Have you all started January's READ THIS! book - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes - introduced here a couple of weeks ago?
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Today, I am sharing with you a few reviews of this novel:
First, from the NYTimes, Liesl Schillinger writes: “'The Sense of an Ending' is a short book, but not a slight one. In it Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam."
From NPR, Heller McAlpin writes: "It's fall, postwar baby boomers are hitting the age of nostalgia, and intimations of mortality are in the air. Julian Barnes' new novel, The Sense of an Ending, rushed into print three months ahead of its original U.S. release date after being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, fits right into the wistful zeitgeist. It's an elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale about memory, aging, time and remorse. [...] The Sense of an Ending bears a kinship with Philip Roth's late cycle of slim novels about nemeses. Like The Humbling, especially, it addresses the conflict between Eros and Thanatos — sex and death — and offers somber insights into life's losses, mistakes and disappointments in a piercing, thought-provoking narrative. Bleak as this may sound, the key word here — the note of encouragement — is 'insights.' And this beautiful book is full of them."
From the Denver Post, John Broening writes: "Julian Barnes has staked his career on the fictional possibilities of the intellectual blague, the headscratching paradox, the unresolvable conundrum. [...] In 'The Sense of an Ending,' Barnes has finally found the perfect balance between the drama of ideas and the profundity of plot. It is his best novel."
And finally, from USA Today, a review by Deirdre Donahue who isn't nearly as impressed as so many other reviewers: "Nominated three previous times, the much-admired English novelist Julian Barnes has finally taken home Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize. But before you rush to buy his prize-winning novel, a warning. There's no question Barnes is a gifted writer but, honestly, The Sense of an Ending will leave a lot of American readers mystified at how it won. [...] In the longest, dreariest 163 pages in recent memory, Sense of an Ending offers pretentious philosophical musings masquerading as a novel."
I cannot wait to pick up this novel and see what all of the fuss is about. If you haven't already started, won't you please join me in reading this new novel?
I cannot wait to pick up this novel and see what all of the fuss is about. If you haven't already started, won't you please join me in reading this new novel?
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