The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)

I do not know why I picked up this book, I am not familiar with the author, but it

seemed outside the thriller genre, which I did not want to be reading for a while. Our narrator is looking back on his life from his retirement years and remembering school buddies, his first romance. Some things happen in the present that make him revisit those school years, analyze those relationships. The setting is Britain in the 60's, so just a decade before my own history. I liked his comment that the changes of the 60's did not reach everyone, it depended where you were and who you were. I was not that far removed from the time to know that things like dating and relationships were different back then.

I liked this self analysis, contemplating history, how memories of events differ, how we interpret what we see, hear about, remember. I feel I am spending some time on this type of contemplation, looking back at my own life. And then to make it even more relevant, there are a couple of suicides in the book by young people, and I am just dealing with one in my own life - a student I was working with on a few projects. You may never know what triggered that self destructive act.

The main character Tony is supposed to get a bit of money and a diary after the death of his old girlfriends mother. He tries to get the diary by contacting Veronica, the old girlfriend. She was not easy to understand in her youth and has become even more enigmatic in the present. She keeps telling him that he "just doesn't get it," but since she doesn't tell him anything, I am not sure how he was supposed to "get it." The only thing that was unsatisfying is the ending.Tony tries to figure out what happened to Veronica and his old friend Adrian that committed suicide and whose diary he was to have. In the end Tony seems to understand what happened, but I didn't. Again, the audio version of the book didn't help, but I listened to the ending twice, and still only understood a part of what Tony understood. I would have to go back to different parts of the book to see if I could decipher it. The book was still worth reading. I should take time and write down my own thoughts outside the snippets that appear in my blogs.

When I have questions about a book, I see what other people have said about it. If I want a better summary of the book, I can read it on the author's site. The book received the Man Booker Prize. I liked the quote in the Wikipedia from BBC news: " It's a quiet book, but the shock that comes doesn't break stride with the tone of the rest of the book. In purely technical terms it is one of the most masterful things I've ever read."  And then I go check out Amazon, because the reviews there are by regular people, not reviewers. There were plenty who did not understand the ending, and I didn't find any that did explain it (but there were hundreds of reviews and I only have so much time.) One review by Third Age Traveler had pulled out some quotes from the book (s)he liked, and those were memorable for me too, so I will repeat them here:

"...of course we were pretentious--what else is youth for?"
"...our fear: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature."
"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."
"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be."