collections,
Cross Channel and The Lemon Table, and fourteen other books. He
lives in London.

One
East Wind
At Phil &Jaanna’s I: 60/40
Sleeping with John Updike
At Phil & Joanna’s 2: Marmalade
Gardeners’ World
At Phil & Joanna’s 3: Look, No Hands
Trespass
At Phil & Joanna’s 4: One in Five
Marriage Lines
Two
The Limner
Complicity
Harmony
Carcassonne
Pulse

　　“Marvelously inventive . . . Pulse sneaks up on you, and by
the end, you cannot help but be moved. These are stories that
illuminate characters not through dramatic epiphanies but real,
small turns in the road and moments of change. [Barnes’s] prose is
rich without being showy; he has a precision and economy of
language that at times recalls William Trevor. Above all, Pulse
shows a contemporary master working at the height of his ability.”
—Jill Owens, The Oregonian
　　“Of our leading novelists, Julian Barnes has one of the richest
historical imaginations . . . His main business here is the
present, particularly that portion of it that includes bright,
relentlessly articulate people encountering the first pangs of
aging and its discontents . . . His characters are never tragic.
They are inhabitants of a gray-scale world, plugging on through
life chastened by the experiences Barnes recounts, but not
devastated by them. That may be why we identify with them so
easily, so instructively.” —Richard Schickel, Los Angeles
Times
　　“Sharply elegant, piercing investigations of relationships.”
—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
　　“Filled with gems . . . beautiful, elegiac tales about how
marriages endure or change over time . . . A testament to Mr.
Barnes’s full panoply of talents . . . [He’s a] confident literary
decathlete, proficient at old-fashioned storytelling,
dialogue-driven portraiture, postmodern collage, political allegory
and farce, [and the] ability to create narratives with both surface
brio and finely calibrated philosophical subtexts.” —Michiko
Kakutani, The New York Times
　　“Graceful . . . Keenly funny . . . Barnes’ tales are shrewd,
piquant, and moving [and] his gift for deft, acerbic dialogue is
finely honed.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
　　“Companionship—the search for, the basking in, and the loss
of—binds Barnes’s first-rate collection . . . Dryly witty [and]
poignant.” —Publishers Weekly, starred
　　“Elegance and versatility—familiar Barnes strengths [that] define
this latest story collection . . . . Another impressive addition to
an already impressive oeuvre.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred
　　
　　
　　

　　Sleeping with John Updike
　　“I thought that went very well,”
　　Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a
pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and
stale.
　　Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance.
“You were certainly on good form.”
　　“Oh, I had a nice room for a change. It always helps.”
　　“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
　　“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of
complacency.
　　“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
　　“You know, I never worry about that anymore. It fi lls a
slot.”
　　When had they first met? Neither could quite remember. It must
have been nearly forty years ago, during that time of
interchangeable parties: the same white wine, the same hysterical
noise level, the same publishers’ speeches. Perhaps it had been at
a PEN do, or when they’d been shortlisted for the same literary
prize. Or maybe during that long, drunken summer when Alice had
been sleeping with Jane’s agent, for reasons she could no longer
recall or, even at the time, justify.
　　“In a way, it’s a relief we’re not famous.”
　　“Is it?” Jane looked puzzled, and a little dismayed, as if she
thought they were.
　　“Well, I imagine we’d have readers coming to see us time and
again. They’d expect some new anecdotes. I don’t think either
of
　　us has told a new story in years.”
　　“Actually, we do have people coming to see us again and again.
Just fewer than . . . if we were famous. Anyway, I think they like
hearing the same stories. When we’re onstage we’re not literature,
we’re sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.”
　　“Like your Graham Greene story.”
　　“I think of that as a bit more than a . . . catchphrase,
Alice.”
　　“Don’t prickle, dear. It doesn’t suit.” Alice couldn’t help
noticing the sheen of sweat on her friend’s face. All from the
effort of getting from taxi to platform, then platform to train.
And why did women carrying rather more poundage than was wise think
floral prints were the answer? Bravado rarely worked with clothes,
in Alice’s opinion—at least, after a certain age.
　　When they had become friends, both were freshly married and
freshly published. They had watched over each other’s
children,
　　sympathised through divorces, recommended each other’s books as
Christmas reading. Each privately liked the other’s work a little
less than they said, but then, they also liked everyone else’s work
a little less than they said, so hypocrisy didn’t come into
it.
　　Jane was embarrassed when Alice referred to herself as an artist
rather than a writer, and thought her books strove to appear more
highbrow than they were; Alice found Jane’s work rather formless,
and at times bleatingly autobiographical. Each had had a little
more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back,
than they thought they deserved. Mike Nichols had taken an option
on Alice’s Triple Sec, but eventually pulled out; some journey man
from telly had come in and made it crassly sexual. Not that Alice
put it like this; she would say, with a faint smile, that the
adaptation had “skimped on the book’s withholdingness,” a phrase
some found baffling. Jane, for her part, had been second favourite
for the Booker with The Primrose Path, had spent a fortune on a
frock, rehearsed her speech with Alice, and then lost out to some
fashionable Antipodean.
　　“Who did you hear it from, just out of interest?”
　　“What?”
　　“The Graham Greene story.”
　　“Oh, that chap . . . you know, that chap who used to publish us
both.”
　　“Jim?”
　　 “Yes, that’s right.”
　　“Jane, how can you possibly forget Jim’s name?”
　　“Well, I just did.” The train blasted through some village halt,
too fast to catch the signboard. Why did Alice need to be so
stern?
　　She wasn’t exactly spotless herself. “By the way, did you ever
sleep with him?”
　　Alice frowned slightly. “You know, to be perfectly honest, I
can’t remember. Did you?”
　　“I can’t either. But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as
well.”
　　“Doesn’t that make me sound a bit of a tart?”
　　“I don’t know. I thought it made me sound more of a tart.”
　　Jane laughed, to cover the uncertainty.
　　“Do you think it’s good or bad—the fact that we can’t
remember?”
　　Jane felt back onstage, facing a question she was unprepared for.
So she reacted as she usually did there, and referred the matter
back to Alice: the team leader, head girl, moral authority.
　　“What do you think?”
　　“Good, definitely.”
　　“Why?”
　　“Oh, I think it’s best to have a Zen approach to that sort of
thing.”
　　Sometimes, Alice’s poise could make her rather too oblique for
ordinary mortals. “Are you saying it’s Buddhist to forget who you
slept with?”
　　“It could be.”
　　“I thought Buddhism was about things coming round again in
different lives?”
　　“Well, that would explain why we slept with so many pigs.”
　　They looked at one another companionably. They made a good team.
When they were first asked to literary festivals, they soon
realised it would be more fun to appear as a double act. Together
they had played Hay and Edinburgh, Charleston and King’s Lynn,
Dartington and Dublin; even Adelaide and Toronto. They traveled
together, saving their publishers the cost of minders.Onstage, they
finished one another’s sentences, covered up each other’s gaffes,
were satirically punitive with male interviewers who tried to
patronise them, and urged signing queues to buy the other one’s
books. The British Council had sent them abroad a few times until
Jane, less than entirely sober, had made some unambassadorial
remarks in Munich.
　　“What’s the worst thing anyone’s done to you?”
　　“Are we still talking bed?”
　　“Mmm.”
　　“Jane, what a question.”
　　“Well, we’re bound to be asked it sooner or later. The way
everything’s going.”
　　“I’ve never been raped, if that’s what you’re asking. At
least,”
　　Alice went on reflectively, “not what the courts would call
rape.”
　　“So?”
　　When Alice didn’t answer, Jane said, “I’ll look at the landscape
while you’re thinking.” She gazed, with vague benignity, at trees,
fields, hedgerows, livestock. She had always been a town person,
and her interest in the countryside was largely pragmatic, a flock
of sheep only signifying roast lamb.
　　“It’s not something . . . obvious. But I’d say it was
Simon.”
　　“Simon as in the novelist or as in the publisher or as in Simon
but you don’t know him?”
　　“Simon the novelist. It was not long after I was divorced. He
phoned up and suggested coming round. Said he’d bring a bottle of
wine. Which he did. When it became pretty clear that he wasn’t
going to get what he’d come for, he corked up the rest of it and
took the bottle home.”
　　“What was it?”
　　        …