Fans of British Writers discussion

This is the thread for discussion of all things --comments, questions, reactions, background material, review links, etc.-- related to our group read of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. (As always, participation is voluntary!) I haven't begun reading it yet, but I expect to get my copy tomorrow, from one of the public libraries in the area.

Raised in London (though born in Leicester, in 1946), and a graduate of Oxford Univ., Julian Barnes is a pillar of the English literary establishment. He won the Man Booker Prize (the UK equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) for this novel in 2011, besides garnering a variety of other prestigious awards for other writings/achievements. Altogether, he's written 14 novels (four of them under the pen name Dan Kavanagh), as well as short stories, translations, and a number of nonfiction books.

Hmmm! Has anyone else started this one yet? (I know Oksana has.) I finished it yesterday (it's a fairly quick read, because it's short).

This book (not surprisingly, given its high profile and the author's standing with the critical community), has gotten a lot of traction here on Goodreads. It has well over 166,000 ratings, and the average rating is close to the "really liked" range, at 3.75 stars. No less than 15 of my Goodreads friends, all of whose opinions I respect, have written text reviews of it (which I've read and liked), and all but one rated it at four or five stars. (The remaining one was a three-star.)

My expectations going in weren't high, however, and I have to admit my reaction is an outlier. I can't honestly claim to have liked it; I found it depressing and uncongenial. In fairness, this is probably the result of not being the right reader for the book; I'm not drawn to modern "literary" fiction, would never have chosen to read the book on my own, and don't have enough first-hand experience or actual knowledge of the genre to rate or review it fairly, as I explain here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

I've read one book by this author and thought it was okay, but that's all. I'm not a fan of this genre either, so I'm skipping this read.

Happy reading to those participating!

Reading this book did have one influence on me! The nonfiction book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine was on my to-read shelf already; but this read convinced me to push it to high priority among my nonfiction to-reads. It's high time I made a serious, factual study of "highbrow" culture, rather than just relying on my subjective impressions of it. (Of course, the Levine book has an American context; but I don't think the phenomenon and its development would have been much different in the UK.

So far, this book hasn't engendered much discussion! Has anyone else finished it yet? If so, how did you like it? What are your main take-aways from reading it? Did you think the author had a message of some sort? If so, what do you think it was? Were any of the characters very likeable? Could any of you relate to Tony? Or perhaps to another character? Do you think the author successfully achieved his purpose here? (Why, or why not?)

I have just finished the book. I could not post my thoughts about it as I was travelling. I have been reading a lot lately about the nuances of our memory. I was intrigued by the book because it seemed to build on the fact that our memory was fallible. Tony Webster, an unreliable narrator, creates his own memories, self-servingly ascribing his own meanings to the significant events in his life. He is quite comfortable and banal in his cocoon of memories. I think this is why the author mentions some mundane tasks Tony performs in the first part of the book, e.i. descaling his kettle. In the first part of the book, his life is pretty ordinary and boring. However, the brevity and flatness of his narration imply that his life has been one long anti-climax.
In the second part, his memories are triggered by the new information. He slowly realizes the hurt he imposed on his closest friend and his wife.

Unlike Werner, I had high expectations for this book. With all the new research on the fallibility of our memory, I was looking forward to see how the author had created a narrative of memory recovery. But I was very disappointed with the book. The idea was great and intriguing, the writing was masterful, but the development of the story was poorly executed and disappointing.

That's too bad, Oksana.
A good book about memory, but not by a British author, is I'm Not Stiller/Stiller by Max Frisch.

Thank you, Rosemarie. It looks interesting!

I hope you enjoy it-I did.