{"id":478,"date":"2012-07-30T16:05:32","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T00:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=478"},"modified":"2012-07-30T16:05:32","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T00:05:32","slug":"the-sense-of-an-ending-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/30\/the-sense-of-an-ending-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sense of an Ending– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The Sense of an Ending<\/a> by Julian Barnes<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

aMy reviews tend to be about provenance and coincidence, are therefore deeply personal, and should therefore by skipped if you\u2019re looking for synopsis and approval. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with synopsis and approval. I just don\u2019t feel like summarizing, and I don\u2019t have the reputation or wisdom required for my approval carry any weight.<\/p>\n

My wife\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

And it turns out this is the third Man Booker Prize 2011 Shortlist book I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Sense is about time, documents, suicide, class, and England. In more or less that order. One character invokes Camus, reminding us that: \u201cThere is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.\u201d Match that against my favorite quote from Camus: \u201cOne sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers\u201d and you\u2019ve got the tone of the book. It\u2019s \u201cto be or not to be\u201d for the modern age.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the tone, anyway, although the plot, in the end, vindicates the coward\u2019s life. In more than one place Barnes has lines like \u201cif this was a novel\u201d or \u201cif this was fiction\u201d 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 \u201cthe littleness of life that art exaggerates,\u201d and since the line comes from Flaubert, perhaps we\u2019re supposed to compare this character to Madame Bovary.<\/p>\n

So be it. It\u2019s not that were disconnected that makes us miserable, it\u2019s that we\u2019re bored. Kill yourself for a good reason, or a bad one. But don\u2019t pretend it\u2019s noble, because once you\u2019ve removed yourself from time\u2019s exegesis, you no longer get to participate in the meaning of life.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019re looking for synopsis and approval. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with synopsis and approval. I just don\u2019t feel like summarizing, and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Sense of an Ending– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-7I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}