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.
Full of broken rules ... If we don’t want to call it a novel, we might think of it as a printed conversation in which only one person talks ... The novelist, more than anyone, should take care not to inflict his own sentimental romances on people he hasn’t invented. Even if Barnes can’t track the arrival of fictional possibility he knows when a novelist has been overmanaging the facts.
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.
