"A history of the world in 10½ chapters" by Julian Barnes (Picador, 1989)

I read it a long time ago and liked it.

• 1. The stowaway - The narrator’s a stowaway on the Ark. A woodworm. Lots of jokes: animals were tempted by prizes of luxury cruises for 2; chamelions learnt disguise to avoid being eaten by Noah. Noah throws carcasses overboard.
• 2. The visitors - Franklin Hughes is guest academic TV celeb on a cruise. Armed terrorists board. They get him to tell his audience that they were going to kill a pair of passengers each hour until their demands are met. Bodies are thrown overboard. American Special Forces board, sorting things out.
• 3. The wars of religion - It’s 1460. At a court-case a priest is called upon to defend woodworms against excommunication. A satire on theology?
• 4. The survivor - A woman, fearing nuclear war, leaves with 2 cats on a yacht. Paragraphs alternate between 1st and 3rd person. At the end we might be at a therapy session or inside her head on an island.
• 5. Shipwreck - We’re told what happened about the Medusa. Then we learn about how Gericault turned the catastrophe into art. The painting doesn't match the facts though Gericault interviewed survivors. He nearly painted the moment of mutiny. The author wonders why the Ark isn’t often painted, and at the end wonders if woodworm is in the painting's frame
• 6. The Mountain - Dublin 1837. A devout daughter decides to save her dead father's soul by going to the re-start of humanity, Mount Ararat. Disgusted by the behaviour of the monks there, she asks to be abandoned in a cave.
• 7. Three simple stories - Meeting a survivor of the Titanic. Analysing the Jonah story. The story of the St Louis, which in 1939 carried Jews to Cuba then back to Europe in 40 days.
• 8 Upstream! - A London-based actor in the Venezuelan jungle is playing a priest in a film based on a supposedly true story about 2 priests and a raft. He's writing letters to his girlfriend, apologising for his infidelity. He begins to respect the natives. His co-star dies, perhaps at the hands of the natives, who steal the crew's equipment. The film's abandoned and his girlfriend dumps him.
• Parenthesis - About love. He quotes Mavis Gallant - "The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature - or for love". He writes that he's been in love twice: once happily and once unhappily. The latter taught him more about love.
• 9. Project Ararat - An astronaut on the moon hears God say "Find Noah's Ark". Back home he tells his disappointed wife this, but nobody else. He fundraises to get money to go to Mount Ararat, spending weeks there. He finds a skeleton in a cave. He brings some of the bones back home. It turns out to be the woman's body from "6. The Mountain". He fundraises for another trip.
• 10. The dream - A man wakes up in heaven. He has a good enough time for centuries. He talks with the rep to find out how it all works. He visits Hell, which is like a theme park. He's told that all heaven's residents want to die in the end.

Other reviews

• Patrick T Reardon (As Barnes sees it, the history of the world is an endless series of Ark-like voyages headed nowhere in particular. Each of us on an Ark-like voyage. And each of us has an Ark that is being slowly but surely eaten away by some form of woodworm. A fairly bleak outlook. Yes. But then there is his “Parentheses,” a paean to love in all its oddity.)
• Jonathan Coe (while hardly a ground-breaking piece of experimentalism, succeeds to the extent that it is both intelligent and reasonably accessible. Where it falls down is in denying its reader any real focus of human attention or involvement. On this level, in fact, I found it an arid book indeed. ... Barnes's genuine cleverness is too obviously on show here to make such attempts at buffoonery seem anything other than an annoying pose. ... As one perceptive critic put it in 1975: 'Such moments of intended authenticity... become, in their turn, conceits, and honesty, despite the author's best endeavours, becomes self-defeating. It is the Catch-22 of fiction.' (The critic, by the way, was Julian Barnes; but he might have changed his mind since then.))