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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize and #1 international bestseller, The Sense of an Ending is a masterpiece.
The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?
Author Notes
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, on January 19, 1946. He received a degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford University in 1968. He has held jobs as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review, and a television critic.
He has written numerous works of fiction including Arthur and George, Pulse: Stories, The Noise of Time, and England, England. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1980 for Metroland, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and a Prix Medicis in 1986 for Flaubert's Parrot, and the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. He also writes non-fiction works including Letters from London, The Pedant in the Kitchen, and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He received the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation in 1993, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011.
He writes detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanaugh. His works under this name include Duffy, Fiddle City, Putting the Boot In, and Going to the Dogs.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Barnes's (Flaubert's Parrot) latest, winner of the 2011 Man-Booker Prize, protagonist Tony Webster has lived an average life with an unremarkable career, a quiet divorce, and a calm middle age. Now in his mid-60s, his retirement is thrown into confusion when he's bequeathed a journal that belonged to his brilliant school-friend, Adrian, who committed suicide 40 years earlier at age 22. Though he thought he understood the events of his youth, he's forced to radically revise what he thought he knew about Adrian, his bitter parting with his mysterious first lover Veronica, and reflect on how he let life pass him by safely and predictably. Barnes's spare and luminous prose splendidly evokes the sense of a life whose meaning (or meaninglessness) is inevitably defined by "the sense of an ending" which only death provides. Despite its focus on the blindness of youth and the passage of time, Barnes's book is entirely unpretentious. From the haunting images of its first pages to the surprising and wrenching finale, the novel carries readers with sensitivity and wisdom through the agony of lost time. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
At once commanding and subtle, Barnes has created a refined novel intensely suspenseful in its emotional complexities and exemplary in its arresting tropes, rhythms, revelations, and musings on the puzzle of time and the mysteries of memory and desire. And how masterfully Barnes induces us, page by page, to revise our perceptions of and feelings toward his ensnared narrator. Cordially divorced and smugly retired, Tony is yanked out of complacency by a perplexing letter. The recently deceased mother of his disastrous first love has inexplicably bequeathed him the diary of a school friend of his who committed suicide. As Tony seeks an explanation, Barnes turns evocative motifs--the way Tony and his friends wore their watches with the faces on the inside of their wrists; the night Tony witnessed the Severn Bore, a powerful tidal surge that reverses the river's flow--into metaphors for how we distort the past and how oblivious we are to the pain of others. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Barnes' sublimely modulated and profoundly disquieting tale of delusion, loss, and remorse ends devastatingly with a crescendo twist. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Barnes is a British author Americans follow with high attention, and this novel secured him the Man Booker Prize.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MANY literary careers have been made, and doubtless more will be, by conveying the inwardness, awkwardness and social anxiety that constrict British mores like a very tightly wrapped cummerbund. This suffocating self-consciousness lies at the heart of British humor, whether in the farcical scramble of trying to keep up appearances or the risible but sincere terror of being mocked - which sniping English schoolboys still fear, even when they're grown up, bald and 70. It takes a brave author to mine this dynamic for pathos instead of sniggers. Evelyn Waugh did it in "Brideshead Revisited," as did Philip Larkin in "Jill." (Think of the scholarship boy John Kemp, who "tingled and shuddered" with embarrassment when his posh Oxford roommate's friend caught him looking at her with desire.) And Kazuo Ishiguro did it in "The Remains of the Day," which won the Man Booker Prize in 1989. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, "The Sense of an Ending" - which has just won the 2011 Booker Prize - Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art. Barnes, it goes without saying, is a much-decorated veteran of English literature's emotional battlefields, one who has covered this terrain many times before. But in "The Sense of an Ending" - his 14th work of fiction - he engages with the untidy collisions of the human struggle more directly than ever, even as he remains characteristically light on his feet. In many of his earlier novels, Barnes tackled sexual jealousy, insecurity and competition in an almost jaunty manner. When a husband in "Before She Met Me" guzzles wine and weeps, tormented by thoughts of his wife's past lovers, a friend dryly remarks, "Doesn't sound much fun." In "Talking It Over" and "Love, Etc.," in which two men take turns marrying the same woman, all three members of the ménage are too sophisticated to show much pique. And in more elaborately scaffolded novels like "Flaubert's Parrot" and "Arthur and George," Barnes encases any sharp-edged questions of love in the sheathing of plots about historical figures. But in "The Sense of an Ending," he has dispensed with detachment and shed his armor plating. The new book is a mystery of memory and missed opportunity. Tony Webster, a cautious, divorced man in his 60s who "had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded," receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he'd met only once, 40 years earlier. The mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has bequeathed him £500 - a legacy that unsettles Tony, pushing him to get in touch with Veronica (their relationship had ended badly) and seek answers to certain unresolved questions. Had he loved Veronica? (At the time, it was an emotion he had lacked the spine to own up to.) What had happened to the energetic boy he used to be, "book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic," who thought of himself as "being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released" into an engaged adult life of "passion and danger, ecstasy and despair"? And what ever became of the friend he and Veronica both knew back then, a brainy, idealistic boy named Adrian Finn? Gradually, Tony assembles his willfully forgotten past impressions and actions, joining together the links that connect him to these people, as if trying to form a "chain of individual responsibilities" that might explain how it happened that his life's modest wages had resulted in "the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss." Adrian had impressed Tony when he announced his exasperation with their country's national pose of perpetual insouciance. "I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it," Adrian declared. Hearing this, Tony had felt a "throb of vindication." But his vindication was unfounded; it belied his own noncommittal nature. Adrian's indifference to playing it cool somehow made him the leader of the boys' clique when they were teenagers; he became the one they looked up to. Yet Tony never emulated Adrian, and was guilty of the pose Adrian deplored: pretending not to care. He pays for this failure again and again, from his 20s to his 60s. "Does character develop over time?" Tony asks himself, wondering at the "larger holding pen" that has come to contain his adult life. Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30, he speculates. "And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy." Tony's tragedy, "if this isn't too grand a word," is that he avoids deep connection rather than embracing it, for fear of risking its loss. In college he did not consummate his relationship with Veronica, telling himself that abstinence spared him burdensome conversations about "where the relationship was heading." He pretends that this was his choice: "Something in me was attracted to women who said no." But 40 years later, her mother's gift reawakens Tony's memories of steamy "infra-sex" with Veronica - sensual fumblings that took place while they were mostly clothed. "Part of me hadn't minded not 'going the whole way,'" he decides. It had protected him from "an overwhelming closeness I couldn't handle." Not long after the breakup with Veronica, Tony had met, married and (eventually) been divorced from a nonenigmatic woman with "clear edges," someone he knew he wouldn't mind losing terribly much. In Margaret, he sought a mature, "peaceable" life. Decades later, he sees the fraudulence in that discretion. "We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them." But who does Tony enfold into his "we"? His agonized analysis is entirely self-referential, as solitary and armored as the man himself. Decades earlier, Tony had accused Veronica of an "inability to imagine anyone else's feelings or emotional life," but it was he, not she, who was incapable of looking outside his own head. Barnes's unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, "whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost," and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs. "I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation," he reflects. "Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable." "The Sense of an Ending" is a short book, but not a slight one. In it Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam. 'What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.' Liest Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
When we look back on our lives, what do we remember from our experiences? Tony's story starts and finishes with his school chums, one of whom commits suicide during his college years, and his first girlfriend. When he is contacted by someone from 40 years in his past, he must reexamine events, memories, causes, and results. The pacing is steady and the insights poignant, although the ending is a bit contrived. Narrator Richard Morant moves smoothly between the awkward, loud voice of an English schoolboy, the all-knowing college student, and the resigned elder. VERDICT Barnes's 14th book and winner of the Man Booker Prize, this short novel will best appeal to readers of introspective literature. [The Knopf hc, published in October, was a New York Times best seller.-Ed.]-J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Regional Lib., Independence, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.