In one of our bathrooms we keep a drum of water which is usually half-filled and always uncovered. Occasionally, for reasons I do not know, a rat would fall into it. There'd be no way for it to climb back out. And as no one in our household is plucky enough to handle a live rat, we'll just let it stay there until it tires and finally drowns. The big black ones succumb faster than the smaller ones. The record holder of sorts was a really tough, brown, less-than-medium-sized rat athlete who kept on swimming for almost three days. It robbed me of at least two chapters of the book I was then reading because instead of the book keeping me company while I take a dump, I was watching this rat frantically trying to keep its nose above water, its four feet in a nonstop climbing motion, unaware of the futility of it all.

Julian Barnes here, a multi-awarded novelist (see my review of his "Flaubert's Parrot" which gave me so much pleasure that it made me finally read Flaubert's Madame Bovary), did something like one of these rats in our drum of water. In the end he likewise drowned. Many readers disliked this book for this but I am giving his performance here five stars for it was far from a 244-paged monotonous rat swim. He exhibited vastly different strokes, leaped in the air like a dolphin, dove underneath the water, tried to climb the slippery wall of the drum, cried, laughed, reminisced, joked, prayed, cursed the meaningless void, expressed hope, shouted his despair, danced, and told anecdotes about his friends, family and writers (and oh, what stories he tells about them, both the living and the dead!).

He was already over 60 years old when he wrote this book. Apparentlly still healthy but with constant thoughts of his mortality and certain (for him) permanent obliteration. His maternal grandparents, his parents and his only sibling (a brother who teaches philosophy) were all either atheists or agnostics. He himself does not believe in God or in the afterlife ("Dead is dead," said Gertrude Stein, an author which Julian Barnes surprisingly never referenced). He explains his reasons, but does not preach or attempt to convert. Rather, with his humor, intelligence, wit and keen mind he explores every angle of life's big questions about God, death, the act of dying, absurdity versus meaning, eternal life, oblivion, existence and the void.

A brave effort and a mesmerizing performance.