The Sense of an Ending is remarkable.

Author: Julian barnes

Year of Publication: August 2011

PLOT: 5/5

CHARACTERS: 4/5

WRITING: 5/5

CLIMAX: 5/5

ENTERTAINMENT: 5/5

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“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”

For the first few chapters, this reads like a routine account of the life of a common man who isn’t aware of the people around him and doesn’t think much of himself. The fact that two distinct stories were being written simultaneously is only revealed towards the conclusion, and even though the hints to the second story were so obvious, you can only realize them in retrospect and wonder how you could have missed them. You question how the main character could have misunderstood, overlooked, and ignored them as well. Or did he? Perhaps he was only able to connect the dots in retrospect.

Julian Barnes writing is genius & delicious. In this gripping book, a middle-aged man struggles with a history he has never given much thought to—until two best pals from boyhood, one dead and the other painfully alive, return with a vengeance. After creating a life for himself, Tony Webster believed he had left all of this behind. By this point, his marriage, family, and profession had ended in a civil divorce and retirement. However, he is later confronted with an enigmatic inheritance that forces him to reevaluate his understanding of many concepts he had previously accepted as true as well as his assessment of his own character and role in the universe.

This is unquestionably one of the novels I heartily recommend! A novel of extraordinary psychological and emotional depth and sophistication that begs to be read in one sitting. This book explores narratives—the stories we tell ourselves about the past—in a fascinating way. This book challenges the reader to consider their own stories.

Favourite quotes that stayed for long with me:

What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.

The more you learn, the less you fear. “Learn” not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

The book The Sense of an Ending explores memory, how it helps and fails us, and how our perceptions of the past are influenced by our desires for certain answers.