The Sense of a Memory

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending wins Most Confusing Last-Minute Plot Twist, hands down.  Is that the point of the title?  To have the feeling of an ending but not understand it, and/or to suggest the lack of sense in the ending?  Strangely, the plot twist itself is inconsequential to the meat of the book.  This was my first experience with Julian Barnes and I'm pegging him as an author to revisit; I had plenty of "YES" moments during this book, though most of them were depressing or actually alarming.  If I would've read this book for the first time about 20 years from now, I'd be having a major case of the blues, so clearly does he crystallize regret of wasted youth.  On a lighter note, I also encountered a new word (susurrus; mumuring -- fun!).

Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Nutshell summary, the narrator is an older man, Tony, who is suddenly thrust into a situation involving an ex-girlfriend from his teen years and a long-dead friend.  The book begins by the narrator retelling his teen years, the fling with the girlfriend, his friend's suicide.  This is the kind of book where, once you know the ending, you need to return and read this first part again because foreshadowing is everywhere.  Underlying all of this is that the narrator is unreliable; if this isn't immediately apparent, it's okay because Barnes then beats you over the head with it:

"... the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened." (p.12)  [** side note: consider Eros vs Thanatos as 'primitive storytelling', imposing meaning on the affair and pregnancy (Eros; life instinct) followed by the suicide (Thanatos; death instinct)]

"We need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us." (p.13)

(A great movie with the same memory gist is Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" -- a story told retrospectively by a man who exaggerates and caricatures the past.) Towards the end of his narrative, Tony actually edits his memories, inserting people or situations that had previously been forgotten (or maybe really not there at all?).  How much do you trust your own memory, let alone Tony's?  These days it's probably easier to track the past just by scrolling through your Facebook feed, though even that you can delete and select memories for editing.

The two passages that really stuck with me long after I finished the book:

"But time ... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them." (p.102)

"Had my life increased, or merely added to itself?" (p.97)

That's some heavy reflection right there.  For both Tony and I.

Bottom line?  Highly recommend.  Like I said at the top, I'm glad I read this book young; there's still time to not be so safe and cowardly.  Julian Barnes: endorser of YOLO.