British writer Julian Barnes in 2023. LINDA NYLIND/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE/BUREAU233
A few days after his 80th birthday, celebrated on January 19, Julian Barnes published Departure(s) in the United Kingdom, France and several other countries. The British writer presents this as his final book, and he wrote it as such. It's a hybrid text in which fiction and nonfiction intermingle, where the narrator bears the same name as the author and shares with him obsessions that have been familiar to readers since Flaubert's Parrot (1984): memory and its pitfalls, time and love. Departure(s) is made up of meditations on memories, endings, the workings of the brain and the story of two friends, Jean and Stephen, for whom the narrator played matchmaker twice, 40 years apart. With both Jean and Stephen now dead, "Jules" frees himself from the promise he made to them never to write about them.
Before the publication of this book, which gracefully brings to a close the long "conversation" between the author and his readers, Barnes welcomed Le Monde into his home in the north of London. In the billiard room-library on the first floor – reached by passing a landing whose walls are covered with photographs of French artists dear to the heart of this great Francophile, like Colette, François Mauriac and Sarah Bernhardt – he reflected on his career and his decision to bow out. A decision so recent, however, that he still spoke in the present tense about the work of writing.
