The English author Julian Barnes turns eighty | EUROtoday

Anyone who talks about Julian Barnes can not keep away from Flaubert. Because Barnes himself talks a lot about him – a lot that in 1998, when the editors of the Times Literary Supplement commissioned the English author to evaluate a quantity of Flaubert’s letters, they teased within the accompanying letter: “Please write us a million words about it.”

Sir Kingsley Amis, the English author a technology older than him, who – identical to Barnes – acquired the Somerset Maugham Award for his debut novel and solely many years later gained an important English e book award, the Booker Prize, is claimed to have wished that Barnes would simply hold his mouth shut about Flaubert – rumored by Amis’ son Martin, additionally a author and a detailed good friend of Barnes. But he did not even give it some thought. And so one would possibly name it vital that the primary e book by Barnes to be translated into German was “Flaubert’s Parrot” in 1987, really his fifth novel.

“Flaubert once said: ‘I have no biography,’” Julian Barnes as soon as mentioned, including: “Art is everything, its creator is nothing.” But when he started his writing profession (comparatively late, in 1980, when he was already 34), he wrote two of his personal biographies. One began like this: “Julian Barnes, born on January 19, 1946 in Leicester, studied French at Oxford, became a lexicographer, studied law (like Flaubert), was a literary critic for the Times . . .” and so forth. The solely factor the opposite had in frequent with all of this was her date of beginning; She gave her place of origin as County Sligi in Ireland and continued: “… devoted his mature years to truancy, carnal desire and petty theft, left home at seventeen to take on a job as a sailor on a Liberian tanker.

After secretly disembarking in Montevideo, he made his way through North and South America with a variety of jobs.” The first biography reflected banal life, the second was art that Barnes had devised for the alter ego, under whose name he wrote a total of four crime novels in his early days. His name was Dan Kavanagh, but that was also a fact of life, because Barnes was married to Pat Kavanagh, a well-known literary agent.

She died in 2008, shortly after Barnes published Nothing to Fear, something of an autobiography marked by death. Both were unexpected for a man who was then only in his early sixties, who had said in an interview twenty years earlier when asked about the big answers: “There are basically three: faith, artwork and love. I feel faith will not be true; artwork would not work for everybody. The ultimate assist is love.” Barnes had now lost that, although art worked for him (many essays on painting, literature and cinema testify to this), and that is why his writing, which had previously been as elegant as it was ironic, became darker.

The next novel, “The End of a Story,” promptly brought Barnes the long-overdue Booker Prize, which had been denied to such grandiose books as “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” (1989), “Talking About It” (1991) or “Arthur & George” (2005) because, despite all their emotional depth, they were too mocking for the jurors and therefore perceived as too light. That’s why it’s satisfying for Barnes that half the chapter from “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” one about love, is used again and again by his audience when it comes to getting over the loss of a loved one.

Barnes talks about this consoling effect of his literature on himself in the volume that is being published simultaneously in Great Britain and Germany today to mark his eightieth birthday: “Departure(s)”, in German “Abschied(e)”, and it is no longer a novel, but actually what the English title (unlike the German one) promises: departure and farewell at the same time. “This is definitely my last book,” says Barnes, addressing his readers, “my last conversation with you.” Too many companions have died since Pat Kavanagh, most recently Martin Amis in 2023 and Ismail Kadare, a writer whom Barnes deeply admired, in 2024.

He had long since been diagnosed with an illness that, as he now writes, will not necessarily kill him, but is also incurable. Since he explains his narrative principle in the new book as follows: “I mostly write fictional stories, and they require a slow composting of life before it becomes usable material,” it is clear that this sovereign of the contemporary British novel now feels too old to accumulate enough humus again. And yet his last book is one that once again brings to fruition what makes Barnes so incomparable. Wit and compassion.

Actually, we find out, a novel had even been started: under the title “Jules Was”. And now one may wonder how much the autobiographical reference indicated by one’s own nickname would have differed from what we now read in “Farewell(e)”. At the center of it, as with almost everything by Barnes since his debut novel “Metroland” (1980), is a melancholic love story – the author’s literary love story for Flaubert is also an affair with someone who has long since died.

This time it tells the story of the love between Stephen and Jean, two fellow students from Oxford who were brought together by Barnes at a young age and, after their early separation, again more than forty years later – only to fail again in living together as a couple. Barnes had made a promise to Jean that he would never write about it. She and Stephen are now dead too, and Barnes breaks his word. This is an admission that doesn’t make him likeable, but also a concession to the highest authority for him that remains when love has died: art.

In “Farewell(e)” he was able to save himself once again from what he fears: “that after forty-four years, with one publication after another, I will gradually have to repeat myself, always have to resort to the same old motifs and memes, always have to serve up my favorite quotes from my favorite writers or even (which I hope not) always have to tell the same jokes”.

This corresponds to the nightmare of everlasting life that Barnes made the ultimate chapter of his “History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” an much more comforting episode about life than half the chapter about love. Yes, every thing dies, however on the finish solely the hope that the final phrase about Julian Barnes’ final e book has not but been spoken. He’s solely turning eighty as we speak. His function mannequin Flaubert didn’t dwell to be sixty, however he wrote till the top. And within the “Daily Telegraph” the day earlier than yesterday, Barnes said that he too would proceed to write down books, simply no extra books. We’ll see.