by Sana Ashraf
Some books come with good plots and others with interesting characters, and then there is Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending: the novella that has it all. Literature, hope, dreams, love, theories – as well as memorable characters.
The 2011 Man Booker Prize Winner enchants its reader from the very first page. It opens with a fervent, outreaching, group of three teenagers who meet Adrian Finn – an intellectual who’s arguably ‘smarter than his age’ – until he is absorbed into their clique. Hungry on knowledge and all that proportionate it, they would participate in the discussion of science and literature, their own theories, and often outsmart their teachers and even themselves. They swear to keep in contact after graduation – which is typical and even optimistic.
The storyline then follows their college life and middle age, all told through the memory of the narrator, Tony Webster. Except… their lives don’t turn out as they thought it would. They expected lives as note-worthy as that of the philosophers and of the writers they used to quote. They thought they were different. “Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?” For one, Tony undergoes the traditional process of life: the career, the family, the divorce. It all happens in passivity, until he receives a letter from a lawyer, taking him back 40 years into the past, and time spent as a teenager.
This novella is great entertainment, but also quality literature. The sentences are flawless in style and fluency. Every page leaves the reader at once staggered and elevated, as we trace a story that lights a fire in our hearts that dims as our characters age, their lives of ending up banal and mundane. What makes this novella different, and a great read, is that it speaks to the soul a magical…
“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However…who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’?”
Book Recommendation: ‘Where Rainbows End’ by Cecelia Ahern
From mischievous children to stubborn teenagers; from letters and e-mails to the rise of instant messaging. Rosie and Alex have been the best of friends since childhood until Alex’s family moves from Dublin to America and they are separated. A story of two best friends… or a little more than ‘just friends’.
