THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes

The February, 2018 selection for the Contemporary Book Club

Finished We 2/22/18- after I took Buddy for his dental check-up. He didn't need the general anesthetic, just a couple of 'scrapings'.

Since I love novels with an 'unreliable narrator', so this one was a 'no brainer'. Also, this guy was either lied to or people would tell him, "you never get it".

A short novel and lots of it made me want to underline.

Although history is written by the victors, the book reminds us that lots of history is written by the whining losers. And, I suppose, by a lot of people who are just plain uninformed.

Written in two sections. The first refers to his college life where he meets the main characters, and then rapidly skims (forty years!) to his life as a retired English gentleman. The second section- the longest- is about the major deceptions in his life. The 'big things' that he didn't understand, wouldn't understand, and the stuff that he never learned about and very definitely effected everything that he thought about himself.

From wikipedia-

"The novel is divided into two parts, entitled "One" and "Two", both of which are narrated by Tony Webster when he is retired and living alone. The first part begins in the 1960s with four intellectually arrogant school friends, of whom two feature in the remainder of the story: Tony, the narrator, and Adrian, the most precociously intelligent of the four. Towards the end of their school days another boy at the school hangs himself, apparently after getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened. Adrian goes to Cambridge University and Tony to Bristol University. Tony acquires a girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he spends an awkward weekend. On waking one morning he finds that he and Veronica's mother, Sarah, are alone in the house, and she apologises for her family's behaviour towards him. Tony and Veronica's relationship fails in some acrimony, as he breaks up with her after she has sex with him. In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing him that he is going out with Veronica. Tony replies to the letter, telling Adrian that in his opinion Veronica was damaged in some way and that he should talk to her mother about it. Some months later he is told that Adrian has committed suicide, leaving a note addressed to the coroner saying that the free person has a philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life, and may then choose to renounce it. Tony admires the reasoning. He briefly recounts the following uneventful forty years of his life until his sixties. At this point Tony's narration of the second part of the novel – which is twice as long as the first – begins, with the arrival of a lawyer's letter informing him that Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and two documents.[11] These lead him to re-establish contact with Veronica and after a number of meetings with her, to re-evaluate the story he has narrated in the first part.[12] On consulting the lawyers, Tony learns that Veronica has Adrian's diary. This leads him to send Veronica repeated e-mails requesting the diary. Veronica eventually sends Tony a single page of the diary, containing Adrian's musings on life as a series of cumulative wagers. Following this, Veronica meets Tony on the Millennium Bridge in London and gives him the letter he sent to Adrian in his youth. On re-reading it, Tony realises how malicious and unpleasant it was, and how he has erased this from his memory. Nevertheless, he persists in attempting to retrieve the diary from Veronica, which leads to her asking him to meet at a location in North London, where she drives him to see a group of mentally handicapped men being taken for a walk by their careworker, one of whom she points out to him. Tony does not understand the significance of this and Veronica leaves him with no explanation. Over the course of several weeks, Tony revisits the location until he is able to relocate the man Veronica showed him in a pub. Tony greets the man saying he is a friend of Veronica's which leads to an upset response from the man. Tony recalls the memory of Adrian from the man's facial features. He e-mails Veronica an apology, saying he didn't realise that she and Adrian had a son together. Veronica only responds with the reply "You don't get it, but then you never did." On revisiting the pub where he saw the man, Tony gets into conversation with the careworker, who reveals that the man is actually the son of Veronica's mother, Sarah, making him Veronica's brother."

I'm interested to see what the reaction will be at the book club meeting. I will be surprised to learn that it was very popular. This is the first 'very masculine' perspective that we've had in a long time- maybe never a book this clearly written by a male.