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.
Slim and stark ... Barnes’s prose is largely stripped bare — it resembles a tall ship that, in the face of a storm, has taken down and stored its sails and rigging to better endure punishment.
Departure(s) brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired. Barnes’s powers of observation and comment may have diminished, but his appetite for playfulness and detail, for bedrock human stuff, remains unslakable ... As a culture, we’ve grown cynical at the notion that we are witnessing the 'last' of anything — the last tour, the last film and the last episode so rarely are. Still, here’s hoping that Barnes is not yet finished writing.
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.
Even if Departure(s) does not turn out to be Barnes' capstone, it is a welcome addition to his bibliography ... Slim but weighty, digressive yet incisive.
