Welcome readers!
When we read any book, we note down our initial impressions. It is quite interesting to observe those initial impressions we have made about the book while we read it first. When we come across the write-up after reading the book twice, so many new layers fill the place. Similarly, I tried to note down some initial impressions of reading Julian Barnes's novel.
"There was unrest. There was great unrest."
{Something
happened
within me}
This book has challenged me as a reader.
As a reader, it was far difficult and equally challenging to read Julian Barnes’ short novel ‘The Sense of an Ending’. If the uneasiness can be put into words then most probably the restlessness and turmoil (which I felt) can be best described in Marshall’s words as ‘Unrest...Great unrest!” The tale is not so heavy but its confessional quality and the final revelation makes it so. It begins with a punching start and ends with a fiendish thwack.
To be very honest, I must not have read Julian Barnes if the text wouldn't have been prescribed in my course in Masters of Arts. It can quite possible that I would have read him if I had got a few suggestions from friends, colleagues, but I hardly found any. If I talk about (out of syllabus) texts, I used to get suggestions of Khaled Hosseini's, Haruko Murakami's or Kazuo Ishiguro's, Yuval Nova Harari's works and gladly I bought their works to read. But Barnes, I feel fortunate enough to have read his work which today became my all-time favourite book -
'The Sense
of an Ending'
Talking about the plot briefly, the story starts with a quite happy and divorced man in his sixties, Tony Webster who narrates an engrossing past in a confessional manner. The unreliability is painfully true as at one moment it completely snatches the attention and makes the reader believe in whatever he is narrating is true but at the same time, he also warns not to be swayed by whatever he writes. This narrative art touches and affects the reader like me at a highly personal level. Memory and history both go hand in hand but turns out with an enigma that it fully convinced me in the first half that he has lived a perfectly happy, normal life and had never ever bothered any single person.
It is a human tendency that we erase some memories for which we don't have a favourable opinion and so we develop our own subjective reality, which many people including me might be doing. It was amazing to observe the unreliability of the narrator because the history which he remembers is thoroughly different from the real thing and that is what I have learnt from this piece of literature that whenever we assume certain things from any situations, we must not react immediately in a cruel harsh manner. The unpleasant situations should be dealt with utmost calmness and with far-sighted vision.
When I finished the book, it gave clarity about memory- fragment(ically) fractured memory. I was wondering about how convincingly the narrator managed to put forward an intentionally unconscious biased past. I came to know about how one approaches memory, history, time, life and some unanswered questions and SELF.
This 150-page book is directly an answer to the question 'What is Literature?' Because I came to know many great things from this book and when I finished reading, my mind was overflowing with questions, of course, rhetorical questions. One of the things that this book taught me is objectivity. It taught me to evaluate my personal life by detaching myself and at the same time, it is necessary to understand things from other's perspective also.
It's a splendid fact that the book has as much depth as precise and accurate as its length is. I have observed that as a reader, one seems to be in a constant quest whether to believe in the narrative presented or to doubt it. Well, at some moments, as much as the reader tries to detach from the narrative, s/he is forced to convince himself with the narrative.
I felt reading while reading this book like a quest where there are clues in the narration of the book, there are real unidentifiable hints but even the fully conscious mind will not be able to recognize it but to come back to it again after reading a few pages ahead.
This equation puzzled me a lot, that uneasiness was absolutely hard to bear.
b = s - v (×/+) a¹
a² + v + a¹ × s = b ?
As the was unable to comprehend the situation described in this equation, similarly I too was unable to understand as well as bear the patience.
Who says 'end' means extreme limit or conclusion? but once you will read this novel, you will realize the emptiness of the end, the incompletely complete end or the completely incomplete end.
It is titled 'The Sense of an Ending' but for me, as I finished the reading, it's really a sense of a beginning of understanding, of comprehending, of developing perspectives of everything.
What more can you expect if you get a favourite book to work on and some friends with whom you can discuss the text, ideas, style, etc. I didn't know the characters of 'The Sense of an Ending' were the ones who were going to stay forever with me to remind me to be alert with my memory and numerous punching statements which totally seem relatable or thoroughly connected to my life.
If you want to experience a great read, don't forget to read 'The Sense of an Ending' because once you will give it a read, you are definitely going to reread it in future.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book-
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