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Departure(s): A Novel
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On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writers endgame.A culmination . . . shimmering with [Barness] silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart. The AtlanticShortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: There will be a storyor a story within the storybut not just yet.Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barness reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities were prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals, and disappointments of a different order.Life and memory can be so . . . quixotic, dont you find? Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writers eye upon it, and how his efforts in their behalf add up in the end. Having promised them hed never write about them, he breaks the promise to fulfill one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelists game that only Julian Barnes knows how to play.
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This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.
For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.