Gustav Mahler was only fifty years old when he died in 1911. His may have been a relatively short life but it was one filled with extraordinary creativity and accomplishments and no small measure of personal tragedy, ill health, and sadness. Robert Seethaler’s short novel, The Last Movement, sees the great composer in the last phase of his life and making his final voyage from New York to Vienna. The plot, such as it is, finds Mahler on the deck of the ocean liner, reflecting on his life, accompanied only by a cabin boy. His memories are mostly sad ones. The tragic loss of one of his children, the stormy marriage to his beloved Alma, and the frustrations of his professional life all feature prominently as he looks back and tries to make sense of his existence. What discovery persists? The deep and inescapable solitariness of of every human life, the fundamental aloneness that cannot be avoided regardless of the successes and companions accumulated along the way.

The Last Movement is another delightful, thoughtful miniature from Seethaler, but for me it never reached the heights of beauty he achieved with A Whole Life. Worth reading? Certainly.

Memories, and especially their unreliability, seem to be one of the favorite concerns of literary novelists. Time and again I read novels in which the author reminds the reader that memory is a creative act, that memories are often inventions and fabrications, that the past is a slippery thing to retrieve, that our motives for recalling and retelling stories from our past are rarely pure, and so on and so on. It’s the center of Julian Barnes’s latest and possibly final book, Departure(s).

Is Departure(s) a novel or a memoir? Its narrator is someone called Julian Barnes. We’re told by this narrator that he is a Booker Prize-winning novelist who lives in London, a widower who learns at the start of the COVID pandemic that he has been diagnosed with a form of blood cancer. Google Julian Barnes and you will find all of this true, so what makes Departure(s) a novel? I’m not sure but it’s an interesting conceit which the author uses to confront the purpose of storytelling, fiction versus fact, the differences (and similarities) between remembering and re-telling, and much more. If this sounds a little dry, it isn’t. Barnes is having great fun here. Departure(s) is in my view one of the most approachable and endearing novels he has written. If it really is his last, I for one will be sorry.

Colm Toibin’s novella, A Long Winter, was first published in 2005 by a small press, then included in a collection, and has now been re-published in hardcover by Picador. Such maneuvers usually make me skeptical. A large publisher, waiting for new work from their famous author, fills the gap by putting out overpriced hardcovers of early or minor work. It is hardly a new ploy, but I need not have worried in this instance. Diehard fans of Toibin’s work, like me, will enjoy A Long Winter, though it never quite reaches the heights of his later novels.

The story is set in a small, isolated village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. This is a place of smallholdings and land owned and worked for generations by poor farmers. A place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where both friendships and enmities run deep. Miquel lives here with his mother and father. His much loved brother, Jordi, has just left for military service. On a cold, snowy day, Miquel’s mother, after a bitter confrontation with her husband and son, leaves the small farmhouse and never returns.

A Long Winter is a poignant story about loss, loneliness, and love. What is best? To have known love and to endure the pain of losing someone, or to be alone and never experience such loss? Toibin is a brilliantly subtle observer of human behavior and conveys so much feeling with so few words. If he occasionally falls into the trap, as he does here, of trying to do a little too much, it hardly matters because the results are still so powerful and affecting.