The Sense of an Ending in Around the World in 80 Books

May 18, 2018 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

If you get the possible reason(s) for the £500 legacy left to Tony Webster, one of the great unreliable narrators I've run across in literature, then the story is devastating. (And the meaning for the money is something that is inferred, so it's not a spoiler. Read carefully, because Barnes is very clever with his clues.) On the surface, the story is about an aging man looking back over the years, struggling a bit with memories, and the iffy day by day process of the selection and ordering of th ...more

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Aug 24, 2014 Daisy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aroundtheworld2014, england, favorites-2nd-place

My first Julian Barnes. (And not that this is the point but, I figured out the ending of The Sense of an Ending...).

But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history--Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true; that you can infer past actions from current mental states.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent dif ...more

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Sep 26, 2016 Tanya rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2016, list-1001-btrbyd, format-audiobook, list-1-001-btrbyd-2012-additions

Glad this one came up accidentally on my music shuffle as I had put off reading this for a long time, but ended up liking it and wanting to discuss it with others. I didn't particularly care for the narrator, however, the way it was read contributed to the success of the story. ...more

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