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Rating: ..."We live in time; time shapes us and holds us, yet I have never had the sensation of fully understanding it"...
Words of Tony Webster, a man in his sixties who has let life write him, who didn’t partake more than necessary in events, and who can be described as an average man, with an average life, an average divorce: all in all, a man without qualities.
..."Is there anything in the world more reasonable than a second hand? But a tiny pain or the slightest pleasure is enough to teach us the malleability of time. Certain emotions speed it up, others slow it down; sometimes it seems to disappear until it actually does disappear for real and never shows up again"...
Tony doesn’t remember school, the University, or maybe he doesn’t want to remember, especially Adrian... We all had an Adrian in our group of friends: intelligent, sensitive, successful, and at times brilliant, who hasn’t? Raise your hand if you haven’t. And then there’s the friend’s woman, who also used to be his woman, that Veronica. And then there’s the news: Adrian’s death, a suicide in a bathtub colored a nice scarlet red...
And now what is there? I mean, after the funeral of the friend, what happens? Nothing, nothing special, time passes, forty years, before a law firm informs him of a will, before Tony begins to understand, or at least to ask some questions.
An evaluation of a life in retrospect, partial and inaccurate memories, a thankless and painful reckoning: in mathematics there are the four operations and they are perfect; in life, besides additions and subtractions, there are multiplications and divisions of successes and losses, but the results are not always predictable and often the accounts don't add up: it depends on how much you have invested in your private Wall Street.
"The Sense of an Ending" is a remarkable work for its simplicity and elegance in narrating the perception each of us has of passing time, of aging, and it is also much more... if you ever have the luck to come across this novel by Julian Barnes, read it, have it read, but don't make the mistake of ignoring it.
Rating: just short of a masterpiece, 4.5/5
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