Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
Published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage, Penguin Random House
Julian Barnes is the eminent English author who won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending.
He is a ‘hybrid’ author, whose books range from the fictional Flaubert’s Parrot and The Only Story to non-fiction, Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art.
Departure(s), his self-proclaimed final book, is a piercing yet playful metafictional study of a protagonist self-referentially named Julian Barnes.
He is an Oxford University graduate who plays a pivotal role in bringing his friends, Stephen and Jean, together not only once, but twice. The tale focuses on the start and the end of their lives.
It delves elegantly and tangentially into memory (and memory as identity) while probing the approach of death.
extract from Departure(s) at PaperbarkWords blog:
(used with permission)
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
“ ‘Love, in reality, Mr Novelist, isn’t how you and your breed depict it.’
I decided not to take this personally. Also, to ignore the implication that I didn’t have much experience of love myself. ‘Certainly not in bad fiction. But I think the great novelists understand love, and most aspects of human behaviour, better than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or priests or lonely-hearts columnists.’
It sounded a bit pompous, I know. But that’s because it wasn’t just me who was under attack (which I would have laughed off easily), but all the great writers of the past. Who, as her next words implied, fell short of understanding.
‘That still doesn’t get us very far.
‘Sorry about that.’
Jean swirled her whisky over the ice cubes and said, in a clear indication that our exchange was over: ‘It seems that I am the answer to a question I was never asked, and haven’t asked myself.’
It was at that point, I think, that I decided to break my promise not to write about Stephen and Jean.”
(Departure(s) by Julian Barnes, page 103)
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