rifting towards February at 5:30-ish or so on a Saturday evening in western Pennsylvania. I love the midnight blue of the winter sky.Last week I finished "The Sense of an Ending," by Julian Barnes.
C & I went on a buying spree the previous weekend at Barnes & Noble (gift cards!). I had been looking for Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, but it was nowhere to be found. Had read a review of the Barnes book, so I picked it up.
It's a book that makes you think about who you, and the people you have known, are.
The protagonist, Tony Webster, is average, normal, full of the youthful expectations, along with his pals, of a life waiting to begin. A romance goes wrong, a letter is sent and Tony goes on to live a quiet, ordinary, life, avoiding being hurt.
There's the rub. Even ordinary people can be awful, without meaning to be. The survival mechanism, to avoid pain, turns out to have the ironic ability to inflict it.
Having avoided pain, Tony is oblivious to how he causes it in others. He's not a bad person, he's very reflective, but keeps missing the main point.
The tale ends, as he puts it, with "Great Unrest."
This is a book that demands rereading it. Read for structure first and nuance later.
Not to go on a rant, but in terms of cultural experiences, "The Sense of an Ending" beats "The Artist" hands down. End of not going on a rant.
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