The Sense of an Ending
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By Julian Barnes
avg rating
3 reviews
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.
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I was surprised this book was first published only in 2011 - it seems from another time altogether. I think the hazy, slippery nature of time is probably the point of the novel. The group of sixth-form friends in the boys-only grammar school, the masters in gowns and the ‘going up’ to university at the beginning of the novel place this time somewhere in the early 1980s for me. This book’s front, back and inner covers are garlanded with praise, so I was puzzled to finish this book and feel completely underwhelmed by it. It put me in mind of other similarly underwhelming (for me) books by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. I couldn’t empathise greatly with the main character’s struggles with his comfortable middle class life, amicable separation with his wife, and obsession over a notebook left to him in the will of an old school friend but withheld from him by a bitter former girlfriend. I’d love to read someone else’s rave review of this short novel to know what I might have missed. Fortunately it’s a very short novel so little time will be lost in giving this book a go nonetheless.
I didn't want this book to end.... the way Julian Barnes writes is a delight. I was guessing right til the end, and then I finally got it!!
A great novel, and very quick to read at 150 pages.
The majority of the group enjoyed this book with one member saying that it was one of the best books that she had ever read. Three of the members read it twice. A couple of members of the group found it frustrating that it ended with questions unanswered.
