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The Sense of an Ending Paperback – May 29, 2012

by Julian Barnes (Author)

4.0 12,853 ratings

Part of: Borzoi Books (1 books)

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BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.

Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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“ ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ ”
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“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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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 nor defeated.
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Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Elegant, playful, and remarkable.” —The New Yorker

“A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] jewel of conciseness and precision. . . . The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away.” —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It’s highly original as well. And complicated, just like life.” —New York Journal of Books

“Ominous and disturbing…. This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes’s most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds.” —The Wall Street Journal

“At 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won’t regret it.” —Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle

“With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful.” —The Washington Post

“Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It’s highly original as well. And complicated, just like life.” —New York Journal of Books

“Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct – and sometimes entirely erase – our pasts. . . . Barnes’s highly wrought meditation on aging gives just as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken as it does to the momentum of its own plot.” —Vogue

“Novel, fertile and memorable . . . . A highly wrought meditation on aging, memory and regret.” —The Guardian (London)

“A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away. . . . Clever, provocative. . . . Barnes reminds his readers how fragile is the tissue of impressions we conveniently rely upon as bedrock.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Brief, beautiful. . . . That fundamentally chilling question—Am I the person I think I am?—turns out to be a surprisingly suspenseful one. . . . As Barnes so elegantly and poignantly reveals, we are all unreliable narrators, redeemed not by the accuracy of our memories but by our willingness to question them." —The Boston Globe.

“Quietly mesmerizing. . . . A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count.” —The Independent (London)

"Deliciously intriguing...with complex and subtle undertones [and] laced with Barnes' trademark wit and graceful writing." —The Washington Times

About the Author

JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty previous books including, most recently, Keeping an Eye Open. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; and in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I remember, in no particular order:

– a shiny inner wrist;

– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;

– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;

– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;

– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;

– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

* * *

I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.

There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.

The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he’d previously been taught, and if he might prove ‘scholarship material’. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.

‘Now, you’ll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.’ Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn’t be flicked, like an angler’s fly, to land on one of our heads. ‘Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?’ He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. ‘Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII’s reign?”

Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.

‘There was unrest, sir.’

An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.

‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?’

Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I’d say there was great unrest, sir.’

‘Finn, then. Are you up in this period?’

The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall’s idiocies.

‘Not really, sir, I’m afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event – even the outbreak of the First World War, for example – is that “something happened”.’

‘Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn’t it?’ After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher.

At the next break, I sought out Finn.‘I’m Tony Webster.’ He looked at me warily. ‘Great line to Hunt.’ He seemed not to know what I was referring to. ‘About something happening.’

‘Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn’t take it up.’

That wasn’t what he was supposed to say.

Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn’t.

Later that day – or perhaps another day – we had a double English period with Phil Dixon, a young master just down from Cambridge. He liked to use contemporary texts, and would throw out sudden challenges.‘“Birth, and Copulation, and Death” – that’s what T. S. Eliot says it’s all about. Any comments?’ He once compared a Shakespearean hero to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. And I remember how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes’s poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured,‘Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.’ Sometimes, he addressed us as ‘Gentlemen’. Naturally, we adored him.

That afternoon, he handed out a poem with no title, date or author’s name, gave us ten minutes to study it, then asked for our responses.

‘Shall we start with you, Finn? Put simply, what would you say this poem is about?’

Adrian looked up from his desk. ‘Eros and Thanatos, sir.’

‘Hmm. Go on.’

‘Sex and death,’ Finn continued, as if it might not just be the thickies in the back row who didn’t understand Greek. ‘Or love and death, if you prefer.The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict. Sir.’

I was probably looking more impressed than Dixon thought healthy.

‘Webster, enlighten us further.’

‘I just thought it was a poem about a barn owl, sir.’

This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.

Adrian allowed himself to be absorbed into our group, without acknowledging that it was something he sought. Perhaps he didn’t. Nor did he alter his views to accord with ours. At morning prayers he could be heard joining in the responses while Alex and I merely mimed the words, and Colin preferred the satirical ploy of the pseudo-zealot’s enthusiastic bellow.The three of us considered school sports a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive; Adrian joined the fencing club and did the high jump. We were belligerently tone-deaf; he came to school with his clarinet. When Colin denounced the family, I mocked the political system, and Alex made philosophical objections to the perceived nature of reality, Adrian kept his counsel – at first, anyway. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too – it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.

The school was in central London, and each day we travelled up to it from our separate boroughs, passing from one system of control to another. Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

‘Fucking bastards, parents,’ Colin complained one Monday lunchtime. ‘You think they’re OK when you’re little, then you realise they’re just like . . .’

‘Henry VIII, Col?’ Adrian suggested.We were beginning to get used to his sense of irony; also to the fact that it might be turned against us as well.When teasing, or calling us to seriousness, he would address me as Anthony; Alex would become Alexander, and the unlengthenable Colin shortened to Col.

‘Wouldn’t mind if my dad had half a dozen wives.’

‘And was incredibly rich.’

‘And painted by Holbein.’

‘And told the Pope to sod off.’

‘Any particular reason why they’re FBs?’ Alex asked Colin.

‘I wanted us to go to the funfair. They said they had to spend the weekedn gardening.’

Right: fucking bastards. Except to Adrian, who listened to our denunciations, but rarely joined in. And yet, it seemed to us, he had more cause than most. His mother had walked out years before, leaving his dad to cope with Adrian and his sister. This was long before the term ‘singleparent family’ came into use; back then it was ‘a broken home’, and Adrian was the only person we knew who came from one. This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn’t; he said he loved his mother and respected his father. Privately, the three of us examined his case and came up with a theory: that the key to a happy family life was for there not to be a family – or at least, not one living together. Having made this analysis, we envied Adrian the more.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to he released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

In the meantime, we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos. Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion that principles should guide actions. Previously, Alex had been regarded as the philosopher among us. He had read stuff the other two hadn’t, and might, for instance, suddenly declare, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent.’ Colin and I would consider this idea in silence for a while, then grin and carry on talking. But now Adrian’s arrival dislodged Alex from his position – or rather, gave us another choice of philosopher. If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.

Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for? We used terms like ‘Weltanschauung’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’, enjoyed saying ‘That’s philosophically self-evident’, and assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive. Our parents saw things differently, picturing their children as innocents suddenly exposed to noxious influence. So Colin’s mother referred to me as his ‘dark angel’; my father blamed Alex when he found me reading The Communist Manifesto; Colin was fingered by Alex’s parents when they caught him with a hard-boiled American crime novel. And so on. It was the same with sex. Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

One afternoon Old Joe Hunt, as if picking up Adrian’s earlier challenge, asked us to debate the origins of the First World War: specifically, the responsibility of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassin for starting the whole thing off. Back then, we were most of us absolutists. We liked Yes v No, Praise v Blame, Guilt v Innocence – or, in Marshall’s case, Unrest v Great Unrest. We liked a game that ended in a win and loss, not a draw. And so for some, the Serbian gunman, whose name is long gone from my memory, had one hundred per cent individual responsibility: take him out of the equation, and the war would never have happened. Others preferred the one hundred per cent responsibility of historical forces, which had placed the antagonistic nations on an inevitable collision course: ‘Europe was a powder keg waiting to blow’, and so on. The more anarchic, like Colin, argued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.

Hunt gave a brief nod to Colin’s attempt to undermine everything, as if morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence, something to be grown out of. Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life – and truth, and morality, and art – far more clearly than our compromised elders.

‘Finn, you’ve been quiet. You started this ball rolling. You are, as it were our Serbian gunman.’ Hunt paused to let the allusion take effect. ‘Would you care to give us the benefit of your thoughts?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘What don’t you know?’

‘Well, in one sense. I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.’ He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us.‘Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened.That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

There was a silence. And no, he wasn’t taking the piss, not in the slightest.

Old Joe Hunt looked at his watch and smiled. ‘Finn, I retire in five years. And I shall be happy to give you a reference if you care to take over.’ And he wasn’t taking the piss either.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Edition (May 29, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 163 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307947726
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307947727
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.53 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #67,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,042 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #1,228 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #5,014 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, including Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, England, England and Arthur and George, and two collections of short stories, Cross Channel and The Lemon Table.

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annika

no sense of an ending or "non-sense" of an ending--- You can't miss this if you thnk through it (spoiler alert possible)

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2011

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just read the book (twice in one day) -- i had to read this several times to believe that julian barnes wrote this. i think after reading this most helpful thread- the theme is actually about fear-- not the fear of death (mentioned over with suicides of robson and adrian etc) , the fear of living, the fear of not being right-
- the fear of "not getting it" the fear that the point of our lives and the realization that all you held to be true was just a illusion/delusion. OK OK--Now i know this is not an original thought- i see many agree with this.

First let me say I loved the book until i got to the end. Then I was frustrated and felt oddly betrayed. Why? bc it didn't make sense, so i had to check like all of us did, what the heck happened here? So I went back and read it again and again, and did some work on thinking about this. This is how it went.

I concluded the focus on plot was entirely wrong--the book was wonderful and thought provoking and meaningful,-- i loved the book-until the end why-- because i wanted answers-- i didnt get them and hence felt let down and the book sucked-- this was the first time i read it-- second and third reading i realized how much i still enjoyed reading it, because it was thought provoking, and the prose beautiful - and that's what makes a great novel for me. as masters of our own history---- the sense of an ending (for a second forget that was the title) made total sense to me.

and i assure you i read, highlighted did everything as a lawyer to get the facts/plot straight, going back charting out the histories and timelines to absolute no conclusion. or if you will, "nothing that would hold up in court'-

- and that's when i realized i maybe overlooked the obvious--- julian barnes or any author knows how to tie a plot together-- most of us have been readers our own lives-- we know an author of this caliber could not have unintentionally created these gargantuan gaps-- which must mean he did it intentionally-- and not like some of the reviews said to" just make it work",-- it's obvious from his previous work he's not 'that' kind of author---so was it possible that i missed the point? I think it's about the sense of ending self delusion-- and that's it.

the point is we think we are all right in our interpretations of our histories, our certainty of our life and the way we perceive it. we are tony.

the ending wasnt about the plot at all-- i finally realized (being a lawyer that was the hardest thing for me-- i needed it to be tight and make sense- hence my research on this particular thread to answer the same relevant questions)

i think it was more about us (the readers) along with tony "not getting it". The focus of the discussion is all on how it was supposed to make sense -- but there is a possibility that it was not about that at all-- about tony's end of self delusion/illusion and making the whole thing understood. we the readers are tony. the book is a reflection of our perceptions/illusions/ whatever, but in the end it has to make sense.

How many times in the book did tony say "if this were a novel" etc etc. How many times did he refer to "would this hold up in a court of law"-- isn't is apparent that barnes is saying this is NOT supposed to make sense. The only obvious answer if you think this through is that tony's desperation "to get it" is much like the readers desperation as well-- we don't get it do we? Or maybe we do. When you run out of trying to make sense of it in a linear and logical way, then you have to go outside of that and that leaves me with one answer --that this was intended by the author.

the ending or the whole book was about as many others have said-- just the end of illusion/self-delusion, and most importantly- we are just all interpreting the past to our own advantage/disadvantage-- which is the point of the book-- and the point of the ending or maybe beginning--

julian barnes is no novice to tight storytelling- the reason of the ending and i believe it was the author's intent to keep the answers vague and open to interpretation-- possibly laughing to see if we the readers "would never get it, never have, and never will." I believe the answer is right in front of us. and perhaps the point he was trying to get accross-- are you focusing on your reliance on tight plotlines (like we perceive our life to be mapped out like tony does/did) handing you your answers so you dont have to think at all, or getting the message that this life doesn't make sense, much like this book doesn't make sense, but the journey was reading it and developing as tony did by understanding the gaps in memory and perception and self identity??

the "sense" in the sense of an ending could just refer to the point that the book ended, the questions like life and character to be continuously and consciously examined-answers we will not receive no matter how many times we re-examine this book or our lives- which in all irony we all are doing reading this book.

What was it that ended really? Not the mystery of Adrian etc--not the 500 pounds--the only ending was the book with tony still on a journey-- his wasn't over--- or rather everyman's journey-who we all are in the end. and when does that ever end? there is no ending right? does this make sense? and does it have to?

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Ciccio

Interesting reading and afterthoughts

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2024

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Some random thoughts here:
There is this interesting recall to time at the beginning of part one and at the beginning of part two that made me recall some of Borges lines in the Aleph. Then the metaphors of the river going down and upstream are good, but abused a bit on how many times is recalled. Also interesting that the part one is kind of spoken in a more childish language to portray Tony at the time.
The text has many good passages, like the end of part one and beginning of part two, and then some suspense follows (although somewhat predictable if you read part one in a critical way) that is slowly delivered in a sort of incomplete and kind of inconsistent way for some, but I think that the best part of the book comes in some few strokes here and there that make you reflect on your life, particularly for those of us that are in that early retirement age. Looking backwards in life since most of it is in this direction as opposed to what we do while young.
I gave it 4* because it rouse some interesting thoughts and confirmed others at this age of my life.
And yes, I would have liked to know more, but I do appreciate that it is said what it has to be said in as few pages as possible (Again, quoting Borges: "Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.").

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Mark B. Friedman

Didn't make it for me, but I didn't catch all of it either the first time around

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2012

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*** Revision ***

I wanted to add something to my review after reading Colm Toibin's very positive review of the book published in the NYRB. Based on what Toibin wrote, and he is an admirablly skilled novelist himself, it seems I completely missed something of significance in Barnes' novel, namely several references to the poetry of Phillip Larkin. Sadly, I am almost totally ignorant of 20th century English poetry, so there was never a chance I would pick up on what Barnes was trying to do with those refreences in this novel.

The book's 1st person narrator alludes to the poetry in several of his musings, but never identifies Larkin by name so that you either have to know it is Larkin or be willing to stop and Google for the reference in mid-sentence.

The funny thing is I noticed the references at the time, Barnes is a very careful writer, but I never thought to stop & Google the lines. I just kept plowing along.

What strikes me that I missed is that the narrator referring several times to Larkin's exceptional lyric poetry suggests considerably more intellectual and emotional depth than I otherwise gave him credit for, based on the remaining evidence. So I misjudged him. Which leads me to want to re-think my overall judgment of the novel. Consequently, I added one star to the review. (I still don't think it is up there with the best of Barnes, but, admittedly, that is setting the bar very high.) And I will put it on my list of things to re-read someday to find out what else I missed.

I am very grateful for Toibin's review. He points out the Larkin reference at the outset of his review article, and it was as if he was aiming directly at us amateurs reviewing a modern Master and missing the point completely. (When I posted my original Amazon review, I read through many of the then current reviews, but I don't remember seeing any that made the Larkin connection.)

*** End of revision ***

This review is a little difficult for me to write, as I admire much of Barnes' previous work. I thoroughly enjoyed "Arthur & George," recommend "Flaubert's Parrot" highly, and rate his "A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters" (my personal favorite) as a post-modern classic. His best writing reflects a rare set of narrative gifts, intelligence, wit, style, easy grace, erudite, clever, great depth and range. He is one of the most accomplished writers in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, I found "The Sense of an Ending" to be one of his least satisfying novels.

One aspect of Barnes' work that warrants notice is his willingness to bend the form of the novel, so the fact that "The Sense of an Ending" is something of a departure from his last few books was not unexpected. What I found disappointing was simply the execution. Still, mediocre Barnes is way better than most, so I can still recommend the book to anyone for wants to see what all the fuss is about (the Booker award, and many rave reviews, etc.). The book is also quite short, more of a short novella, really, a quick read, an elegiac and mercifully brief little slice of a book. As it clearly has its admirers, too, you ought to be able to make your own determination of the book's worth without too much effort.

"The Sense of an Ending" utilizes an unreliable 1st person narrator and the story is delivered in two sections. Structurally and stylistically, it reminded me of "The Good Soldier," which I was first given to read in college as one of the great early 20th examples of this approach. Like "The Good Soldier," there is a jarring incident in "The Sense of an Ending" in the 1st half of the book that is rendered in a way to make the Reader sit up and notice that the story the narrator is relaying is far from the whole story. This technique works well in this novel, too, and I began to perk up at this initial revelation, which takes the form of a letter the narrator wrote in anger to an admired childhood friend that is returned to him later in life when he is leading a spare, lonely and solitary life in retirement. The angry letter to the friend was written by the narrator as a young man after hearing that the friend has taken up with the female protagonist, originally the narrator's ex-girlfriend. The fact that the invective and bitter tone of this ancient letter is considerably more toxic than our unreliable narrator ever admits to puts the Reader immediately on notice that something (everything) likely is amiss. So far, so good.

One glaring problem was that I found the narrator to be unsympathetic from the outset, a rather dull character, we are not in Bellow or Nabokov territory here, so his sudden fall from grace is a brief descent. And, structurally, having a 1st person narrator that lacks insight and wit means there is not much of it on display as he relates his dreary, personal history unless there is some interesting action for him to witness, which you won't find much of here either. Not much happens at all. To compensate, what Barnes does in "The Sense of an Ending" is have the female protagonist hammer our hero repeatedly with "You just don't get it. You never did" until the climatic, final revelation resolves the mystery for one and all. Unfortunately, I found the final revelation to be more mundane than sensational, more poignant than shocking, a final aspect of the novella that just didn't work for me.

I still look forward to the next Barnes novel - I hope I live to see many more. This one is a failed experiment. I think Barnes may have boxed himself in deciding to go with a 1st person narrator who is dull and uninteresting. When you reach the end of something like Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years , for a wonderful example of the unreliable narrator approach, you have been marvelously entertained and you wish fervently Mann had lived to finish it. While this book is well-written and admirably crafted, somehow, the whole seems less than the sum of the parts. My inclination is to think that Barnes might have thought so to, which is why he left it in miniature. My guess also is that the 2011 Man Booker Prize is well-deserved recognition for a great writer's career, and was probably not simply praise for this particular novel.

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Ha minh

The best of Julián Barnes.

Reviewed in Spain on May 10, 2023

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I've read some of his works but this one does impress me much: profoundly, slowly and amazingly twisted.

Cliente Amazon

Testo per studi universitari.

Reviewed in Italy on April 29, 2023

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Ottimo libro per l'università.

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rajiv agrawal

Awesome

Reviewed in India on September 25, 2023

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In the league of Great Expectations. Awesome!

greg martin

Highly recommended

Reviewed in Australia on July 9, 2022

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Wonderful book. Beautifully written, moving, funny. A man trying to make sense of his life and the lifelong impact of the decisions made in his youth. A pleasure to read.

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WeAreWhatWeRead

Small but mighty

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 25, 2016

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I find it hard to comprehend how people can possibly give negative reviews to this excellent little novel. For me, it ticked all the boxes: very interesting, multi-dimensional characters, a philosophical discussion here and there, easy to follow structure and a superb twist at the end. The twist, I thought, was especially powerful because it makes you re-evaluate everything you thought about the protagonists and their actions. The book is short but so masterfully written that it says everything it needed to. The language is intelligent and beautiful without ever trying too hard. The quite lofty ideas are introduced with a light hand and the discussions are well integrated in the body of the novel. It was very clever of Barnes to put in, right at the beginning and throughout, the disclaimer about memory being such an unreliable bastard. Forewarned is foretold, so we know not to, for example, get all hot and bothered if we don't believe that a bunch of teenage boys could be that astute and articulate.

All the main characters are excruciatingly unpleasant and, on the whole, thoroughly boring people, and this is where Julian Barnes shines: without undue sentimentality, he makes us care about what happened to these people, and we end up feeling desperately sorry for them. And, since every single one of us must have done something mean or shameful in our past, we might not like it but, if we're honest with ourselves, we will end up also identifying with the characters here. I didn't think it was ever about whether guilt can justifiably be felt for something other people did 40 years before. It was, I thought, about how we all screw up without meaning to do so, and we live with the consequences the best we can.

I can't praise this novel highly enough. As a worthy Man Booker winner, it does one extra thing very well: it shows that to be full-on literary, fiction doesn't need to be difficult to read, annoying or pretentious. Short and certainly not sweet, 'The Sense of an Ending' shows us all how it's done.

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