Beautifully written with, yes, one hell of an ending. ( )

# The Sense of an Ending ~ Julian Barnes

This is a wistful book about the fallibility and mutability of memory. The very first words in the novel are "I remember", and throughout the book we are brought to consider the untrustworthiness of our recollections. "What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed," says the narrator.

Later, he says:

>We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

Tony Webster is in his mid-60s when he receives an unexpected bequest which causes him to think back on the events of his youth, from his senior years at high school through university and a few years afterwards.

At high school, his group friends is joined by Adrian, a new arrival at the school. While he fits in well with the group, he is somewhat their intellectual and cultural superior. Adrian has a series of intense classroom debates with their history teacher about whether we can ever make a really objective assessment of historical events, even quite recent ones. But, in a wryly ironic note, the narrator comments that his own recollection of these debates is almost certainly flawed.

Tony tells of his early clumsy encounters with young women, and his constant sexual frustrations at the time. "You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country."

Eventually, during his university years, he meets Veronica: "About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile." It's this relationship which is at the core of the novel, because he has a bitter break-up with her after a year of going out together. Veronica then takes up with Adrian, Tony's intellectual school friend. And some time later, unexpectedly, Adrian takes his own life for reasons which are not clear.

All this is many decades in the past as Tony now recounts those events, but they are brought back into his life when he is advised of a bequest from Veronica's mother Sarah, who he had met only once when visiting her parents. The bequest is a modest sum of money and, astonishingly, Adrian's diary. Except that Veronica is in current possession of the diary and refuses to supply it to Tony.

Tony's attempts to get hold of the diary and his renewal of contacts with Veronica play out in the rest of the novel. He finds himself confronted with past events and actions of his own which he had forgotten, or badly mis-remembered. It takes him a long time to discover and understand the conseqences resulting from his youthful behaviour.

This is a beautifully-written novel which really makes you think about life, and how our memories can betray us; about how we can fail to grasp what has been going on, even at critical moments of our lives; and how we can deeply misunderstand other human beings.

*A Sense of an Ending* won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and deservedly so, I think. ( )

This was...ok for this reader. The main character was unpleasant. I won't say much more other than this wasn't a book I would have chosen as a Booker winner, or for the 1001 books list, or for the Morning News Tournament of Books. shrug
*Book #136 I have read of the '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'
*Book #144/340 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books ( )

Just ok. I need to think about it a little more before I really write more but I'm not sure that I fully understand what happened.

I've had a day to think this over, and read some of the comments online, and I still am not quite sure what to think. There are just so many things that don't make sense! I still can't figure out why the Mom left him the money and the diary. Why would she even think that he wanted it? And there wasn't really much hinting that she was trying to steal Veronica's men, was there? There were far more hints about something awful going on between Veronica and her brother and/or Dad.

And Adrian -- he didn't seem so wonderful and it seemed stupid that he'd kill himself over the pregnancy, especially since it seemed so foolish for the first classmate to have done so. I guess he couldn't handle the fact that he cheated with V's Mom -- but honestly, who would have ever really known that?

And am I really supposed to believe that V held that nasty letter against Tony thinking that he caused the bother to be mentally challenged? Really? Wouldn't she be far more angry at Adrian?

Somebody posted that they thought that Tony was actually the father of the mentally challenged Adrian. That's far more interesting and explains a lot more of Veronica's bitterness but can't explain the suicide.

I think this book is hammering home for me how much I dislike books that critics find wonderful. ( )

I did not see this ending coming nor did I think it was plausible. However, I loved the rest of the writing. ( )