The Sense of an Ending

As an English teacher, I really expect myself to read a little more than I actually do. Busy life and papers to grade are my two standard excuses, but I hear my colleagues talking of their latest literary conquests, and I cringe in professional inadequacy. They are just as busy as I, yet they manage to eke out the time. So on this my first full day on Christmas break, I added Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending to my Kindle and devoured it cover to cover today. (Does "cover to cover" work for a Kindle purchase?) I've always had a thing for the Man Booker Prize, so this year's winner seemed to be a logical first choice. The meager 160-odd pages were honestly secondary to the accolades the book has received in my choice of first texts.

Anyway, I loved this book. Themes of nostalgia, misrememberings, and existential angst will always resonate with me, and I'm thinking of including this novel as part of my Philosophy and Literature elective next year. I'll have to revisit it once the afterglow of the experience of reading has subsided -- perhaps, more appropriately, once the venom from the sting in the "tale" has dissipated -- but it seems to be one worth including in that context. I was reminded of Yann Martel's The Life of Pi and my waking Dana asleep beside me at 2AM with "you won't believe how this ends!" I burbled that to myself for a good few days after I'd finished the book. But this plot's oblique edginess and these charcters' extraordinary banality will have The Sense of an Ending stay with me even longer. It's certainly a serendipitous choice for the first novel of my New Literary Age.