Departures
Apart from The Departures , I have ten other Julian Barnes’ novels on my bookshelf and have previously posted about The Noise of Time (2016) and Elizabeth Finch (2022). There’s only a few of his novels I don’t have but I am sure I read these along the way – library copies or copies leant to a friend. My first memory of reading Barnes was A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters , at the time of its release in 1989, when I was an intellectual slip of a thing. I loved the imaginative premise of the novel, its sweep, and its metafictional half chapter. So, Barnes has present throughout my adult reading life. The retirement of both Peter Carey and Julian Barnes from the world of fiction seems as close as a well-respected work colleague, a teacher – for example – so much a part of the school you can’t imagine the place without them. Barnes makes his own departure the theme of this auto-fictional work. Human memory is the immediate theme, with the introduction of the literary idea of ‘inv...