Julian Barnes: I've become more left-wing because the center has moved rightwards'

"As he did in his masterful Flaubert's Parrot, the British author returns in this new work to a hybrid style that blends fiction and nonfiction, imagination and erudition. And once again he plays with the traps of the past and memory, as he did in The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. In Departures, a couple, Stephen and Jean, attempt without much success to rekindle their idealized university romance half a century later."

"The walls are crowded with blackandwhite photographs of writers and composers who have shaped his work Flaubert, Chekhov, Philip Larkin, Shostakovich. The shelves overflow with books. A handsome 1930s billiard table sits at the center of his study. Barnes no longer plays; he's stopped by an old shoulder injury. In its place, books pile up across the felt. The author overcame the death of the love of his life, literary agent Pat Kavanagh (in 2008, aged 68), and lives with Rachel Cugnoni,"

Julian Barnes, age 80, states Departures will be his last book while he plans to continue essays and newspaper pieces. Departures returns to a hybrid mode blending fiction and nonfiction, imagination and erudition, and revisits themes of memory and the traps of the past. The narrative follows Stephen and Jean as they attempt to rekindle an idealized university romance half a century later. Barnes lives in a Victorian house filled with books and black-and-white photographs of influential writers and composers. He lost Pat Kavanagh in 2008, lives with Rachel Cugnoni, and manages incurable but treatable blood cancer with regular hospital visits.

Read at english.elpais.com