The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

There was a line in Trust that struck me as something I might want to refer back to, so I committed the page number to memory. "We do so many stupid things when we're young. No trace should remain of youth, not even memory." This phrase was still ringing in my head and felt very apt as I was reading The Sense of and Ending. Like Trust, The Sense of an Ending is about an older man looking back on a relationship from his youth, reflecting on how he has changed as a person. At one point in the book, the narrator is confronted with an actual artifact from his youth – a letter he wrote, but only remembered in broad strokes – and he's forced to confront his past self, in a way we can often avoid when we rely only on memories.

If I remember correctly, it was on the basis that a friend of mine who is a professor was teaching this book as part of a class that appealed to me that I got this book in the first place. Also on her syllabus was J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, which I briefly considered reading as a follow up. It is perhaps in the spirit of this book, that I've searched my email history and am now scrolling through years of her Facebook posts looking for confirmation of this. I seem to remember her putting out a general call, of some sort, for recommendations for this course – but what exactly was the topic? I can't recall. What I do remember, is the books that came to mind for me in response to her prompt were The Good Soldier and The Age of Innocence*. 

I have a list in my notebook under the heading, 'Books with "That Mood,"' and the list includes those two books, along with Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror* and Garden By the Sea (I believe it was the occasion of finish the latter that led me to start this list); "everything by Patrick Modiano, but especially Villa Triste;" Antonio Muñoz Molina's Winter in Lisbon; Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity**; and a handful of others. I have just added The Sense of an Ending to the list. 

"That Mood," if I had to describe it, would be a melancholic nostalgia. (Is that redundant? Doesn't nostalgia always imply melancholy, sadness, loss?) What many of these books have in common are a first person narrator recalling events from a more or less distant past, often when the things that were going on around them were somewhat beyond their comprehension, while now – with age and time and memory – the pieces from the past seem to fit together differently. Maybe I'm making generalizations in trying to force all these books together, but I know there is a common feeling they left me with.

*As an aside, I read The Age of Innocence, A Broken Mirror, and Beware of Pity during periods when I didn't write about every book I read, but the former two both made my "Best Books I Read This Decade" post from the end of 2019. Beware of Pity I addressed when writing about another book I read by Stefan Zweig, so that's what I've linked there.

**Stefan Zweig even comes up in The Sense of an Ending: when the narrator meets up, some 40 years later, with the woman he dated in college she's reading a Stefan Zweig book and he confesses – to us, not to her – that he has never read Zweig.