The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

This book was nothing like the kind of books I normally read. It was good, but not amazing, not for me at least.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

I gave it 3 stars… just plain 3.

It was a good story, with lots of symbols I guess… but I’m at a stage where I like straightforward stories.. and this was not one of them.

There might be spoilers ahead, so be warned.

** Spoilers **

This book talks about the life-long-story of Anthony Webster, Veronica Ford and Adrian Finn.

Anthony or Tony, is the main character and the one’s point of view from where we see the story unfold, he had some friends at school and when a new very smart new student arrived to the class they turned their 3 man group in a 4 man group, the new addition was Adrian Finn.

They all had very profound kind of talks, but Adrian was known to be the most mature of them all.

Later in life when they were all off to college, they separated and Tony found a girlfriend, Veronica, with whom he dated some years and later fell out of love. But to his surprise, she later on started dating Adrian himself, much to Tony’s disgust.

Up until this point, Tony’s memories of the events are fuzzy and with very little details. But he does remember a tragic event that makes him feel a little remorse… Adrian suicides. Neither him nor his friends ever know the reason.

But Tony’s life continues, he marries and then divorces, he has kids then grandchildren, he ages… and then he receives a letter from Veronica’s mother that he’s left with a couple of documents and some money. But the thing is, one of the documents that he was supposed to receive was withheld by Veronica herself.

After all those years, his curiosity is certainly piked and he starts trying to contact everyone he can in order to either get information or the document itself.

The document… is Adrian’s diary.

Why did Veronica’s mother had it? What was written in it? Whose fault was Adrian’s suicide? Did Tony remembered more about his interactions with the Ford Family and Adrian? Why is Veronica so cryptic?

Some of the answers to this questions we find out, some others we don’t. Most of the book, if not all, is Tony’s recollections and asumptions and opinions… which I think takes certainty from the story.

In the end, some shoking things are discovered by Tony, but… they’re also his own conjunction and we have to accept they’re the reality...

The relationship between Adrian and Tony, felt to me similar to Demian in Herman Hesse, the mistery boy that always seem to know more than everyone else and eggs (?) which was weird. But oposit to Demian, Adrian was more human(?) and weaker, he suffered in life even though Tony didn’t acknowledge he did for most of the story.

There are lots of things that were unclear to me, that maybe they were explained or maybe not. But that’s what made lower the rate for this book. It IS a good story, but there were some things missing for me.

I’ll now watch the movie… because I want to see if there’s some light into the mystery shown in the adaptation.

Hope you enjoyed. Have a nice day.

**EDIT**
Yesterday I watched the movie, I liked it because the actors were nice and endearing… I don’t want to be bias to the main actor, Jim Broadbent, because he was Prof. Slughorn in the Harry Potter movies, but he was kind of cute, a cute old man. And the Tony from the book didn’t strike me as cute, as the actor was… Mainly because in the book he was supposed to be 60 and my dad is 60 and he doesn’t have that “old man” vibe projected throughout the story.

This is the movie trailer from IMDB.

Enjoy.