Julian Barnes said he was done. Without pathos. Without theatrically closing the door. More like when a man finally admits to himself what he has known for some time.
His new novel, “I'm Leaving,” published recently, will be his last. “I feel like I've played all my melodies,” he said. There's no bitterness in that sentence. More peace than a cut.
He turned 80 on Monday. He has forty-five years of writing behind him: fifteen novels, ten books of essays and nonfiction, plus crime novels he published under the pen name Dan Kavanagh. One criterion, he says, could be that you write while you're still being published. But that, he says, is a trap. Books aren't written because can to be published, but because you still have something to say. And he claims he has reached a point where there is no more.
That doesn't mean he stops writing. Texts, criticism, journalism - all that remains. But novels, in the full, difficult sense of the word, are where the circle closes.
“I’m Leaving” seems like a quiet reckoning by its very description. Barnes is here the mediator between two anonymous friends, Stephen and Jean, former lovers. The novel glides between memoir, essay, and fiction, as if the genre boundaries no longer matter to him. Memory, love, friendship, aging, death, all the themes he has returned to throughout his life. Only now more slowly. Calmer. As if he is rearranging them once more, to see if anything has changed.
Six years ago, he was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. He takes daily therapy, in the form of pills. "Right now, the result is inconclusive," he says. His body is weakening, but he's gotten used to it. He speaks of death more quietly now than before. It used to terrify him. Now he makes a distinction between death in his forties and death in his eighties. Everything else, he admits, nobody knows anyway.
He has been a widower since the age of 62, when his wife, a writer, died in 2008. Five Coffee HousesLast August, away from the public eye, he remarried. Rachel Cugnoni, a publisher he has known for almost thirty years.
He published his first novel, “Metroland,” in 1980. His real breakthrough came with “Flaubert’s Parrot,” four years later. He only won the Booker Prize in 2011, for “This Feels Like the End,” after three finalists. “I’ve led a happy life,” he said recently. And that rings simply true.
So, when he says this is the last book, it makes sense to look back. Not to wrap things up, but to take another look at what's left. Here are our picks: The 10 best novels by Julian Barnes.
10. Troy (2000)
A seemingly ordinary story of adultery, but in fact a precise study of envy, self-love and emotional cruelty. Stuart, Oliver and Gillian, a triangle from which no one emerges unscathed. Funny, painful and unpleasantly accurate.
9. Porcupine (1992)
Barnes' shortest novel. A merciless satire. A fallen communist leader awaits a televised trial and cannot see his own guilt. Funny, but eerily familiar. Regimes pass, mentality remains. And waits.
8. Lemon Tree Table (2004)
Stories about aging without self-pity. About the changing body, about silence, about disappearing sex, about music and language. Smart, subtle, occasionally cruel, just the right amount.
7. This Feels Like the End (2011)
A novel about the unreliability of memory and late regret. Short, precise, painful. The book that won him the Booker Prize and remains one of his purest prose breakthroughs.
6. Staring at the Sun (1986)
A look back from the future. Gene Sargent, on the eve of his 100th birthday, tries to understand his own life. Without big answers, but with a lot of truth.
5. Arthur and George (2005)
A historical novel about real injustice, identity and glory. Arthur Conan Doyle, the father of Sherlock Holmes, as a literary character. Perhaps the most classic, but also the most accessible Barnes.
4. Before She Met Me (2002)
An obsession masquerading as love. A jealousy that feeds on the past. A novel that shows how quickly reason can turn into control.
3. The Sound of Time (2016)
Shostakovich and the Soviet Union. Art under state pressure. A novel about fear, compromise and quiet survival. One of Barnes' most mature texts.
2. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)
Playful, ambitious, elusive. Essays, stories, Noah's Ark, art, animals, history. A book that is not easily explained, and it doesn't have to be.
1. Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
A book in which everything opened up. Obsession, sadness, play, literature itself. Biographies that disagree and the truth that keeps slipping away. Barnes in full force.
If “I'm Leaving” is truly the last melody, then Barnes leaves behind an opus that seeks no conclusion. Diverse, smart, deeply human. Not perfect. But honest. And lasting.
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