The Sense of an Ending

I was recommended to read Julian Barnes' The sense of an Ending by my sister, I think because it had a few mathematical references in it - in particular a diary entry with the equation

b = s - v +x a

or something like that. I think I really appreciated 75% of this book. There are some nice literary references - I particularly like the references to Camus.

I do find it difficult to deal with suicide in books, and I guess part of what this book is about is making sense of a full stop like suicide, but it also is about making sense of the ending to any type of relationship - to young romances where we wondered whether we were in love in the first place, to marriages that drift apart, to friendships that we don't invest enough time into, and to the death of loved ones.

We yearn for that clarity of reflection, and mementos like Diaries, old notes, only really brew up a sense of complexity such that we start to question what began in the first place. I would hate to think of what people reading my diaries would do to their memory of me. I will endeavour to write at least once "this is not me" in each diary - because it's not.

And at the same time everything is.

I think the power of this book could have come by keeping to the unknowable, I found that the way things fall into place at the end made the story a little less ordinary and therefore a little less universal in the emotions that one goes through in reading it. So perhaps it's closer to 85% or even 90% that I liked. The ending is okay, I guess some people need the satisfaction of a wrap-up, but I think there was the potential here to leave things a little more hung.

Whenever there's "maths" in a book it usually captures my scrutiny - I wouldn't really call the equations in this book "maths", but I can relate to trying to represent relationships between people with letters and symbols - not because maths will solve it, just to clarify the thinking process.

hmm...