Since I began reading Julian Barnes's work over the past year and particularly since I read Keeping an Eye Open, a non-fiction work about looking at art, and The Noise of Time, a novel that imagines the life of Dimitri Shostakovich, I have gained enormous respect and appreciation for Barnes as a writer. I'm especially impressed by his clean, unpretentious prose, which reads so easily and is so exact, and by his deep understanding of what it means to be an artist and of what art itself is. There's much more in my review of these two books for the Los Angeles Review of Books.