Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Knopf (October 5, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307957128
ISBN-13: 978-0307957122
Genre: Mystery & Thrillers > Literature & Fiction
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize [2011]
—Mark Lawson, David Cohen Prize citation
Editorial Reviews
“Barnes
builds a powerful atmosphere of shame and silence. . . . As ever,
Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator’s unique
subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision. . . .
Novel, fertile and memorable.” —The Guardian
“Compelling. . . . His reputation will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity. Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories.”
—The Telegraph
“Compelling. . . . His reputation will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity. Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories.”
—The Telegraph
“Short and sharp. . . . A true master of his craft, Barnes’s precise and economic prose is often a delight, and he packs in some vivid characterisation, scene-drawing and emotional insight within his brief 150 pages.” —The List
“Barnes has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes’s story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory. . . . Such a slyly subversive book.” —London Evening Standard
“Julian Barnes is one of those marvelously inventive authors who writes a very different book each time. He experiments with historical and contemporary fiction, memoir, biography and essays, seamlessly moving from genre to genre. . . . His prose is rich without being showy; he has a precision and economy of language that at times recalls William Trevor.” —The Oregonian
“Barnes is among the most adventurous writers—in style, versatility and narrative structure—of his Amis-McEwan-Hitchens generation.” — The New York Times Book Review
Description
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 new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
ReviewThis intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
Dirk Sinnewe "books galore" (Germany)
If
Barnes's novel was only a philosophical treatise on themes such as, for
example, the constructedness of history, memory, love or remorse, then
only a few people would read it, so the author offers us some kind of
mystery story which the main protagonist Webster has to solve: the
deceased mother of his former girlfriend Veronica has left him 500
pounds as well as the diary of his friend Adrian. Why does Veronica's
mother do this and will the content of Adrian's diary shed some light on
his suicide?
This "mystery story" only works because Veronica remains more or less silent throughout the second part of the book. She may fall into the category of the mysterious woman; after all Barnes is at pains to portray her as a woman that is surrounded by an air of secrecy, so it may seem in keeping with her character that she does not immediately tell Webster all she knows, her monosyllabic replies may also just be credible, but her continuous repetition of the set phrase "You just don't get it, do you?" when she meets Webster after so many years is just not credible at all. For me this is the central weakness of the plot, resulting from a flawed character-construction. Either that or the unreliable narrator may have, once again, constructed his very own version of the past.
This "mystery story" only works because Veronica remains more or less silent throughout the second part of the book. She may fall into the category of the mysterious woman; after all Barnes is at pains to portray her as a woman that is surrounded by an air of secrecy, so it may seem in keeping with her character that she does not immediately tell Webster all she knows, her monosyllabic replies may also just be credible, but her continuous repetition of the set phrase "You just don't get it, do you?" when she meets Webster after so many years is just not credible at all. For me this is the central weakness of the plot, resulting from a flawed character-construction. Either that or the unreliable narrator may have, once again, constructed his very own version of the past.
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