THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

By: Julian Barnes

Front Cover: “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.”

My Thoughts: This is not the type of book I read very often, but I'm really glad I did. I didn't realize how much I had enjoyed this book until I had finished it. It is a really short book but there's so much to it. There is just something so relatable and likable about the main character. His insights are so human.  This is definitely more of an internal/reflective type book. There isn't a ton of action or lots of things happening in the plot.

I confess that I was so confused by the ending. I had no idea what had just happened or what it meant. I had to go back and read it again. It was just so not expected. You're so inside the character's head and he really has no idea what certain things mean either. He is an unreliable narrator but I liked that about him.  He was just as surprised at things as you are.

Favorite Quotes: "We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way."

"For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out—perhaps especially when it doesn't workout—promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life."

"I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was."

Overall: 4/5