The Sense of an Ending – Cannonball Read 17

“…all you can truly say of any historical event … is that ‘something happened.’”

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes

September 17, 2024 by ElCicco 1 Comment

Cbr16bingo Free Spot (sub for Rings square), +3 bingos The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel that won the Booker Prize. It is short but manages to delve into deep themes regarding memory, history and remorse through a story with a surprising finish. Told in two parts by the same narrator, Tony Webster, the reader must constantly question Tony’s memory and reliability, as he himself does. Part 1 of the novel finds Tony as a teenager in the 1960s with his friends in […]

“To be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie”

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

August 7, 2019 by Wanderlustful Leave a Comment

I read and loved Flaubert’s Parrot in college, so I was really looking forward to reading another book by Barnes, especially a book that won the Booker Prize in 2011. The Sense of Ending is a slim novella that winds a lot of ideas into its relatively few pages. The plot outline is fairly simple: our first person narrator, a retired Brit divorcee named Tony Webster, receives a lawyer’s letter informing him that he has been left a diary in a will. The diary belonged […]

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