Book Review: "The Sense of An Ending," by Julian Barnes "The Sense of An Ending,"
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Book review: “The Sense of an Ending,” by Julian Barnes
“The Sense of an Ending,” the most recent novel by the English writer Julian
Barnes, opens with a brief list of the narrator’s 40-year-old memories, 1.
__________ with a proviso that the last of them “isn’t something I actually
saw, but what you 2. __________ up remembering isn’t always the same as
what you have 3. __________.”
It’s the first of many such provisos in this story of Tony Webster, a 60-
something retiree living near London who has taken 4. __________ a difficult
project: discerning what role, 5. __________ any, he may have played in a
decades-old tragedy. To do that, he must persuade an old girlfriend 6.
__________ he hasn’t seen or even thought of in many years to 7.
__________ over a diary that is, legally at 8. __________, his property. While
Tony waits for her unlikely cooperation, he has little choice 9. __________ to
search through his memories, excavating as 10. __________ he can any
details or scraps of contextual information that he has buried.
The diary belonged to Adrian Finn, the brightest and most self-11. __________
member of Tony’s teenage friends, who bonded over history, philosophy and
bons mots at an English boys’ school in the 1960s. The ex-girlfriend is Veronica
Ford, 12. __________ relationship with Tony was short-13. __________ and
frustratingly chaste. What reunites the three, in a manner of speaking, after
such a long time is the death of Veronica’s mother, who had been holding on to
Adrian’s diary since he committed suicide not long after the boys went their
separate ways.
When Tony learns that Veronica’s mother, whom he had encountered only
once on an unpleasant weekend visit, has bequeathed to him 500 pounds and
Adrian’s diary, he is suitably mystified. His curiosity 14. __________ into
obsession 15. __________ learning that Veronica has taken the diary for
herself and refuses to 16. __________ with it. An e-mail campaign follows, in
which Tony resolves “to be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in
other words, to lie.” Determined to get to the 17. __________ of the mystery
and convinced that the diary holds the key, he adopts a tone of unflappable
good cheer with Veronica, who responds to his e-mails 18. __________, if at
all.
(…)
“The Sense of an Ending” — which has been shortlisted for Britain’s Man
Booker Prize, marking the fourth time Barnes has been so honored — grapples
with this question and 19. __________ at a resigned conclusion. Tony, for his
part, broadcasts from the first page his doubts regarding what he’s able to
recall; these doubts accrete in the text like statements from the witness stand
(“I couldn’t at this distance testify,” “I can’t from here determine”), before
culminating in a full-20. __________ confession of unreliable narratorship: “I
exaggerate, I misrepresent.”