The Sense of an Ending
해외주문/바로드림/제휴사주문/업체배송건의 경우 1+1 증정상품이 발송되지 않습니다.
패키지
북카드
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about?until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
작가정보
저자(글) Barnes, Julian
Julian Barnes is the author of twenty previous books including, most recently, Keeping an Eye Open. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix M?dicis and the Prix Femina; and in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.
책 속으로
I remember, in no particular order: ? a shiny inner wrist; ? steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; ? gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; ? a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; ? another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface; ? bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. We live in time ? it holds us and moulds us ? but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing ? until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. * * * I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage. There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited. The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he’d previously been taught, and if he might prove ‘scholarship material’. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom. ‘Now, you’ll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.’ Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn’t be flicked, like an angler’s fly, to land on one of our heads. ‘Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?’ He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. ‘Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII’s reign?” Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response. ‘There was unrest, sir.’ An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled. ‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?’ Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I’d say there was great unrest, sir.’ ‘Finn, then. Are you up in this period?’ The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall’s idiocies. ‘Not really, sir, I’m afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event ? even the outbreak of the First World War, for example ? is that “something happened”.’ ‘Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn’t it?’ After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher. At the next break, I sought out Finn.‘I’m Tony Webster.’ He looked at me warily. ‘Great line to Hunt.’ He seemed not to know what I was referring to. ‘About something happening.’ ‘Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn’t take it up.’ That wasn’t what he was supposed to say. Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn’t. Later that day ? or perhaps another day ? we had a double English period with Phil Dixon, a young master just down from Cambridge. He liked to use contemporary texts, and would throw out sudden challenges.‘“Birth, and Copulation, and Death” ? that’s what T. S. Eliot says it’s all about. Any comments?’ He once compared a Shakespearean hero to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. And I remember how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes’s poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured,‘Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.’ Sometimes, he addressed us as ‘Gentlemen’. Naturally, we adored him. That afternoon, he handed out a poem with no title, date or author’s name, gave us ten minutes to study it, then asked for our responses. ‘Shall we start with you, Finn? Put simply, what would you say this poem is about?’ Adrian looked up from his desk. ‘Eros and Thanatos, sir.’ ‘Hmm. Go on.’ ‘Sex and death,’ Finn continued, as if it might not just be the thickies in the back row who didn’t understand Greek. ‘Or love and death, if you prefer.The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict. Sir.’ I was probably looking more impressed than Dixon thought healthy. ‘Webster, enlighten us further.’ ‘I just thought it was a poem about a barn owl, sir.’ This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out. Adrian allowed himself to be absorbed into our group, without acknowledging that it was something he sought. Perhaps he didn’t. Nor did he alter his views to accord with ours. At morning prayers he could be heard joining in the responses while Alex and I merely mimed the words, and Colin preferred the satirical ploy of the pseudo-zealot’s enthusiastic bellow.The three of us considered school sports a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive; Adrian joined the fencing club and did the high jump. We were belligerently tone-deaf; he came to school with his clarinet. When Colin denounced the family, I mocked the political system, and Alex made philosophical objections to the perceived nature of reality, Adrian kept his counsel ? at first, anyway. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too ? it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism. The school was in central London, and each day we travelled up to it from our separate boroughs, passing from one system of control to another. Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit. ‘Fuckin
출판사 서평
“Elegant, playful, and remarkable.” -The New Yorker
“A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning.” -San Francisco Chronicle
“Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale.” -Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art.” -The New York Times Book Review
“[A] jewel of conciseness and precision…. The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length.” -The Los Angeles Times
기본정보
ISBN | 9780307951243 ( 0307951243 ) |
---|---|
발행(출시)일자 | 2013년 07월 23일 |
쪽수 | 176쪽 |
크기 |
106 * 175
* 20
mm
/ 90 g
|
언어 | 영어 |
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