PositiveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)Despite its romantic veneer, Departure(s) is far more about life than love ... Departure(s)’s meandering digressions sometimes become self-indulgent ... We should mourn the end of a career and the diminishment of a generation of writers ... I, for one, will continue tending to my regrets, which now include Barnes no longer writing.
Janet Malcolm
PositiveSydney Morning Herald (AUS)There are traps of autobiography beyond tedium. Excessive nostalgia, sentiment or fogeyism are a few. Yet strip them all out and you lose the soul. What leavens Still Pictures throughout is Czech humour that, in its irreverence and intolerance for pomposity, is similar to Australian wit ... Unfinished though it is, Still Pictures is an apt completion of these pursuits, its author inhabiting the negative space surrounded by characters, stories and photos. The result is anything but tedious.
