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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

3.73 · Rating details · 153,779 ratings · 16,326 reviews

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.

This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood fr ...more

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Hardcover, 1st edition, 150 pages

Published August 4th 2011 by Jonathan Cape

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Jan 22, 2017 Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it

This is by Julian Barnes so we know it will focus on memory and its tricks. Some examples: “…but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” And “I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.” And “again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

The book is a Booker This is by Julian Barnes so we know it will focus on memory and its tricks. Some examples: “…but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” And “I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.” And “again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

The book is a Booker Prize winner, so we expect and we get great writing. “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.”

There’s not a lot of point in adding an extensive review to book with 12,000 already on GR although it’s interesting to note that its rating, 3.7 is a bit on the low side. Barnes seems to be a writer that you like or you don’t.

The basic story is that we have a man of retirement age who is a doofus. He has a couple of adult children he’s never shown much interest in, and an ex- that he meets with for an occasional lunch. The story goes back to his college days and early romances when he broke up with one girl who dumped him for another buddy in his group. (view spoiler)

His buddy died years ago so he now tries to contact his old flame and make amends. (He missed all the self-help books about “never explain…”) He meets with her and they email a bit. Everything is different from what he believes happened and I find the denouement a stretch; it’s implausible that his ex-girlfriend would not reveal the surprise twist at the end but just say things like “you still don’t get it do you?” Well of course he can’t get it because of the plot device.

It’s been said that over the course of a great novel that the main character has to experience change. However this guy seems to exemplify the maxim: Once an ass, always an ass. ...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Petra-X Off having adventures rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, 2013-reviews, reviewed, 10-star-books

Just brilliant. The book at first appears, right to the end, to be a rather mundane story of the life of an ordinary man who is neither perceptive about the people around him nor does he see himself in a clear light. Only at the end is it apparent that there were two different stories being written at the same time and you can perceive all the clues to the second story only in hindsight although they were so clear, you wonder how you could have missed them. You wonder how the protagonist could h ...more

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Dec 17, 2011 K.D. Absolutely rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: Angus Miranda

Shelves: favorites, stylish, booker

When Veronika said, ”You don’t get it. You never did.” I told myself: so, why don’t you tell him? Grrr. If only these people (Barnes’ characters) would sit down and discuss amongst themselves, then there will be no problem. Then Tony Webster will not have to spend all his life trying to grapple the memories he thought to be contained in his whole pathetic life. You see, Tony Webster is a double-sided man: he seems to be this gentle go-with-the-flow nice man who respects his girlfriend not to hav When Veronika said, ”You don’t get it. You never did.” I told myself: so, why don’t you tell him? Grrr. If only these people (Barnes’ characters) would sit down and discuss amongst themselves, then there will be no problem. Then Tony Webster will not have to spend all his life trying to grapple the memories he thought to be contained in his whole pathetic life. You see, Tony Webster is a double-sided man: he seems to be this gentle go-with-the-flow nice man who respects his girlfriend not to have real sex until they are ready. However, when his girlfriend dumps him for Tony Webster’s friend, he writes the bitterest letter that I’ve read coming from a dumped lover. The kind of letter that would put to shame even the vilest and the most manipulating characters of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in his masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

But that slow tease makes the reading very interesting and fun. The book is thin and the letters are big. Don’t be deceived though. The brevity does not reflect the jam-packed plot and the intricate thoughts that go on inside the mind of Tony Webster. You see, the story is a book narrated in the first person and Tony Webster is what they call in literature, film or theatre, as unreliable narrator. Barnes deceives the reader into believing that the character of Tony Webster in the first part of the story will be consistent. Until the revelation in the second part but I did not feel disgustingly deceived. I was amused, surprised but definitely bewildered by the brilliancy on how Barnes put everything intricately together. The prose is crisp, clear and concise. Definitely British but it is not stiff and rigid. This is my first Barnes and I used to think before that his prose would be a challenge to enjoy. Definitely not: it is very readable and easy to comprehend even for an Asian like me. The prose, plot, thethe characters, the sequence of the events, the thoughts that run in Tony Webster’s mind, big revelation in the end… They are all part of the big beautiful ensemble that delivers an exceptionally nice written novella.

Ah oh, the theme. It is something that I can truly relate to: a middle-age retired man who tried to live a peaceful ordinary British life. With a grown-up daughter and an ex-wife who he still maintains as a friend, he now lives alone with only the memoirs of how he thought his life went through as a young man. I think that this looking back to the what-ifs is one of the favorite pastimes of middle-age people during their spare quite time. And I am beginning to imbibe this hobby as I am approaching retirement ha ha.

You will pick this book if: 1. You make sure that you read all the Man Booker winning books; 2. You are a fan of Julian Barnes; or 3. You believe in my rating and you like this review.

You will like this book if: 1. You pretend to like or actually like less populist contemporary books; 2. You like all works of Julian Barnes and you hate to have an exception; and 3. You are an old or middle-age man and you are fond of thinking of your what-ifs.

Undoubtedly, one of the best books I’ve read this year. May the Good Lord bless you with more years so you can write more beautiful novels, Mr. Barnes.
...more

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Sep 11, 2015 Paul Bryant rated it did not like it

Shelves: novels

Such was the big fat craptastic big-reveal groanworthy lurid pulpy Victorian melodramatic you-got-to-be-kidding ending-with-no-sense that the two stars this novel was hanging on to by its fingernails up to page 130 slipped out of its grasp and it ended up with the ignominious one star, but since that puts it in the same company as many much-loved novels it may well be worn as a Badge Of Honour – I envisage one of those peelable stickers on all future editions A P BRYANT ONE STAR NOVEL!! and Juli Such was the big fat craptastic big-reveal groanworthy lurid pulpy Victorian melodramatic you-got-to-be-kidding ending-with-no-sense that the two stars this novel was hanging on to by its fingernails up to page 130 slipped out of its grasp and it ended up with the ignominious one star, but since that puts it in the same company as many much-loved novels it may well be worn as a Badge Of Honour – I envisage one of those peelable stickers on all future editions A P BRYANT ONE STAR NOVEL!! and Julian Barnes can swank around with Zadie Smith, Richard Ford and Don DeLillo and read each other their own one star reviews.

It’s one thing to realise that as a person with a fiction addiction you must tread a lonely path because in Real Life as you may know not that many people are as hopelessly addicted as we here on Goodreads. But then it’s another thing to have to admit that within that already small (but intense, intense) community of readers you are now part of a minority since the majority appear to be besotted with YA/adult romance/fantasy etc. So, mainstream literature is now a minority sport like lacrosse or curling, and should be rebranded. But then, even stranger, to find oneself as the minority of the minority of the minority…. Which happens when the majority of the minority are all raving about a novel that turns out to be The Sense of an Ending.

In Flaubert’s Parrot by JB a guy moons around in France on his own and has thoughts about his life and about Flaubert and you gradually realise that he’s suppressing some horrible thing he doesn’t want to think about. The atmosphere in that novel is transfixing, it’s maximum understated comedy horror. Top novel. This one, 150 pages of picking over an old friendship and a first romance the banal entanglements of which come to a vague watery light when the deceased mother of the ancient girlfriend (it was all 40 years ago) bequeaths to our boring narrator a diary. Like a bolt from the blue.

This was a novel where all the detail of the guy’s current mildly depressed defeated mouldering away English life were exactly and toe-curlingly right, and all the actual incidents in the plot (of which there are five, I think, maybe five and a half) are completely wrong, simply ridiculous – no one would do that. The girlfriend would not (redacted), the mother would totally not (redacted) and if the friend really did (redacted) then the narrator (redacted). This is why a novel can be both intelligent (he drops in a sprinkling of Readers Digest Improve Your Conversation by Quoting Philosophy snippets and he’s forever going on about Time, what is Time, can we control Time or does Time control Us, can Time go backwards or sidewards, can Time flow up one nostril and down the Other?) and also stupid (people don’t behave like this).

This was a Booker prize winner but it was one of the Bad Bookers like Vernon God Little. There are Good Bookers, like Wolf Hall and The White Tiger. Read the good Bookers, avoid the Bad. Keep on the sunny side of life.
...more

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Dec 06, 2011 Auntjenny rated it did not like it

Definitely has a plot, but a pathetic one. Thin characters, cliched ideas. I feel annoyed by having read this book. OK, there was one good quote: “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.”

But ultimately, the plot is a gimmick! I don't understand how this won the Booker Prize.

What the heck did Tony ever do to anyone except send a crappy letter to an ex-girlfrien ...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Cecily rated it it was amazing

Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction, solitary-protagonist, unreliable-narrators

This is an exploration of memory, exquisitely written as the thoughts of an old man, looking back on his life - good enough to merit 5*, despite the somewhat contrived ending (ironic, given the title).

Imagery

It opens with six watery images (an unexpected word in several of them makes them more vivid), each of which form part of the story:

“I remember, in no particular order:
- a shiny inner wrist;
- steam rising from a wet sink as a frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
- gouts of sperm circling ...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Emily May rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: philosophy fanatics

Recommended to Emily May by: Melina Marchetta

Shelves: 2012

I think my years as a philosophy student were actually detrimental to my enjoyment of this short novel about life and memory. The stuff that has left other people reeling in amazement reminded me of little more than just another essay on the mind and the way we think, the way we interpret events and the way our memories can let us down. Mr Barnes is clearly a clever man and his writing is a touch complex but always charming. However, is this really that original anymore?

I don't think so. I can point you towards many - even young adult - books with equally unreliable narrators that are much more engaging, gripping and altogether more rewarding - even if they do lack the complexity of the mind-delving going on in The Sense of an Ending. And, though Barnes thoroughly explores the mind of Tony Webster, I found him to be a painfully bland and unexciting protagonist that no amount of philosophical thought could save.

This is a book that will suit people who like to think about everything. It is more or less the story of a very average man who pulls apart and analyses his memory of school, first love, first sexual encounters, his marriage... everything about his life. I thought I was the kind of person who likes to question things in an unbelievably anal way. For example, the other night I had the most pointless and stupid discussion with my dad about knowledge, where he said that he knew there were blind people in Spain (don't ask, just don't ask), and I said he couldn't possibly know that for certain unless he'd gone to Spain and met a blind person. He said he could. Then I said he couldn't. As you can tell, it was a very productive evening. But my point is that I enjoy philosophy.

Tony Webster, however, philosophises about his whole life, a life that just isn't interesting enough for me to care about the "reasons" behind its events. I like, in theory, the idea that everything isn't always as simple as it seems, that things run deeper, that people have hidden and questionable motivations for the things they do and say, and that memory is not the truth but the story we tell ourselves. The idea of this book, I like. And some people love the simplistic side of it, the analysis of real and everyday life, rather than using philosophy to look at murder or something equally dramatic. But I don't believe that Tony's story was exciting enough to want to question. I actually don't care why Adrian did what he did, or why Veronica's mother behaved in a certain way. Perhaps my biggest problem with this book is that I don't care about Tony.

Why would I want to hurt my brain straining to think about something that doesn't interest me? Some people obviously saw something much deeper in this, perhaps a message about society as a whole that says something important about our current world... perhaps not. I personally saw it as a failed attempt to turn the mediocre into something poetic. But it was too nicely written to be one star. ...more

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Apr 01, 2016 Steve rated it really liked it

Some of my closest GR friends may have noticed that I’ve been less active around here lately. Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. It’s nothing dire, but it’s still sad for me to have to say. As it turns out, I’m going to have to hang up my spurs, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with my friends here, and not even much to do with me. It has to do with my niece’s husband who until recently had been a web application developer at Goodreads. The past perfect tense applies because, wh ...more

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Sep 26, 2014 Adina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: booker, british, 1001, mcewan-barnes-coetzee-and-co, short, favorites

4.5*

Update: There is going to be a movie after the book and it is coming out this month! if interested you can see the trailer here: https://www.facebook.com/vintagebooks...

A story about the unreliability of memory and how we can chose to forget or to reinvent the past in order not to remember disturbing truths.

I discovered this book by Julian Barnes when reading comments about Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan which is a book I also enjoyed. The tone of the story is quite similar in some ways. Barne ...more

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Dec 10, 2011 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I had never really intended to read this book, and I certainly had no intention of owning it.

I was browsing in a B&N sitting out a winter storm in Lincoln, Nebraska and ran across of stack of The Sense of an Ending with BOOKER PRIZE WINNER blazoned across the front of the book. I dug through the stack of third printings and there near the bottom was one book with BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE on the cover. Well it is sort of cosmic for a collector such as I to find one first American edition in the ...more

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Mar 29, 2019 JV (semi-hiatus) rated it liked it

Shelves: 2019, audiobooks, curiouser-and-curiouser, literary-fiction, contemporary, brit-lit

Stupefy (according to Cambridge Online Dictionary)
verb UK /ˈstjuː.pɪ.faɪ/ | US /ˈstuː.pə.faɪ/

(1) to make someone unable to think clearly
(2) to surprise or shock someone very much

Good day, curious reader! You might be flummoxed as to why I have decided to define the word "stupefy" first. Fortunately, it has something to do with this narrative as it left me gobsmacked or stupefied after reading this short novel. Apparently, the two aforementioned definitions did work their magic through me ...more

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Nov 10, 2011 Jason rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, reviewed, for-kindle

Tony Webster is a shallow douchebag.

First of all, let’s get something straight. I don’t believe people should be judged too harshly for behavior they exhibited in adolescence. That’s not to say that people are not responsible for actions they committed in their youth; it just means that their actions as teenagers do not necessarily reflect the kind of people they will become as adults. So my problem with Tony Webster isn’t that he was an asshole in high school. In fact, I’d probably be a bit hyp Tony Webster is a shallow douchebag.

First of all, let’s get something straight. I don’t believe people should be judged too harshly for behavior they exhibited in adolescence. That’s not to say that people are not responsible for actions they committed in their youth; it just means that their actions as teenagers do not necessarily reflect the kind of people they will become as adults. So my problem with Tony Webster isn’t that he was an asshole in high school. In fact, I’d probably be a bit hypocritical to judge him in that context because I might have been a asshole myself at that age. Maybe. But I can assure you I am not an asshole now and if I’m to be judged on the kind of person I am, I’d like for that judgment to consider me only in my current adult state, please. No, the problem with Tony Webster has nothing to do with his high school self—it’s the fact that over the course of forty years, he has not changed one single bit.

As Tony divulges the circumstances surrounding a pivotal juncture in his youth, he would have you believe that his best friend was a disloyal SOB, his girlfriend a Cutthroat Bitch, and he perfectly justified in telling them both to fuck off. And perhaps he was. Again, that is not the problem I have with Tony Webster. Even that he holds on so tightly to warped memories as reasons for his past behavior (which are really justifications) is something I do not hold against him—we all do that to a certain extent. It’s called self-preservation. But where I start having issues with Tony is where he begins to dwell on these events and obsess over these people he hasn’t seen in decades in a way that is not normal or healthy. If his reasons were sincere, if he actually felt like he needed to atone for something, then I might understand. But that is not what he’s doing. No, he wants to ingratiate himself into these people’s lives, forty years later, just so they can be left with a positive impression of him! See, Tony might think he has you convinced he’s grown and matured into a considerate human person, but the only one he’s convinced is himself, because Tony is in fact the same self-serving bastard he was when he was fifteen. It does make you reconsider his life details in a new light, though: his failed marriage, the distant relationship he has with his daughter, his pathetic lack of friends. I mean it’s one thing to be an unreliable narrator, but here we have one who’s delusional, too.

History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

The final straw for me was when he (view spoiler).

This book does present an interesting supposition, though—that past events are easier to understand from the historical perspective, the fact that one can see an event in its entirety, more objectively, and from various angles with the passage of time, which allows for a more accurate account of that event. In other words, it’s hard to maintain a clear perspective on something while in the thick of things. Although the narrator uses this to justify his own shallow behavior, I thought it was a pretty enlightening concept nonetheless. ...more

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Feb 04, 2012 Teresa rated it it was amazing

This book got under my skin. Not in the negative way, like what Tony, the narrator, may be doing, or trying to do, to Veronica, who 40 years ago was his first serious girlfriend, but in the way he describes how his ex-wife would dress a chicken -- slipping butter and herbs under the skin, with a delicate hand, never breaking the outer layer. I was hooked from the first page and even when I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about it, even in my sleep, or, more likely, semi-sleep. I was pulled int ...more

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Jan 26, 2017 Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽ by: Petra-X Off having adventures

Shelves: literary-stuff, made-me-think

This enigmatic literary fiction novel does a great job of playing with perceptions. I pulled out this short Booker Prize novel one night, thinking I'd just read a bit to get a feel for it, to know what to tell my book club about it, since I needed to suggest a choice of 4 or 5 books to my book club the next day for their vote. A few hours later I finished the book, moved but a little bewildered.

In the first fifty pages the narrator, Tony, tells of some events in his high school and college days This enigmatic literary fiction novel does a great job of playing with perceptions. I pulled out this short Booker Prize novel one night, thinking I'd just read a bit to get a feel for it, to know what to tell my book club about it, since I needed to suggest a choice of 4 or 5 books to my book club the next day for their vote. A few hours later I finished the book, moved but a little bewildered.

In the first fifty pages the narrator, Tony, tells of some events in his high school and college days: a group of rather pretentious friends (who, for the most part, play at being intellectuals), a relationship with a girl, Veronica, that didn't work out, a friend's suicide, marriage, divorce, retirement ... it sounds pretty pedestrian when he tells about it, though Julian Barnes has a wonderful way with words.

Then the next hundred pages happen: a bequest in a will. A short, enigmatic note from the woman who died. A renewed acquaintance with Veronica. More surprises. (view spoiler)

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

Some readers dislike Tony enough that it dampens or ruins their enjoyment of the book, but I had a great deal of sympathy for him.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded -- and how pitiful that was.

But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly.

I've felt those feelings.

This blog has one writer's explanation of what was really happening, and an extremely long but intensely interesting comment section where various readers chip in with their theories and insights, which gave me a lot of food for thought. (view spoiler)

So much food for thought ... and debate ... in this one!

Content notes: Scattered F-bombs and some sexual content. ...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Nataliya rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Kris, Jim, Ian Graye

Recommended to Nataliya by: Iffletoe

Shelves: 2013-reads, booker-winners-and-nominees

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending has a lot packed in the short 150 or so pages.

Memory and history, responsibility and blame, deceit, misunderstandings, aging, guilt, remorse - and, of course, a safely passive coasting on the smooth sailing surface of life, occasionally interrupted by the tidal waves of unexpected upheavals and disturbances, just like Severn Bore, seen once by Tony Webster and Veronica.

"We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events

"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. But it’s not convenient — it’s not useful — to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."

It is the story of fickleness and subjectivity of memory that creates the unreliable histories we tell ourselves; the dissonance between what happened and what stories we choose to tell ourselves - because such unconscious lies are often what we just happen to need to feel alright about ourselves.

And so we construct our own memories and write our life stories the way it suits us.

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves."

It's the story that touches on allotting responsibility and blame - be it for the Great War or a breakup or a divorce or a suicide - and learn that the answers may not always be there. We can come up with a catchy and cheeky answers ('History is the lies of the winners', pretentiously and predictably states teenage Tony Webster with all the world-weariness of a sixteen-year-old) - but ultimately, the answers are never clear-cut, and everything is in the grey zone, and the realization is that of a sixty-year-old Tony:

"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."

It's a melancholic reflection of the reality of aging and the little differences between 'settling for it' and 'accepting reality'. And, what's pathetically and sadly true, we fail to really grow and change at the end of our life stories - after all, Life is not really Literature. Yeah, it's not a book to read when you're feeling a bit down on yourself. Because at the end "what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed."

"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."

With this introduction, we take a dive into the mind of Tony Webster - a self-centered average guy who, like the rest of us, uses the subjectivity of memory to be the hero in his story, to be who he needs himself to be, to unconsciously tinker with the events until they seem just right. 'Yes, I remember exactly what happened!' is not that reliable, and Tony comes to learn that. Whether he actually takes something important from this experience - well, that's debatable

"It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."

We meet Tony at sixteen, through the recollection of his almost five decades older self. The older Tony constantly interrupts his own narration to remind us of the subjectivity of his memory, setting himself up as the ultimate unreliable narrator. This story resembles a coming-of-age book at the beginning (with all those pseudo- and not-so-pseudo-intellectual teenagers in the British prep school in the 1960s waxing on and on about philosophical matters with the smugness inherent to the adolescence) - but it turns out to be anything but.

"Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records— in words, sound, pictures— you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping."

Tony Webster is pathetic, self-centered and self-righteous. His life did not turn out the way he thought it'd be ("This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.")- and he has been coasting through it, just an average guy leading an average life, far from the inspirations he may have had when back in his teens he was friends with a bright young philosopher (yes, a bit full of himself - but who isn't at that age?) Adrian Finn, who produces such pompous little gems as this one:

"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

And then, a few years later, Tony's university girlfriend Veronica Ford(the one he views through the prism of his memories as a supreme bitch) dumped him and dated Adrian, and then Adrian committed suicide, and then there were four unexciting mediocre decades, and now the above ex-girlfriend's mother left Adrian's diary to Tony - but the ex-girlfriend is not willing to part with what Tony comes to view as his rightful legacy. And along the path to reclaim that diary Tony embarks on a quest to turn remorse into guilt and guilt into forgiveness - in the most self-centered way possible. Along the way he also toys with shouldering responsibility for what happened in the lives of Veronica and Adrian - but, as I see it, this over-estimation of his own importance is yet another one of his memory delusions and instead he may be on the sidelines of this story, regardless of what his unreliable memory tells him his life story should be.

"Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history— even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?"

But maybe, just maybe, the aging Tony Webster will learn something from the trip to the past he takes on his quest to recover Adrian's journal. But ultimately it's not about Tony at all; Tony is just a slate on which to project the final thoughts, the final lines of this novel that harbor a bit of hope for the majority of us, floaters on the safe waters of life, who may or may not meet their Severn Bore.

"There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest."

This story is written with enough irony and melancholy to sustain a book of a much larger size. It's insanely quotable, to the point where you begin to suspect that certain lines were thrown in by the author with expectations of their future quotability factor. The language is smart and exquisite, sometimes a bit sardonic, sometimes a bit pedantic, and sometimes painfully genuine. Love this book or hate it - but you cannot deny that the writing is quite excellent.

.......

....
And to close off, I want to go back to the image of the Severn Bore, the natural phenomenon that unsettled Tony back in his youth and still may be the disturbance that we all need from time to time. Great unrest, so to speak.

"I don't think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn't like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I'd witnessed either) – nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it."

...more

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Dec 17, 2016 Lizzy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-literay-fiction, stars-5, read-2017

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
From the first page, I was carried away by Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and its wonderful story. For such a short novel it seems to waste no words, and only speeds between breaths to tell us about the capriciousness of our memories. I think it cannot be truer that memory is a fickle friend. More than a story, this was a lyrical lesson
Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
From the first page, I was carried away by Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and its wonderful story. For such a short novel it seems to waste no words, and only speeds between breaths to tell us about the capriciousness of our memories. I think it cannot be truer that memory is a fickle friend. More than a story, this was a lyrical lesson with a very precise rhythm of life and time. What time? The forgotten, that that has long passed and that we not always know how to remember. Yes, memory often enough plays tricks on us, but we go on living.

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.

If you are old enough to wonder why you forgot those long ago times, you will enjoy this book. No, I do not mean old in years, but in memories. ‘It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.’ Did you ever wonder about your first remembrances or the memory of your first love? I do it all the time, and how we try or not to remember and how we choose to recollect those long past times. So we live in a make believe scenery where we create unreliable histories that when we less expect come back to surprise us.

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."

While I ran through the pages of The Sense of an Ending, I could recognize myself often in Tony’s feelings and wonders. Not that our lives have that much in common, besides a failed marriage. I could sympathize with him when he relived his life through older eyes that imagined saw more but often forgot or mislead him. ‘Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that's been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent.’ But his losses I felt as my own, I think when I read his recollections I imagined my own instead. Or they were simply mixed up in Barnes’s words.

Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack - there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums... Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Thus, do we really build our own memories and write our life stories the way it better suits us? I wonder. Perhaps, or better yet, probably, we do as a protection from useless sufferings. But do you ever ponder what we would imagine if we were in fact in control of our past? Certainly not disillusionment or a lack of sense regarding what we aimed to accomplish. We have to believe our lives were worth living, so we may yes lie to ourselves. What else can a human being do?

Who has 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. But it's not convenient - it's not useful - to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

Tony Webster’s memory might come through as a melancholic reflection on the reality of aging, but can aging be felt differently? I wonder as I feel myself getting older every day and as I feel the elapse of time more accurately. Is Barnes being too melodramatic? It depends on your memories and how you remember then, I answer myself. And I know that there are times when it’s best not to go back into the past, not try to recollect what went wrong or the missteps we took, but to reinvent what how we existed and live what life has still to offer us so as not to live in eternal gloom.

I had been tempted, somehow, by the notion that we could excise most of our separate existences, could cut and splice the magnetic tape on which our lives are recorded, go back to that fork in the path and take the road less travelled, or rather not travelled at all. Instead, I had just left common sense behind. Old fool, I said to myself. And there's not fool like an old fool:...

And, is it not pathetic and sad when we fail to grow up and change at the end of our life stories, after all, ‘life is not really literature’. But if you pay attention, you can feel time pass by and make the best of it.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened - when these new memories suddenly came upon me - it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river run upstream.

What I realized as I closed the last page is that The Sense of an Ending is a book to be read in a sunny afternoon and not when you're feeling down. I am glad I have been feeling cheerful lately, because at the end what you end up reminiscing is not always what you wanted to remember or what you taught you witnessed.

Highly recommended!
____ ...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Jennifer (aka EM) rated it it was ok

Maybe, like Tony, I just don't get it, but this was a whole lot of Man Booker-winning to-do about very little.

Pretentious, upper middle-class schoolboys behave badly, and -- through too much ego and too little self-knowledge and empathy, too many book smarts and not enough life experience -- inflict cruelty on ex-girlfriends and others as they cavalierly grow out of their coddled adolescence into a ho-hum average life. It then comes back to haunt them - or one of them, anyway - in late middle-a Maybe, like Tony, I just don't get it, but this was a whole lot of Man Booker-winning to-do about very little.

Pretentious, upper middle-class schoolboys behave badly, and -- through too much ego and too little self-knowledge and empathy, too many book smarts and not enough life experience -- inflict cruelty on ex-girlfriends and others as they cavalierly grow out of their coddled adolescence into a ho-hum average life. It then comes back to haunt them - or one of them, anyway - in late middle-age, and as memories are jogged and regrets bubble to the surface, insight is finally gained. Sort of. It's really a dull spark of understanding nested in about the same amount of egocentric self-pity that it started out disguised by.

I guess it's a clever character study, but I didn't and don't like Tony. I think that *is* the point. I really just wanted to give him a smack upside the head and tell him to stop whining and get over himself, kind of like his ex-wife did.

All life has tragedy - and some lives here have *true* tragedy, which Tony fails to recognize even as he seem to be recognizing it (so I guess that's pretty clever of Barnes, but sheesh ...).

Tony's real insight seems to be the recognition that he's failed to live up to his own pompous and overblown expectations of greatness for himself. He's led an average life. And along the way, through his own obtuseness and arrogance, he's inflicted a not-inconsiderable degree of harm, which seems to be of less consequence to him in the grand scheme of things than the fact that he's lived a life of complacent mediocrity.

But then, Barnes leaves us there, with this fellow sighing into his beer and chips. I feel myself asking - but what's next? What this guy does NEXT will tell the real story of his character. I feel ... short-changed; unfulfilled. Harumph.

Subject: The last chapter

Dear Tony: The cure for your loneliness and sense of ennui is to pull your head out of your ass and go out and do something of value with the time you have left. Turn that insight into action that will do someone some good (and I don't mean just leaving a sizeable tip at the pub, either).

Love, Jen

...more

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Sep 10, 2019 Violet wells rated it really liked it

It seems inevitable that virtually every writer will at some point write a meditation on ageing and the role of engineered memory in defining identity. This is Julien Barnes contribution to a somewhat oversubscribed theme, one which is very popular with Booker judges, perhaps because they're generally of an an age when this theme is especially pertinent to them.

I'm not a great fan of minimalist prose so Barnes is never going to become one of my favourite novelists. I like my writers to be more ...more

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Jan 18, 2018 Peter rated it really liked it

Shelves: literary-fiction

Disposition
Julian Barnes’ writing in this short novel speaks loudly in an often quiet reflective allegory of memory and loss. Overtly philosophical, Tony Webster, tells of his youth as a schoolboy, with two old friends Alex and Colin, and the new kid, Adrian Finn. How their ideological sense of the world met with affectations as they sought to impress each other and teachers on various subjects, although always acceding to Adrian’s intelligent and apparent self-awareness. Nearing the end of scho Disposition
Julian Barnes’ writing in this short novel speaks loudly in an often quiet reflective allegory of memory and loss. Overtly philosophical, Tony Webster, tells of his youth as a schoolboy, with two old friends Alex and Colin, and the new kid, Adrian Finn. How their ideological sense of the world met with affectations as they sought to impress each other and teachers on various subjects, although always acceding to Adrian’s intelligent and apparent self-awareness. Nearing the end of school there was a sense of being “kept in a holding pen waiting to be released”, which suggests an expectation of passion, action and success in the future. Quite unfulfilled then, that as an older man he reflected that

“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.”

A sad reflection that life isn’t a simple calculation of additions and subtractions but now and again a multiplication of loss. Tony Webster is a complex character, seen through one lens as he progresses through life and a different one looking back over time after he receives a bequeathed gift from an old girlfriend’s mother.

Tony has drifted through his career, marriage to Margaret, fatherhood, amicable divorce, and tedious retirement, until Veronica’s mother sent him £500 in a will and the promise of Adrian's diary. Veronica leaving Tony for Adrian left pain and deep resentment, causing him to write a letter to them both. A letter that now returned forty years later, does not align with his memory of its contents and which reads cruel and spiteful. In The Sense of an Ending, memory is the precarious matter to be traded between fact and fiction, how time changes memory and how true time is measured in your relationship to memory. When new memories came flooding back “it was as if for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.” Maybe our personalised memories of events and moments are all that really matter.

Barnes creates a wonderful balance between empathy and frustration in watching a character wrestle with their decisions and behaviour when discarded as a love interest. Searching for answers when the smart thing to do is avoid contact and walk away. Failure to do so only has one outcome, more frustration, disappointment and unrest - exposing the neediness and truths that were better ignored. In broken personal relationships, do answers ever really help?

The self-pitying doleful nature of Tony Webster is not a character easily liked and while his outlook on life is bleak there is a hope that he can find acceptance or resolution in the answers he seeks. There is a hope that he can enjoy what remains of his life rather than the nagging ineptitude of his life’s accumulation. For a new beginning, there needs to be a sense of an ending.

I enjoyed this book and as a second read, I appreciated more the mastery of prose Julian Barnes displays. A deserved winner of a literature prize – The Man Booker prize in 2011. I would rate the book 4.5 stars and I would highly recommend it. ...more

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Sep 22, 2017 Liz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: book-clubs

This book literally grabbed me from the first page. I found myself highlighting phrase after phrase. The narrator starts the book looking back at his school days. He's got the presence of mind to understand exactly what he and the other lads were like in those days. He also has the understanding of how memory truly works. “...what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.” Or this “ I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes.”

The wr ...more

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Apr 14, 2012 Rakhi Dalal rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to Rakhi by: Norman

Shelves: favorites

Has it ever occurred to you that while you are complacently sitting, basking in the self acquired glory of wisdom, you chance upon something, like an incident, a person or a written word, which forces you to revisit your understanding and knowledge of the life as you know it? And then you gasp with a sudden disbelief at the ignorance which might have silently crept in and stayed along while you felt contented with your version of perceptions? I felt the same while reading this book. To say that ...more

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Oct 21, 2014 Fabian rated it it was amazing

The Sense of an Ending is the type of British novel ALL OTHER AMERICAN NOVELS TREMBLE IN THE PRESENCE OF. It is blessed with an aura of flawless, impeccable English perfection; the prose is exquisitely clean & concise, GODLY by most-- especially my own-- standards.

It is an uncommon, unpolluted work that should be embedded in psychology books everywhere: the gears of life are described in their rare light, in degrees that, you must agree, can only possibly come from another world, or another dim ...more

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Dec 19, 2017 Brina rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, man-booker

I find it appropriate that my last review of 2017 is titled The Sense of an Ending. Recently I read In the Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Upon returning it to the library, two of my branch librarians asked me if I had ever read any of Barnes other works, and I answered, unfortunately, no. While reading about Shostakovich, I immediately fell in love with Barnes' flawless prose. My librarians know their patrons and reserved me The Sense of an Ending. A Man Booker winner, Barnes has wowed his read I find it appropriate that my last review of 2017 is titled The Sense of an Ending. Recently I read In the Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Upon returning it to the library, two of my branch librarians asked me if I had ever read any of Barnes other works, and I answered, unfortunately, no. While reading about Shostakovich, I immediately fell in love with Barnes' flawless prose. My librarians know their patrons and reserved me The Sense of an Ending. A Man Booker winner, Barnes has wowed his readers with The Sense of an Ending, a book that ties up loose ends of an contemplative, older man's life, and, quite possibly, the ends of my reading year as well.

Tony Webster is amicably divorced, still meeting his ex-wife Margaret for lunch once a week or so. He has a loving relationship with his daughter Susie and her two children, is retired from his job, and finds ample activities to keep him busy with his life. He refers to himself as an average adult with average interests, which Barnes depicts so eloquently. Recently, he has reminisced about his time in both preparatory school and university, which is depicted in part one of this book. In preparatory school, Tony forged close friendships with his gang in Alex, Colin, and newcomer Adrian, Adrian being the product of divorce and a brilliant mind who all of his classmates new had a bright future ahead. As expected, Adrian received a scholarship to Cambridge, Tony to Bristol, Colin to military service, and Alex working for his father. The four attempted to stay close throughout their college years, but in the 1960s before the internet, Tony admits that it was a strained effort to communicate with even his closest friends. Perhaps, if email had been around during Tony's university days, he and has friends would have been alerted to the emotional problems boiling under the surface of their lives.

Upon entering Bristol, Tony is still unschooled in the ways of women. He is admittedly shy and has almost no experience in this arena. On a chance meeting looking for the Severn Boar, he meets Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford, who is from a middle class family, snobby, and has more expertise in relationships than does Tony. The two have almost nothing in common down to the music they listen to and their academic interests. During a school vacation, Tony visits Veronica's family, and they proceed to humiliate him, everyone except the mother who apologizes for her family's rude behavior toward him. Unbeknownst to the dense Tony is that Veronica became smitten with the more academically refined Adrian on a visit to London. Following this visit home, the couple officially breaks up, Adrian writes to Tony for permission to see Veronica, and the ex-couple does not hear or see of each other for the next forty years.

As Barnes quickly forwards his readers through time, he fills in the gaps in Tony's life. While still in college, Adrian unexpectedly commits suicide. The three remaining friends have no idea why a brilliant mind would tragically take his life at such a young age, and remain in the dark as to his motive. Forty years later, Margaret is still Tony's rock despite their breakup and the person he first calls upon when he receives an inheritance following the passing of Veronica's mother. The episode and letter accompanying the behest are puzzling at best, and Barnes through his expert prose does his best to fill in the gaps of the protagonists' lives without giving away any crucial details. He is an author who makes his readers think both about what happened and how the consequences of actions could spiral to create results even forty years in the future. The ending sections brought to mind another British master, Agatha Christie, who leaves her readers contemplating whodunit until the book's closing paragraphs. This is the mastery that Barnes has painted here, one that attempts to give his readers a sense of an ending and merited a Man Booker Award.

Julian Barnes is a living masterful author whose work is constantly being nominated for international awards. I thank my goodreads friends for including his work in their year end reviews, piquing my own interest to read his work. I also give credit to my branch librarians who know my reading interests and reserved this book for me so that I could read it before the end of the year. Julian Barnes creates The Sense of an Ending indeed, both for Tony Webster and for my reading year. I will most definitely be reading more of his special work in the years to come.

4+ stars
...more

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Jan 17, 2012 Fionnuala added it

Shelves: julianbarnes

Reviewed in January, 2012

One of the things I admire about Barnes is the pared down nature of his writing. Every word counts.
The division of this novella into two parts also counts. The reader could start with Part Two and the book wouldn't be any less clear. In fact, possible answers to most of the questions raised at the end of the book can be found on rereading Part One. More enlightenment comes while rereading Part Two.

(The following paragraph may contain spoilers)
As to the possible answer ...more

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May 01, 2012 Andrew Smith rated it it was amazing

I bought this book at Paddington railway station, to read on the way home. It's not my normal type of book but I knew it had won the man Booker Prize and I'd seen some positive comment in the press. It's a short book (one of the reasons I bought it) and it quickly confirmed itself to me as a wise purchase; I was laughing out loud after a few pages, totally hooked. Barnes is obviously a clever guy and I found I had to look up a few words along the way (I was home by then). But as a former lexicog ...more

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Jan 12, 2017 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, booker-winners, english-21st-c, novellas

Umm. I mean this book was written ok and I get it, the whole unreliable narrator thing, but the protagonist is like a psychopath or what? I mean how could he have forgotten? And if what I think happened happened, WTF would Veronique still be talking to him? Why would the mom send him 500 pounds? WTF was that mathematical formula about? Maybe I a just too dense for English post-modernism and I gotta still to American post-modernist,. Hmpf. Disappointed :(

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Dec 01, 2011 Riku Sayuj rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Tanuj Solanki, Vikram Johari, Mohit Parikh, Arnab, Shafi

Shelves: favorites, booker-winners, lit-fic, r-r-rs, contemporary-fiction

What a wonderful wonderful novel. No, not a novel, or a novella; it was a poem, with rhythm, repetition, and cadence, looping back on itself. Yes, it can only be called a poem - a poem about time, about forgotten time, long gone cold.

Having laid off from new Booker winners after a traumatic experience with Adiga, I started on this book with a lot of trepidation. But I was drawn in from the first paragraph and the amazing childhood anecdotes seemed to be promising a night of unbroken reading! I ...more

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Jul 22, 2019 Swaroop rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"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."

This is exactly how it felt when reading the initial pages of this book - Could this be something beyond the understanding!? And, then it hits... Of course, this was supposed to be philosophically self-evident.

Julian Barnes`s The Sense of an Ending is deep, profound and beautifully written. This book is about making sense of the ways we all try to make s ...more

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Nov 20, 2017 Robin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-prize-winner, literary-fiction, novella, 2017, english

I feel like I've got an angel and devil on either shoulder, when it comes to this book.

The being on one shoulder has an unnaturally soprano voice, eyes to the heavens, saying things like: "Oh merciful holiness, what IS this wonderful prose, this succinct precision, o lord, the slow burn of mystery juxtaposed with the deep meditation on memory, our affect on the course of history, and our inability to fix things in the past, god bless and exalt this clever Julian Barnes for a story that I relish ...more

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Jul 30, 2017 Iris P rated it really liked it

Shelves: critically-aclaimed, literary-fiction, should-have-read-long-time-ago, overdrive-library

The Sense of an Ending

It's probably safe to say that most of us have, at some point in our lives, done or said things we have come to regret. That phone call you made when you were extremely upset. That bitter email you shouldn't have written. That text message you were too prompt to send.

If you had the opportunity of visiting a younger version of yourself and review what that other you said, felt, discovered, did or didn't do, how do you think it would measure up against the older you? Wou ...more

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What do people think of the ending? (SPOILER ALERT)	54	8952	Jan 12, 2020 09:51AM
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Fiction- British coming of age novel told in two parts: first in retrospective, then in the present. [s]	7	42	Oct 17, 2019 11:35AM
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About Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

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Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize - Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005), and won the prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

Following an education at the City of London School and ...more

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“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.” — 2942 likes

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” — 850 likes

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