A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 309, [3]. Dark blue cloth boards, blocked in gilt to spine; tan endpapers. Author's note. Fold-out colour plate facing page 124: Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. Blue dust jacket lettered in white (priced £11.95 net to front flap). Individual chapters originally published in The New Yorker. Published in a print run of 13,000 copies.

An offbeat novel, beginning with a revisionist account of Noah's Ark, and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, comprising fable, bestiary, the epistolary form, essay, travelogue, legal report, art criticism and an invented genre Barnes calls 'love prose'. Some critics, daunted by the lack of a singular plot, the disruption of chronology and the absence of narrative cohesion, referred to the book as a collection of tales, stories or short stories.

Barnes rejects the appellation since the book consists of a recurrence of motifs, sea voyages, catastrophes, woodworms, and analogies between characters, all carefully woven into the various chapters through echoes, repeated phrases, and common themes: "It was conceived as a whole and executed as a whole. Things in it thicken and deepen... My line now is I'm a novelist and if I say it's a novel, it is." Asked by Michael Ignatieff as to how autobiographical was the disquisition on love he calls 'Parenthesis?', the half-chapter in the title, Barnes replied: "Entirely." "Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising... My novel of the year." –Nadine Gordimer

[Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Readers' Guides. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006]