Book: The sense of an ending
Aug. 16th, 2013 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Julian Barnes
Details: (c) Julian Barnes 2011; Pub Vintage 2012; ISBN 978-0-099-56497-3
Verdict: The sense of an ending is clever but too depressing for me.
Reasons for reading it:doseybat's mother really pressed it on me, and I generally quite like Julian Barnes anyway.
How it came into my hands:angelofthenorth lent it to me (and in a particularly beautiful edition, too!)
I couldn't quite get into The sense of an ending. I think it's partly because it's very much a book about suicide and I have never really been able to handle those well. And partly because I found the characters impossible to like, particularly the first person narrator. Because of these barriers, I found myself too much aware of the construction of the story. There are several short one or two sentence paragraphs set aside where Barnes draws philosophical conclusions from the narrative and I just found them mannered rather than profound.
I generally like books about older people looking back on their lives and reevaluating things, and I think tSoaE does something quite original with Tony confronting his past and realizing that the story he's been telling himself that he's just an average middle-of-the-road guy doesn't quite reflect reality. But because Tony's self-image is of being kind of boring and mediocre, and his self-discovery involves realizing that he's sometimes been directly cruel, it was hard for me to care what happened to him, either in the story's present or in his exploration of his past.
I also really didn't like the way tSoaE handles disability. Part of the big reveal of the denouement is that one of the characters has relative with an intellectual disability. But there is no attempt to make this relative seem real or explore his perspective, he's apparently just there to be a Symbol of moral badness; there's even hints that his very existence is a "punishment" on some of the central characters.
In the end, I couldn't really tell whether Tony's observations about the relationships between men and women are supposed to be a satire of a certain kind of passive, self-pitying misogyny, or whether the narrative is actually promoting the view that women are mysterious, irrational creatures and the dating scene is stacked against men who attempt to understand the incomprehensible in order to get laid. Tony sort of ironically criticizes his younger self for holding this kind of view, but he doesn't really replace it with anything better as he goes through supposed personal growth, and by the end of the book you still get the feeling that his exes' various kinds of unhappiness are basically all about him and the book is an exploration of his manpain over having profoundly unhappy people in his life. Mind you, he also seems to treat the suicide of his (male) friend as being all about him too.
To be fair I don't normally read Barnes because I expect especially well-drawn women, but tSofE didn't compensate for that deficiency by giving me interesting, well-rounded and sympathetic male characters. Everybody's sort of detached and ironic and the attitude makes the plot events seem basically pointless. The quality of the writing is undoubtedly high; the book is short, less than 150 pages, yet really complex and layered, and you can see that every word has been carefully chosen even while giving the impression of a somewhat artless stream-of-consciousness. I can see why the Batmother was excited about this book (even though my review has come across really negative), but it's just not for me.
Details: (c) Julian Barnes 2011; Pub Vintage 2012; ISBN 978-0-099-56497-3
Verdict: The sense of an ending is clever but too depressing for me.
Reasons for reading it:
doseybat's mother really pressed it on me, and I generally quite like Julian Barnes anyway.How it came into my hands:
angelofthenorth lent it to me (and in a particularly beautiful edition, too!) I couldn't quite get into The sense of an ending. I think it's partly because it's very much a book about suicide and I have never really been able to handle those well. And partly because I found the characters impossible to like, particularly the first person narrator. Because of these barriers, I found myself too much aware of the construction of the story. There are several short one or two sentence paragraphs set aside where Barnes draws philosophical conclusions from the narrative and I just found them mannered rather than profound.
I generally like books about older people looking back on their lives and reevaluating things, and I think tSoaE does something quite original with Tony confronting his past and realizing that the story he's been telling himself that he's just an average middle-of-the-road guy doesn't quite reflect reality. But because Tony's self-image is of being kind of boring and mediocre, and his self-discovery involves realizing that he's sometimes been directly cruel, it was hard for me to care what happened to him, either in the story's present or in his exploration of his past.
I also really didn't like the way tSoaE handles disability. Part of the big reveal of the denouement is that one of the characters has relative with an intellectual disability. But there is no attempt to make this relative seem real or explore his perspective, he's apparently just there to be a Symbol of moral badness; there's even hints that his very existence is a "punishment" on some of the central characters.
In the end, I couldn't really tell whether Tony's observations about the relationships between men and women are supposed to be a satire of a certain kind of passive, self-pitying misogyny, or whether the narrative is actually promoting the view that women are mysterious, irrational creatures and the dating scene is stacked against men who attempt to understand the incomprehensible in order to get laid. Tony sort of ironically criticizes his younger self for holding this kind of view, but he doesn't really replace it with anything better as he goes through supposed personal growth, and by the end of the book you still get the feeling that his exes' various kinds of unhappiness are basically all about him and the book is an exploration of his manpain over having profoundly unhappy people in his life. Mind you, he also seems to treat the suicide of his (male) friend as being all about him too.
To be fair I don't normally read Barnes because I expect especially well-drawn women, but tSofE didn't compensate for that deficiency by giving me interesting, well-rounded and sympathetic male characters. Everybody's sort of detached and ironic and the attitude makes the plot events seem basically pointless. The quality of the writing is undoubtedly high; the book is short, less than 150 pages, yet really complex and layered, and you can see that every word has been carefully chosen even while giving the impression of a somewhat artless stream-of-consciousness. I can see why the Batmother was excited about this book (even though my review has come across really negative), but it's just not for me.
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Date: 2013-08-17 01:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-17 01:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-17 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-19 12:25 am (UTC)