Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is the Booker Prize-winning author’s final novel, published earlier this year on his 80th birthday. I included it in my list of Booker Prize predictions last month, although it is also a hybrid memoir which details Barnes’ diagnosis of “incurable but manageable” blood cancer in early 2020. The novel side of the book tells the story of Stephen and Jean who fall in love when they are at university with Barnes and then reconnect after 40 years apart. Departure(s) returns to familiar themes of mortality and ageing which Barnes has explored in many other books over the years, but this time it feels like the personal reality is felt much more keenly. The musings on Proust are a bit tedious, and I think The Sense of an Ending still stands out as his best recent work. Continue reading
Tag Archives: P. D. James
Books I Read in October
Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Trust by Hernan Diaz was was one of the nominated titles which intrigued me the most. It consists of four manuscripts related to New York financier Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred. The first is a novella called ‘Bonds’ written by Mildred’s friend and is followed by Andrew’s autobiography, a memoir written by his ghostwriter before concluding with Mildred’s personal journal. The structure is unique and very clever, but the pay off for the reader doesn’t really happen until well into the second half when the other perspectives highlight that Andrew and Mildred are thinly disguised as characters in the novella while Andrew’s boasts sit uncomfortably alongside Mildred’s version of events. This is an elegantly written and constructed piece of metafiction which has been accurately described as a “literary puzzle”, but I wonder how many readers will see it through to the end. Continue reading
Filed under Books
A Little Blog of Books 
You must be logged in to post a comment.