30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 30: "The Sense of an Ending"
- bostonbookworm22
- Aug 31, 2017
- 2 min read
Today, on the last day of August, my "30 books in 30 beach days" series is coming to a close.
Never one for subtlety, I'm taking the finale literally with today's review: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
I first read another book titled The Sense of an Ending when I was doing thesis research in the summer of 2009. That book was a work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode. It examined people's tendency to structure their lives with a coherent beginning, middle, and end -- and how they look for meaning and links between the choices and events of each.
Barnes' beautiful 2011 novel is a nod to the ideas in that work. The Sense of an Ending is a slim work (at just 163 pages, you can definitely squeeze it into this weekend's last beach visit), but it packs a punch. It's narrator Tony Webster's life story, divided into two parts. In the first, he describes his college days as a pretentious intellectual, and he delves into two important relationships in his life: the first, his brilliant friend Adrian, and the second, his girlfriend Veronica.
The second part of the novel skips multiple decades and largely focuses in retrospect on the events of the first, allowing Tony to piece together how his actions 40 years before had far-reaching consequences for multiple people in his life.
Tony's long-winded ruminating explores the very concept of memory, and of decisions and free will and fate. The novel is heady and heavy, but its prose is easy and gentle: a conversation with a thoughtful older gentleman. Endowed with its own quiet mystery, it will keep you guessing and transfixed until its own ending.
Rating: 5/5
Thank you for joining me on this summer series! Please let me know what kind of content you would like to see here. I'm all ears (er, eyes!).
