Julian Barnes' wise and elegant way of saying goodbye

With FarewellsJulian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) does not say goodbye to literature, because he is supposed to continue reading until his death or until his eyes and brain allow it, but he does say goodbye to writing books and to his readers. When I say he's saying goodbye, I mean it literally.And he also makes this explicit in the final paragraphs, directly addressing those who are reading it: "I hope you have enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has pleased me (when you think about it, I would be nothing without you)."

This literary farewell is just one of several farewells Barnes refers to throughout the book. I'm not sure, though, that "farewell" is the most accurate translation of the word Barnes uses in the original version. The English title is Departure(s)That is, "partencias," in the sense of leaving a place and leaving behind a whole series of things. I think "partencias" is more appropriate than "despedidas" (although also less evocative and less forceful, and more ambiguous) to describe Barnes's literary operation. It is an operation that consists of explaining how he leaves behind friends and acquaintances who die, and how he also leaves behind memory, intellectual fulfillment, health, future prospects... Life, in short.

Presented in this way, Barnes's latest book might seem like an avalanche of pre-death melancholy, and that reading it is like falling in slow motion down a precipice somewhere between depressing and treacherous. It's not at all like that, however, not least because the literary form that the author ofFlaubert's Parrot The way he handles the materials he works with lends lightness to the text without detracting from its seriousness, scope, or gravity. Barnes constructs the book from a fluid mixture of genres—autobiography, fiction, essay—a mixture that, in turn, allows him to address all kinds of topics simultaneously, from the death of his wife nearly twenty years ago to the treatment he is undergoing to control the leukemia he has been diagnosed with. passing through the literature of ProustBecause of the unpredictability of existence, because of our relationship with our memories, and because of the complicated love story between two childhood friends. Thanks to elaborate yet natural prose, Barnes gives all of this a warm and conversational tone and rhythm, with a touch of typically British civilized dark humor, making it a very enjoyable read.

A sincere gratitude for life

Books that exhibit this hybrid and ever-changing nature seem easy to create, because they appear to allow for it, making everything plausible. But in practice, they require considerable compositional skill and narrative flair to bind together such heterogeneity, preventing it from becoming disjointed, erratic, and gratuitous. Barnes, as he has amply demonstrated over nearly half a century of literary production, possesses this skill and flair, and that is why he is able to organically and persuasively weave together such disparate materials. Everything is where it should be, in the book. I mean that everything occupies a significant space, from the stark clinical descriptions of his medical treatment to the astonishing love vaudeville of a man and a woman whom Barnes introduced when they were young and whom he now, in his old age, helps to reunite, passing through the comments on the great French poets of leaving (Baudel, Mauin), ailments and decrepitudes that he informs us of and, above all, through the half existential and half wise reflections that here and there give emotional warmth to the whole.

That's perhaps what I liked most about FarewellsThe gratitude, sincere yet understated, that Barnes feels for life as it is, beyond injustices, setbacks, sorrows, and pains. He writes: "I think I have always tried to be content with what I have (from a non-theological point of view), and not in a comic, operetta sense, but seriously, looking at it in the context of life's finitude." It is an elegant and wise way to say goodbye.