“There is accumulation .There is responsibility .And beyond these,there is unrest.There is great unrest.”
-Julian Barnes,The Sense of an Ending
Hi Guys,This is my review of the novella “the sense of an ending”. This book was on my tbr list for a long time.Well after overcoming my state of Inertia ,I read it and found it quite intriguing. The Story is about a middle-aged man named Tony Webster and the sudden change in his life at arrival of a letter .
There was our protagonist living a calm divorced life without any extraordinary happening in his life and then bam, a letter arrives through the legal gateway from the mother of his ex-girlfriend enclosing an amount of 500$. From there begins the first part of our book and there we go through the school and college days and wander in the philosophical and youthful thinking of Tony and his versatile sex-hungry,book-hungry group,their rebel mindset and their perception of History . Life along with its usual surprises happen to them and they lose contact with each other.
In the second part ,Tony struggles with the imperfection of memories and seems confused and as we can put self-deluded.
I don’t want to write the whole story here ,but we can say that the main focus of author was on the ambiguity of our perception of our life history and we are often deluded.We create a past that doesn’t exist and our versions of history are often not correct.
All over the read was quite philosophical ,yet the ending was rather ambiguous.I guess not giving an certain ending justifies the title “the sense of an ending”.
It strikes me that this may be one difference between youth and age:when we are young ,we invent different futures for ourselves;when we are old ,we invent different past for others.
Black as My Coffee 