The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
aMy reviews tend to be about provenance and coincidence, are therefore deeply personal, and should therefore by skipped if you’re looking for synopsis and approval. Not that there’s anything wrong with synopsis and approval. I just don’t feel like summarizing, and I don’t have the reputation or wisdom required for my approval carry any weight.
My wife’s cousin recommended a TV show that we are finding we like quite a bit, so when she recommended The Sense of an Ending, it was an easy decision to give the book a try. That it is a mere 163 pages was a plus, too. I don’t have much of an attention span. And I had just struggled to finish a book that I did not like at all, so I jumped into Sense with a lot enthusiasm. I wasn’t disappointed. Read it less than 18 hours. Not quite one sitting, but would have been had I started on a morning instead of bed time.
And it turns out this is the third Man Booker Prize 2011 Shortlist book I’ve read, along with Snowdrops and The Sister Brothers. Three books that I would have never compared to one another, except for their treatments of existentialism, although sometimes I think every book written in the modern era is a treatment of existentialism.
Sense is about time, documents, suicide, class, and England. In more or less that order. One character invokes Camus, reminding us that: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Match that against my favorite quote from Camus: “One sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers” and you’ve got the tone of the book. It’s “to be or not to be” for the modern age.
That’s the tone, anyway, although the plot, in the end, vindicates the coward’s life. In more than one place Barnes has lines like “if this was a novel” or “if this was fiction” and that he also mentions masturbation more than a few times shows how playfully he regards all of this angsty stuff. His main character talks about “the littleness of life that art exaggerates,” and since the line comes from Flaubert, perhaps we’re supposed to compare this character to Madame Bovary.
So be it. It’s not that were disconnected that makes us miserable, it’s that we’re bored. Kill yourself for a good reason, or a bad one. But don’t pretend it’s noble, because once you’ve removed yourself from time’s exegesis, you no longer get to participate in the meaning of life.