THE SENSE OF A ENDING by Julian Barnes (Vintage Books, 2012)
This is a novel about memory and the need we all have to create personal narratives that show us in the best light.
Aside from eliminating bad memories, the brain can play tricks on us by blanking out or reconstructing embarrassing or painful things from the past we’d prefer to forget.
This is the fictional fate of Tony Webster, whose life we follow from the idealistic arrogance of his youth to the resigned acceptance of a relatively uneventful life upon entering what sociologists and Saga travel company would call the ‘third age’.
In these twilight years , as a lonely, retired and divorced citizen, Tony comes to the realisation that he is not, after all, in control of his destiny and forced to concede: “we muddle along, we let things happen to us”. Continue reading
