On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer's endgame.
The whole package is a culmination of sorts, shimmering with his silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart ... Absence itself—absence of love, absence of the beloved—becomes a crucial locus of meaning.
The final part of Departure(s), in which Barnes examines the struggle to find happiness and accept life’s ending, is unexpectedly funny ... The intermingling of non-fiction and fiction could have been confusing, but Barnes really does know exactly what he is up to and his control of the narrative makes it enthralling and affecting ... Brief but it is not slight and, each time I read it, I thought about it for days afterwards.
