book failed to explore history's relationship with the exercise of power "via the interaction of character. And this is where Barnes disappoints: I can't remember reading a novel which showed so little interest in the politics of everyday relationships - or one, at any rate, which isolated them so ruthlessly from the speculative realm of 'ideas'". Coe found the "Parenthesis, or half-chapter" to be "both too florid and too cool at the same time", but concluded that, overall, "Readers of this novel will feel awed, I'm sure, by the range of its concerns, the thoroughness of its research, and the agility with which it covers its ground. But when there are such big themes at stake, the reader can get tired of being teased, however ever waggishly. It's like finally going to bed with the partner of your dreams and then, instead of making love, being given a jolly good tickle". Writing in The New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates began by noting, "Post-modernist in conception but accessibly straightforward in execution, Julian Barnes's fifth book is neither the novel it is presented as being nor the breezy pop-history of the world its title suggests. Influenced to varying degrees by such 20th-century presences as the inevitable Borges, Calvino and Nabokov, as well as by Roland Barthes and perhaps Michel Tournier among others, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is most usefully described as a gathering of prose pieces, some fiction, others rather like essays". She found his "concerns throughout are abstract and philosophical, though his tone is unpretentious […]. Very like Borges, Julian Barnes has a predilection for tracing leitmotifs through a variety of metamorphoses". For Oates, "Given the principle of repetition, of permutations and combinations, it is inevitable that some of Mr. Barnes's prose pieces are more successful than others.[…] the second piece, The Visitors, […] is wholly unbelievable, and the head terrorist speaks a stagey, mock-Hollywood lingo". "But", she wrote, "as A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters progresses and leitmotifs recur, often in comically ingenious combinations, the book becomes increasingly engaging and entertaining; and […] the book attains that genial mastery of tone that characterized Flaubert's Parrot." Oates concluded by writing, "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters demystifies its subjects and renders them almost ordinary: 'Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.' In so doing it deconstructs, perhaps