“This is the beginning of the end”

But she also had the opportunity to climb, as happens in one of the many deadly jumps with those who enter it. Farewellthat loss of smell with death and dying, memories and the inevitable and expanding shadow Proustinvoluntary memory and some other Proustian in this sense, as Mallarmé (for this person, inhaling the smell of the “hot breast” represents for her the “living consequences” of the paradise island).

Barnes tells the reader here like an old friend who sometimes has to send you away. Play with this idea until the end of your book, though it’s best interpreted as a narrative gesture, not so much a testamentary statement. Barnes politely addresses the reader through thoughtful allusions that invite him to share this final journey that began cancer diagnosis and a note in your book: “This is the beginning of the finale”.

The writer has had a type of leukemia for many years that debilitates him, although he will not suffer from it, even though fewer of his friends will be alive. Salen Martin Amish, Christopher Hitchens or an editor Carmen Callilto whom he dedicates a sober and comfortable home. Just two pages are enough for Barnes to place Callil in the great gallery of strong, intelligent women with a subtle sense of humor who enter and sell many of his books. Jean, one of the protagonists of this story, is another good example.

Barnes seems oblivious, but he doesn’t like to write. It is an activity, admittedly, in which one sometimes feels the same pain, but at the same time feels “more alive and original” than when speaking. Such fear will annoy readers who at these heights know that they have more or less understood the trick of what I write. And sus dudas, sus titubeos, and aces engañosa insecuridad.

As in other books about it (“You’re doing this weird,” the character Jean says to the narrator Julian), the author The feeling of the finale (a novel that also contained a meditation on memory) combines autobiography and thought with the novel’s narrative at the heart of the work. The story progresses through detours, cuts, memories, which in each case are corrected or matted.

At the heart of the novel is the story of Jean and Stephen, classmates at Barnes University, whose relationship ended when they reached the brink of formalization (“we leave or we break”if they say), propició writer. After four decades of “middle torment”, Jean and Stephen, again thanks to their writer friend, rekindled their relationship and moved on. But the union cannot bear the daily torment. I don’t know what is more than she is willing to endure at such heights.

As Jean continues, the novelist at this point is “a link with old lives,” a statement that applies to both life and literature. Barnes, who had vowed never to write about him, was kept in the repository of his two friends’ confidential information by a reticent intermediary not too dissimilar to the book’s narrator Rachel Cusk.

I also recognize that it is a “sounding board” for us. In Jean and Stephen’s story there is separation, death, dispatch. The ending is integrated into the natural flow of the story without drama, with the author implying that all stories end the same.

Barnes chases his characters with several pins; like other old ones The same is the best defined, although not necessarily the best in the photo. But we see Jean with clarity, spontaneous and intelligent, and the sillier and lovelorn Stephen.

The thread of the narrative is broken and introduced wise passages: about literature and your relationship to reality (“a mi juicio there is no problem with falsifying the context if one respects the central, fundamental truth of history”), over memory (“without it there is no identity”).

Barnes is an elegant, insightful storyteller allergic to grandeur. Depth and shape and precision

Their narrative approaches other themes such as vision (which is pathetically revealed through an explicit bodily register, consistent with the work of any proven practitioner of some form of autofiction) and death (at the end of the fall of the woman, the protagonist of the formidable Nivelles de vidawho went to the fatal diagnosis with “valiant equanimid”).

His clear understanding of literature as artifice – even if his advances seem intuitive: this is often his great charm – leads Barnes not so much to avoid themes as to point them out, to explain them, before following the adelante (“No, that’s paternalistic, hasta cínico”, if he answers at one point, because it’s much later to formulate a series of themes, but I don’t want to say it even if I don’t want to, even if I don’t want to write). It spins on this side valuable lessons about writing.

Julian Barnes is an elegant, insightful storyteller, allergic to grandeur, with a rare gift of naturalness. More depth and shape. Repeat the emphasis and trust more in accuracy than impact.

Farewell don’t assume any damage to the fronts; e.g clearing the grounds you knowas a final point. “To think that writers have spent many years – he writes – in one of two ways: either they are egocentrically expansive, or they think: they are satisfied and see the grain.”

Autobiographical point he makes a living from his diariesAccording to this usage, there is also reflection: I suggest, as if no other form could be used, that the diary should not be “cooked”, that only those “unhappy, bleak, lied, envious or pathetic” moments should be recorded, it is only an illegible accumulation of “anger and self-pity”. And I’ve also been confused by the completeness of reality for a long time (a person also has happy moments when writing diaries).

He spoke of his youth with a distant, condescending irony, pointing out that at university, when he looked elegant, they were not so much a “harder version” of him as “an imperfect copy of his fathers”.

Farewell it is written not much less in the epic of the finale, but in a sober, sometimes ironic acceptance of the worst and death. Barnes suggests that literature is primarily a conversation that cannot be interrupted by upheavals, but must be fulfilled bit by bit, with elegance and modesty.