Lifestyle
Julian Barnes’ playful new book is also his ‘official departure’
In Departure(s), Julian Barnes’ playful new novel about several of his lifelong obsessions — mortality, memory, and time — the author announces that after publishing 27 books over the past 44 years, “this will definitely be my last book — my official departure, my final conversation with you.”
Surely, he jests? Barnes, who describes himself as a “cheerful pessimist,” turned 80 this month. He also has a longstanding interest in endgames — both endings and games. Writing, he says, is still “one of the times I feel most alive and original,” but he worries about repeating himself, or going stale, or “lapsing into the easy garrulity of autobiography.” Self-determined retirement has the advantage of assuring against being cut off mid-project — and worse, of having someone else clumsily complete his orphaned book. Still, he backslided rather quickly after swearing off interviews some 10 years ago — lasting only until the publication of his very next book.
Departure(s) is billed as a novel. It is narrated by a writer named Julian (“Jules”), a self-declared agnostic/atheist who prepared for COVID lockdown by ordering a 30-DVD boxed set of Ingmar Bergman films. This narrator, like the author, was devastated by the sudden death of his wife (literary agent Pat Kavanagh) to brain cancer in 2008, and has since lost many friends, including fellow writers Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, to other forms of the disease. He relays his own medical saga, including his diagnosis in early 2020 with an incurable but manageable form of leukemia, which is kept in check with daily chemotherapy pills. He comments wryly: “‘Incurable yet manageable,’ that sounds like…life, doesn’t it?”
It takes Barnes a while to get to the story at the core of this book, which involves college classmates he introduced to each other while they were at Oxford University with him in the 1960s. Barnes calls this couple, whom he promised never to write about, Jean and Stephen. They all parted ways after graduation, and mostly fell out of touch until 40 years later, when they were in their 60s. Stephen, long-divorced, contacts Barnes and asks him to help reconnect with Jean. Barnes happily obliges, glad to have another go as matchmaker. Both Stephen and Jean confide separately that they consider their rekindled relationship their “last shot at happiness.”
As a novelist, Barnes is used to playing god, manipulating his characters’ lives and feelings. He notes that he has written about love frequently, though “few of my characters have ever been granted a happy ending.” Jean argues that novelists really don’t get love. Could this be true, Barnes wonders. Surely not the great novelists, who he feels “understand love, and most aspects of human behaviour, better than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or priests or lonely-hearts columnists.”
Barnes’ central concern here is not so much with how Jean and Stephen’s relationship plays out, but with endings in general, both literary and otherwise, and with stories and memories “with a missing middle,” like the 40 year gap in his friends’ love story. Fiction, he notes, “requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material.” It also has the advantage over nonfiction of enabling writers to fill in blanks where facts remain elusive.
Like much of Barnes’ work, Departure(s) attempts to synthesize multiple strands in a wily (and sometimes unruly) hybrid of autobiography, essay, fiction and autofiction that is thick with musings about Proust and other French writers, involuntary memory, and aging. (“You should do one thing or the other,” sharp-tongued Jean admonishes him about his discursive approach to narrative.)
As always, Barnes underscores his thoughts with trenchant quotes from his inner Bartlett’s, including this wonderful parenthetical remark: “What did T.S. Eliot say about memory? That no matter how you wrap it in camphor, the moths will get in.”
Even if Departure(s) does not turn out to be Barnes’ capstone, it is a welcome addition to his bibliography, exhibiting more in common with his greatest hits — including his breakthrough third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot and his 2011 Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of An Ending — than his most recent novel, the disappointingly flat Elizabeth Finch.
Departure(s) is slim but weighty, digressive yet incisive. The plot is pretty much beside the point. Although the book features a somewhat tricky, not entirely reliable narrator, it gives us unprecedented access to the thoughts and feelings of this extraordinarily interesting, erudite writer who professes to view life as, “at best, a light comedy with a sad ending.” A light comedy with a sad ending — that pretty much sums up Departure(s).
How the Epstein files are upending U.K. politics
Nate Diaz
Ready to Throw Hands for America
… I Want In On White House Card!!!
Published
TMZSports.com
Nate Diaz has his sights set on kickin’ ass on one of the most unexpected stages possible: the White House.
The MMA star tells TMZ Sports he’s all-in if talk of a potential fight card tied to the nation’s capital ever becomes reality … making it clear the idea of scrapping under a red, white and blue spotlight has his full attention.
“Yeah, that’d be dope, too,” Diaz said. “America gang, baby. You already know what’s popping.”
While Diaz is hyped about the possibility of fighting on a patriotic mega-card, he says he’s not picky about who he faces — as long as it’s a legit, high-level fight.
And if he gets his way, the White House event could feature some familiar names from his past.
Diaz says he wants to run back his legendary rivalry with Conor McGregor for a trilogy bout — a fight that would instantly become one of the biggest attractions possible for a blockbuster event.
He also called out Dustin Poirier as another potential opponent, though Diaz didn’t exactly extend the olive branch … saying he’d be down to fight him “if he stops being such a p****.”
Diaz even floated Mike Perry as another name he’d gladly throw down with … making it clear he’s ready for whatever matchup gets him back into what he calls “real action.”
The 40-year-old last fought in the UFC in 2022, but his message now is loud and clear: he’s ready to return.
Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in 2019’s Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig.
Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
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Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
“Wuthering Heights” is in theaters, so we’re thinking about the best book to film adaptations of all time.
What’s your favorite movie that started life as a book — and what makes for a great book-to-film adaptation, anyway? Do you want filmmakers to stay as rigorously true to the book as possible? Or are you okay with bold departures, big swings, out-of-left-field choices that evoke the essence of the book, if not every last detail?
“Wuthering Heights,” for example, takes a middle road. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s film keeps the familiar plot beats firmly in place, and casts actors who embody all the stuff that fans of the book need them to, but steeps them in the delirious hormones of a teenage fever-dream. Thus, Margot Robbie’s Cathy is headstrong, impetuous … and horny, while Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff is broody, Byronic … and horny. The two spend most of the movie trading lusty looks in the soaking rain as peals of thunder roll over the moors. Every set, every costume is styled to the gods. It’s a breathlessly over-the-top take that’s divided critics and is about to do the same for audiences this weekend.
We’ve got four examples of other beloved books that made the transition to the big screen. Here’s why we think each of them works, and why we believe they’re the best of all time.
Little Women (2019)
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This movie version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 story about the March sisters is adapted and directed by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig does the impossible task of contemporizing the story while staying so faithful to the book. She does two things that haven’t worked in any other Little Women adaptations: She makes me tolerate the love story between Laurie and Amy. (I still have PTSD from the 1994 version.) And Gerwig allows for Jo — the protagonist, a liberated author who is writing her own story along the way — to have her cake and eat it too.
In the 19th century approach to this story, the woman has to have a man at the end. That’s just a given for these kinds of books and for these kinds of adaptations. But Gerwig made a decision that the writing of the book is essential to the plot line, and that within the book, Jo’s character ends up with a man — a scholar named Bhaer. But in reality, the book is the man — getting her first book published is the win — and that is her love. It’s so rich and smart. I just love it. — B.A. Parker, host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast
Nickel Boys (2024)
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Nickel Boys was originally Colson Whitehead’s book about a boy wrongly sent to an abusive boys school in Florida during the Jim Crow era. It becomes a story about his friendship with another boy there. Within five minutes of watching the movie, I was hooked and felt like I was seeing something really new. Not just new in that it was different from the book, which I really respect. But because the whole thing is told from this immersive camera point of view — and because you are in the head, really in the head of the person experiencing it, it is somehow more immersive even than the book. Sometimes, watching narratives that have descriptions of truly awful things — like Boys Don’t Cry and 12 Years a Slave — I find myself covering my eyes. But because of the point of view in Nickel Boys, I couldn’t. It not only showed me what it was, it showed me what it felt.
Director RaMell Ross is saying something about the experience of reading about these two boys being so badly abused in Jim Crow-era Florida. He’s also saying something about the way that we view it. He is saying something about how anyone who wants to see these things on screen should really think about how we have them in our heads, how they are portrayed to us, and how we react to that portrayal. It’s stunning, and I was absolutely jaw dropped about it. — Barrie Hardymon, editor, NPR investigations
Blade Runner (1982)
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Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became the 1982 film Blade Runner. Both the movie and the book are set in a future where androids are used as slave labor. Six androids escape, and a cop named Rick Deckard — how’s that for a perfect, hard-nosed, noirish name? — has to hunt them down.
Look, there are book people and there are movie people. I’ve visited the Reddit threads; I know that a lot of book people/Philip K. Dick fans hate this movie. But I would argue that the book does what books do well, and the film does what films do well. When you read a book, you live inside it — you’re intellectually and emotionally invested, because you create its world in your mind. And in this book, the author dutifully outfits you with absolutely everything you need to know, and somehow more: You learn about the nuclear war that left big areas of the planet uninhabitable. You learn about this fallout called dust. You learn a lot about how class and status works, and why people are headed to off-world colonies. There is also a tremendous lot about a religion called Mercerism, which is founded on the notion of empathy as the highest human attribute.
The movie carves out the thinnest possible slice of the book — the action, the hunting androids part. And while it pays deference to some of the book’s big ideas, it doesn’t concern itself with all that weighty lore and backstory. It doesn’t need to, that’s not what it’s for. After all, you’re not living in this dystopian future, as you are when you read the book. You’re just visiting it for a couple hours. Androids builds the world, but Blade Runner trots you nimbly through it, doing what films do: Swapping out all those blocks of prose for the fluid visual language of cinematic mood, action and performance. — Glen Weldon, critic and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast
Starship Troopers (1997)
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My pick is a movie in which the director, Paul Verhoeven, straight up hates the source material, detests it and makes fun of it: 1997’s Starship Troopers. The 1959 book by Robert Heinlein is about space cadets and a guy named Johnny Rico going through cadet school and learning the philosophies of being in the military, and why it’s cool to live in a society in which only people who fight in the military can vote. The movie takes that premise and says — this idea: kind of fascist, right? It’s a hilarious parody of Heinlein’s book.
And yet, if you are a mouth breather, not fully understanding how it’s working on a metatextual level, the movie itself kind of rocks as propaganda, as a piece of action filmmaking. It feels like I’m watching Top Gun. Everybody’s extraordinarily good looking. It came out in the late nineties, but I first watched it on TV, and have always thought of it as a post-9/11 movie, in the context of being in school where people were trying to recruit us to join the military. It feels like an extension of Verhoeven’s RoboCop in a lot of ways, how everybody is acting not quite stiff, but extra. Everybody’s got a little asterisks on all of their lines. — Andrew Limbong, culture reporter and host of NPR’s Book of the Day podcast
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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