A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by English writer Julian Barnes published in 1989 is usually described as a novel, though it is actually a collection of subtly connected short stories, in different styles.

It describes Géricault's "softening" the impact of reality in order to preserve the aestheticism of the work, or to make the story of what happened more palatable.

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.

Chapter 9, "Project Ararat", tells the story of a fictional astronaut Spike Tiggler, based on James Irwin.

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.

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.

[4] 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".

[2] For D. J. Taylor, writing in The Spectator, "[…] A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is not a novel, according to the staider definitions; it possesses no character who rises above the level of a cipher and no plot worth speaking of.

He went on to claim that "there exists a whole pack of modern writers who delight in giving the game away, in telling you that they are making it up, in indulging in outrageous manipulations of character and plot.

[…] Like a great deal of theoretical literary criticism — to which it bears a strong resemblance — A History expends vast ingenuity on proving something that might be regarded as an axiom.