Name: The Sense of an Ending (Korean Edition)
Rating: 3.796590909090909 (220 reviews)
ISBN: 9788963708386

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending (Korean Edition)

Includes poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads

The Sense of an Ending

Phil

Creative and well-written. The ending is left open. And it's a bit dark, an aspect I didn't like.

Ans Rizwan

Im not articulate enough to comment on this lol

Jeffery Tay

I came a couple times to push this aside as the ramblings of an old man. However, by the end everything came apart and for the first time you realise how our words can construe a responsibility. 

diya

Going to go stare at a wall for a bit cause what did I just read

sophie <3

Andrew John Kinney

I'm happy to have finally discovered Julian Barnes; I've been meaning to read something of his for some time. I can understand why Sense of an Ending won the Booker (though Barnes once referred to the Mann-Booker as "posh bingo"); Barnes tellingly re-creates adolescent life in England in the '60's, and it was of a sort not so different from my small town teenage years, despite my version being fifteen years later and in another country. For those of middle-class upbringing of a certain era, who has not suffered that uncomfortable weekend at the girlfriend's parents' house, being inspected for flaws? Or, for those males, again of a certain era, the almost-sex with the serious girlfriend. 

The protagonist's realizes, at last, how lucky he is to have simply arrived at sixty-something, and to have avoided the worst of the many available shipwrecks that life offers. It is an insight that feels true to me, despite the somewhat negative cast to the thought, i.e., his life is not extraordinary, but at least it is not a catastrophe. As one who has flirted with catastrophe, I understand the difference. His life may be somewhat boring and conventional, but the wolf is not at the door. And yet he learns a troubling truth about himself, forty years late, because certain words cannot be unsaid.

Barnes reminds me a bit of J.M. Coetzee, though he seems a gentler man. This book, for those of you thinking of reading Barnes, is a good place to start. It's short at 140-some pages, and is quite a page turner, or it was for me. And it's deeply felt.

heleen de boever

This reminded me of various aspects of some of my favourite books: the older, unreliable and complacent narrators of Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, the skillfully crafted plot and erudite musings of The Secret History, combined with the precise yet poetic prose of something like The Tortilla Curtain. The ending hit me like a thump on the chest and left me feeling physically vulnerable. Perhaps the most important thing this book did, though, was remind me of that intoxicating process that reading can be: obsessive, absorbing, with disregard for sleep, for deadlines, as long as you can live in the narrative one page longer.

haifa

As someone who takes note of what memories I chose to forget/warp/mutate, I was hooked to the story. This short novel is an attempt to meditate on ageing, memory and loss. An attempt because somewhere along the gripping story and minimalist prose, the meditation doesn't quite materialize well.

Rohan Uddin

A wonderful, compact novel. This is an immensely powerful meditation on memory, ageing and regrets, told through the memories of Tony Webster. Written with philosophical insight, this book tells us that life can be full of secrets, but may seemingly have a clear-edged to it.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Through the eyes of the unexceptional Tony Webster, Barnes paints a rather crude picture of the colder times, tries to figure out why people kill themselves, and explores the beauty of relationships in retrospect. Tony's struggles are often compounded by recollections of an awkward weekend with his ex's family which is a gentle reminder that some incidents, despite their mundane nature, carve themselves into memory. Adrian's anecdotes during the history lessons at the beginning of the book are especially wonderful.

Fran Lewis

This was something that i picked up on impulse at the library. Fast read and interesting.

John Elbing

An interesting, nostalgic muse on memory.

Gulshan Hasanzada

Kitab pis olsaydı da, tərcümənin sanki orijinal dili azərbaycanca olması təəssüratı verməsinə görə yenə də oxumanızı tövsiyə edərdim. Yaxşı ki, mənim zövqüm və hisslərimcə kitab yaxşı olduğu üçün 5 ulduz verməkdə xəsislik etmədim. Həyatı sonlandırmağa doğru özümüzə bir rahatlıq rutini formalaşdırmağa başladığımız periodda əslində yenidən yaşamağa başlayırıq, həm də bu dəfə xatirələri yenidən yaşamaq, tanışları bir daha tanımaqla. Lakin yadımızda qalanlar, tanıdığımız adamlar əslində bizim bilmədiklərimiz, bizim tanımadıqlarımız da ola bilər. “Aqibət duyğusu”nda da eyni təzadlı fikirlər romanın sütununu təşkil edir.
Zaman tapıb, “read list”-nizə əlavə edib, oxuyun, lütfən 😇👌🏻

Tony Webster, now that he is older, is trying to make sense of some of the ways he has behaved towards other people. He discovers that how he remembers events may not be the same way that others remember them.

Fraser Simons

While I’m not a fan of the style of prose, I do very much prefer it when an author writes a story that communicates something of themselves. And memory is a fascinating subject. One I return to over and over again myself, and feels like a enduring question ingrained in the life cycle of amy given human. Musings like this, when I was young, probably would have seemed ludicrous. 

But the older one gets the more self evident it becomes that memory is not at all as you believe it to be when you’re growing up. So many things alter it and I have many of the same feelings about memory as are codified in this book. 

In a way, that is precisely what failed to connect for me, though. If you seek out stories about memory, as I have, for a long time, it feels like these revelations have lost their lustre. So while I connected at a meta level as like-recognizes-like, at the authorial-reader level, the story itself felt like walking a far too familiar path. The ending is similarly perfunctory if you pay attention. 

It’s interesting being frustrated with a protagonist, and I think it could have formed a better bond, had the prose not been preoccupied with concrete steam or consciousness with no time or place or anything active. And so, because Tony “just doesn’t get it”, and his perception of the world is so ineffectual, it was hard for me to care about him and his story. Other than as a warning about motivation thinking, but that’s the retread path. 

If I had to try to describe exactly why it’s not 3 stars and not 5 stars, I’d compare it to a family member—probably an uncle or a father—telling you a story you’ve heard many times, but they continue, for whatever reason, to tell the tale (perhaps without remembering who they’ve told it to) again and again and again. It’s not that it’s a bad story. It’s well told and you have new context every time you hear it, to some degree. But you do already know it, the way it will be told, and you know that at some point you’ll be hearing this story again. Possibly soon.

Kwan Ann Tan

this book is one of the unique situations in which i find myself saying that the movie was most definitely better- flashback style would have worked for the novel as it did for the movie

Jason Porterfield

Beautifully written, moving and disquieting. Julian Barnes writes novels that stick in my head, and I feel like I'll be thinking about this one for quite some time.

The Sense of an Ending (Korean Edition)

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