If you’re not aware of Julian Barnes’ work, just look at the list of accolades on his Wikipedia page, from a 2011 Man Booker Prize win on down. He starts his latest book Departure(s) with an assurance that it will be his last – like he details in the book, he has a manageable but incurable cancer in his blood he supposes will be the end of him.
Described as a ‘metafictional novella’, Departure(s) is about his own life, with the (perhaps fictional) account of two friends who ended up in a relationship while they were all young, broke up, and rekindled their romance decades later after Barnes engineered them to meet again.
He talks several times about his promise not to write about them, one he’s obviously broken (if they exist), but his friends aren’t really the point of the book. He’s writing about memory – including a repeated motif about Marcel Proust’s own writing about being transported to another time and place through memory thanks to the taste of a biscuit in tea – ageing and illness, and how inchoate and messy they can be, but how beautiful a thing life is because of that.
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