SOURCE: “If the French Were Shorter in Flaubert's Day, Did They Need to Be Less Fat in Order to Be Called ‘Fat’?” in London Review of Books, Vol. 18, January 4, 1996, p. 22.

In the following review, Furbank calls Cross Channel “perhaps Barnes's most assured work so far.”

It was Wittgenstein's objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that the procedure might be impressive, but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it going on indefinitely? On Julian Barnes, who is so addicted to the business or game of interpretations, the question does not seem to weigh so heavily. We perhaps misunderstand Barnes if we take him to be profoundly worried by hermeneutic doubts: by the fictionality of the past and the inaccessibility of truth. When the Flaubert addict in Flaubert's Parrot writes to the Grocers' Company to ask whether red currant jam was the...