When you've read an author with admiration, you end up loving them, and that's why for many readers of Julian Barnes it will be difficult to start reading Farewells (Editorial Angle) without feeling a pang in my heart. Before even starting it, we already know that this is the last book we will read by the author. He has made this explicit, both in the title and in the interviews he has given. Barnes is eighty years old, ill, and doesn't want to leave a book unfinished, so, with a serenity not without irony, he decided that this was the end of his literary career.
Julian Barnes has accustomed us to his peculiar way of writing, mixing genres and playing with confusing the reader. This style of his is sharpened in Farewellswhere you never quite know if you're reading an essay, fiction, or memoir. This book also contains a wealth of references to other authors: Proust, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Updike, Flaubert, George Sand, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Edith Wharton... It's clear that Barnes moves through his readings with the same ease and carelessness with which he moves among his own.
Farewells It begins with a long and profound dissertation on memory. Barnes travels from irony to sorrow, sometimes achieving a potent blend in a single sentence, as when he speaks of a girl he knew in college and says, "She's probably dead now, like most of my friends from that time and place."
In a second part, the writer tells us he will tell us a true story (while hinting that writers should never be believed). It is the story of Jean and Stephen, two friends from his college days, whom he himself introduced, and to whom he promised he would never write about their particular love story.
Without missing a beat, Julian Barnes tells us about his blood cancer, "an ailment," says the doctor, "that cannot be cured, but is manageable." After this fatal diagnosis, the pandemic arrives, and Barnes, the author of Farewell This is how he describes the Barnes protagonist of the book at that moment: "The writer, quarantined inside his house, a victim of blood cancer, while a plague spreads exponentially around him. It sounds like a bad novel, or at least a sweaty one. However, there are promising themes. Coronavirus. He would rather die from blood cancer." And he adds: "He would rather die from the disease he suffers from, thank you very much, than from someone else's disease."
Later, he returns to the love story of which he is a privileged witness (and quite involved). It is there, Barnes admits, that life becomes confused with fiction.
Before finishing, Barnes still gives us a few gems: "Many people think the same, believe that life is or should be fair, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary." A lucid, wise, and sarcastic perspective that, as a reader, you're very sorry to say goodbye to when you reach the last page.
