Play Book Tag discussion

The Sense of an Ending
Rating: 4.5 stars

Cross posted to Decathlon and Listopia

GR synopsis:
The Sense of an Ending follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

The book slowly builds up a quietly devastating plot that is not resolved until the ending, and this was done in such an elegant way that I almost wanted to turn the book around and start over again in the hope of getting more of the clues I potentially missed early on. However, I guess I knew that would not give me all the answers anyhow, as the theme of the book deals with the unreliable juncture of memory, time, and history, with aging and remorse thrown in.

I found the novel very compelling, and like the blurbs say, it begs to be read in a single setting. I couldn’t do that, but I found myself walking extra distance to/from work to be able to listen to it a bit more. I initially gave it four stars, but it might be worthy of a five star.

This quote sums it up nicely;

“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.”

I adore his writing. It was a shame he didn’t make the Booker list this year.

I really enjoyed this book as well. There is a movie too.

Susie wrote: "I adore his writing. It was a shame he didn’t make the Booker list this year."

It was wonderful. This was my first book by Barnes, so I definitely need to get to more of his works. Do you have any you can recommend?

Diane wrote: "I really enjoyed this book as well. There is a movie too."

I rented the movie from the library as soon as I finished the book, it was good as well :-)