Jean Serjeant 1921-2021 recounts surviving a life of ordinary miracles, strongly affected by the adolescent memory of a WWII RAF pilot who chose death via flying into the sun. Nature of a working/middle class woman’s life in postwar UK who senses there is more to life, and more to herself, than what she was led to believe. Remarkable prescience of internet! Nothing much happened yet it covers an entire life; commentary on aging, death, how we impose meaning on life. POV = 2 characters, mother and son. Her recollection doesn’t include much about her parents, society or the practicalities of her life, it’s a very internal world. Witnesses the 7 Wonders of the World with some adjustments and defines her own 7 miracles of the world.

A boomerang book: Didn’t care for the book the first time, read it too fast, much better the second reading. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3834524.html

What's it about? In fact only the third (and shortest) section of three is set in 2022, and even that is a bit ambiguous in that the year is never identified, though 2022 seems a reasonable best fit given what we are told earlier in the book. The first section deals with the childhood of the protagonist in the 1940s; the second with her unsuccessful marriage to the village policeman; and the third flashes back to her life in between from the perspective of celebrating her hundredth birthday.

Is 2022 really going to be like that? I do hope that 100-year-old ladies will still be able to have joyrides in aeroplanes next year, if they want to. And Barnes' supercomputer with all the answers is not far off Google, though it requires a lot more human maintenance than the search algorithms that we have come to know and love in real life.

Is it any good? Unambiguously, yes. I don't think it is as deep and meaningful as Julian Barnes fans evidently do, but it's an interesting reflection on what the life of an Englishwoman born in 1942 might look like. ( )

3.80
Just like many of Barnes' books, this one is divided into three chapters which tell a story of a woman named Jean and her life from the 1920s to the year of 2020.
To be honest, I didn't like the start nor the first third of the book. So I was really bored and contemplated giving up several times. But then came the second third which was really interesting.
The third chapter is set in the future. Certainly, the year of 2020 was a distant future when this was written back in 1986, but it's pretty much now. I'm surprised to see that Barnes accurately predicted the rise of Wikipedia. The only thing he got wrong is the founding year. Wikipedia was actually founded in 2001. not 1998, but he was still surprisingly close. ( )

Interesting examination of what is courage and how we deal with death. The time frame moves from pre WW2 to an imagined future seen mainly through the experiences of a mother and her son. ( )

The really important questions do not have answers: and the really important answers do not need questions. Life is itself, not comparable to anything. And all the great miracles are present in the here and the now, if only we can see them... like staring at the sun through the gap between your fingers.

...Some of the things which I took away from this magical, unreviewable book.

Read it. ( )