Skip to main content

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Genre: Fiction
Sub-genre: Autobiographical narration/mystery
Rating: 4.5/5



It won the Man Booker in 2011 for good reason. As I have mentioned in this post of mine, the number of pages is hardly the yardstick of the intensity of a story. I can safely club The Sense of An Ending with the likes of Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm; their slender spines pack a whopping punch. 

Middle-aged Antony 'Tony' Webster mirrors the common folk. His demeanour and personality are not uncommon. The story centres on a particular episode in his life, described in his own self-flattering, borderline-pitying tone. What began as a perplexing letter, ends in the unlidding of the Pandora's box. 

The genius of the story rests on the author's ability to turn the tide - not once,  but repeatedly - for and against the narrator. This is like an extended diary entry not meant for anyone's eyes. save the author himself. The recordings are true, but then truth is so qualitative, so relative and so opinionated, that it may not be the truth at all. Barnes - known for his other works in a similar field (Nothing to be Frightened Of) - opens the reader's mind to the possibility of the colouring and malleability of our memories by age, circumstances, selfish choices and first-impressions.

True to the form of the book, there is no clearly worded outcome, leaving only a little to imagination. It is surprising, thus, to find a multitude of possible interpretations available online. Admittedly some are wild; others less so. The screen adaptation of the book did not fare well - understandably (in my limited knowledge, I think it is decidedly difficult to play around with the depiction of memories), but that too, has certain elements that superceded my very simplistic interpretations. But then, in this truly inconceivable journey of even the most humdrum of individuals, nothing should come as a surprise. 

The Sense of An Ending is also very artistically named. All things end and new ones begin. Everything is a journey, with a clear start and a hazy termination. Having a clear, dispassionate view - making sense, if you may - of the course of an event is a task which exceeds the timelines of the event itself. 

P.S. I find this cover of the book (the 2012 publication by Vintage) particularly brilliant, considering the significance of the egg; the one I possess looks like this (published by Vintage in 2011). The escaping seeds of the dandelion, though very symbolic, lacks the power of the solitary, white egg !
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Long and Short of It

Call it stuffy, but there'a a charm about long-winded sentences.  People my age - and by that I mean the early-to-mid thirties - have had a disgusting time with school texts, which were expressly chosen for their remarkable abstruseness. Most of us were put off with the language, given the  endless probing into seemingly harmless pieces of text and losing marks to our seemingly erroneous interpretations (at this age, I am told that I am never wrong, I can decipher things the way I want; evidently an adult's imagination holds more value than a teenager's). Abstruse works were seldom long-winded, but vice-versa always held true, and does so - to some extent - even now. Excerpts from classics (I remember Shakespeare's pieces - abridged, they said but that didn't make a spot of difference at that age) lacked any modern adherence to placements and abounded in queer, archaic phrases jumbled in a sentence spanning three lines; we were taught conjunctions like '...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Fatal Englishman - Three Short Lives by Sebastian Faulks

Image courtesy: amazon.co.uk Genre: Biography Rating: 4/5 There is something romantic about the English way of living; it has perhaps become more so now. Even the English themselves no longer stay the same way as during the wide span of time of Sebastian Faulks' work. It certainly wasn't romantic back then. The English have had their share of the good and the bad; they have been hated and revered. And through all of this, like in every other civilisation, the society and its principles have ruled the overarching impression we have created of and about them. But really, we are all humans; how different can we be after all ? Not much it seems.  The Fatal Englishman  is set over seven odd decades, and chronicles the prodigy (in more ways , referring to things beyond just talent) of three remarkable British citizens. The common tie is the fact that they all died terribly young, barely having touched the thirties. They all hailed from different aspects of life - C...
Post a Comment
Read more

Does the thickness of books scare you ?

I swear I'm  not  being diplomatic about this, but the answer to that is 'It Depends.  Smiley versus Karla  trilogy   had me in raptures; I nearly cried (with misery) when I got sent the original version of  David Copperfield . Both were bricks; and much as I love Dickens, there is something daunting about a thickset copy with font 8 on a Times New Roman (or something similar). Thick books (strictly excluding text books) are usually fun. Look at  A Suitable Boy ; I bought it five years back and I'm still ploughing through. I haven't had the time to finish it or get bored of it (but then I'm a serial book-shifter*). And then there is  The Old Man and the Sea ; it is a pamphlet of a book, and I haven't (or rather couldn't) finished that either. So  it depends  on the content of the writing. I'm not saying family sagas are more fun or intellectually more stimulating than, well, an old man fishing in the sea, but somehow, the lac...
Post a Comment
Read more