prevented from landing in the United States and other countries. Chapter 8, "Upstream!", consists of letters from an actor who travels to a remote jungle for a film project, described as similar to The Mission (1986). His letters grow more philosophical and complicated as he deals with the living situations, the personalities of his costars and the director, and the peculiarities of the indigenous population, coming to a climax when his colleague is drowned in an accident with a raft. The unnumbered half-chapter, "Parenthesis", is inserted between Chapters 8 and 9. It is in the form of an essay rather than a short story and offers a philosophical discussion on love, and briefly history. There is a direct reference to Julian Barnes in this half chapter. A parallel is drawn with El Greco's painting Burial of the Count of Orgaz, in which the artist confronts the viewer. The piece includes a discussion of lines from Philip Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb" ("What will survive of us is love") and from W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" ("We must love one another or die"). Chapter 9, "Project Ararat", tells the story of a fictional astronaut Spike Tiggler, based on James Irwin. Tiggler launches an expedition to recover what remains of Noah's Ark. There is overlap with Chapter 6, "The Mountain." Chapter 10, "The Dream", is an account of a modernized version of heaven, where even Hitler is found. It is individualised for each person and the occupants eventually "die". Critical reception Reviewing A History of the World in 10½ Chapters for The Guardian, Jonathan Coe found that it, "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". He added that, "To dismiss the book as being too clever (or merely clever, for that matter) would be ungenerous as well as facile. Barnes is clearly serious about his themes, and there's more than a nod towards emotional commitment. One of his central concerns is the nature of history, and naturally enough - as a good, free-thinking, commonsense, late-20th-century liberal - he rejects any theory of history as pattern or continuum: 'It's more like a multi-media collage,' he explains, and this, of course, is the rationale behind the novel's own structural disjointedness". Coe judged that the