I accept that everyone is focused on next year’s reading challenges but I have some unfinished #NovNov business!

The Sense of an Ending (150pp)

Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again. That’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering…

I’m fairly certain I read this back-in-the-day (2011, when it won the Booker) but had no memory of the story.

Like many of Barnes’s other stories, The Sense of an Ending is loaded with themes of history (how we interpret the past, what it means for the future, who has a right to interpret), philosophy, and the meaning of time. Read this one for the brilliant twist at the end.

3.5/5

Levels of Life (128pp)

A triptych of essays, linked together by ‘levels’. In the first we learn about celebrated 19th century balloonists – they were explorers, pioneered navigation and photography methods, and were obviously a little crazy! In the second piece (safely at ground level), the focus is on the love story between Colonel Fred Burnaby and the most famous actress of her day, Sarah Bernhardt – both were also balloonists.

But it’s the third part of this book, The Loss of Depth, that you need in your reading life. Barnes writes of his grief when his wife became ill, and died 37 days later. This is some of the best writing about grief that I have read (and in many ways I wish this part was a standalone volume, that I could press into the hands of people when they need it, because the words will resonate for those in the depths of despair). I marked dozens and dozens of passages.

Barnes explores many aspects of grief – anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief (particularly in relation to the loss of his future with his wife), and the difficulty of social interactions for people who are grieving (that others either minimise the death or expect you do their mourning for them).

…since the grief-struck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

But it is in his words about both the uniqueness and the commonalities between each person’s grief experience that sets this essay apart.

So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but its tone and textures, its deceptions and false dawns, its recidivism.

I did already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. grief is a human, not a medical, condition. … The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (‘it hurts exactly as much as it is worth’) sad.

Griefs do not explain one another, but they may overlap. And so there is a complicity among the grief-struck.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

You think you have met all the different sorts of pain you will be asked to bear, and that after this there will only be repetition. But why should repetition mean less pain?

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but that doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

As an aside, I loved the fact that while mourning, Barnes ‘discovered’ opera. In listening to Verdi’s Don Carlo, when the hero falls immediately in love, Barnes says –

Yes, I thought, that’s right, that’s how life is and should be, let’s concentrate on the essentials… Opera cuts to the chase – as death does.

4/5