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.
Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth
My Thoughts: This book had a much more pessimistic view on life than I (and i think most of us) like to consider... and I think that was the point. He wants to shake us out of our complacency and make us question what we're doing, instead of just blindly going along until one day we realize we can't really take responsibility for our own life--either credit or blame--because of how few choices we have really made, how few things we have actively made happen rather than just passively allow to happen to us. I think to an extent this way of thinking can be beneficial, but to dwell on it too much will only lead to being trapped in the past and a paralysis on further action. That's why the short length of this book--in addition to being ideal for those of us readers with rather short attention spans--suits the book's purpose very well. It was good to think about the questions Barnes raises, within the context of this story, and then go on with my life and leave that 2 hours of reading the book where i was deeply anxious but also stirring myself to productivity, behind me.
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