Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Rewriting, retelling

It rains this afternoon. It always does at this hour, when all is quiet and half of the day lies decaying, paving the way quietly for the other half. Searchingly, I run to the windows, for a glimpse of the rain-fattened sky, or may be a full-bodied, leafy tree to watch the drops do a dandy dance in the shaky caress of the drunken leaves. A rumble of thunderclap and I wake up from my wishful thoughts - my windows open to the neighbor's bedroom walls and my balcony offers only more concrete and broken vista. Devoid of any scenery, I make do with the familiar fragrance of wet earth that fills every corner of the house.

This obstruction in my rain-peeping brought back mellow memories of an always drenched place, when not so long before I would watch the rain drizzle on the dark pines from my patio that gave way to a magical peek of the cloud shrouded Cascades. All this, of course, seems to be a far fetched dream now or at best something like Coleridge's blurry fragment.
But this sudden burst of uncontrollable nostalgia surprises me. Was I not the one who would relentlessly complain of the sodding rains then? Was I not the one who would vent rain-soaked rants here, there and everywhere? How, then, did the once annoying rains become so dear today? Of course, I am moulding and mending the unpleasant bits of past to suit my precarious present. I am beautifying the once desolate, rain-beaten landscape into something romantic. And nostalgia is always romantic.

As luck always has her own way of mocking you, she couldn't have shoved a more appropriate read my way - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Just a hundred and fifty pages, yet it manages to turn you round and round as if the whole time you were on a mean, never-ending roller coaster. Tony, the protagonist, takes us on a flashback journey, primarily a solipsistic one, where we meet his mates and their youthfully pretentious, philosophical takes on life. The plot thickens when the most "clever" of them, the Camus-quoting, always serious Adrian commits suicide. Justifying the title, Barnes makes sure we sense the end after a major twist, only to be further distracted by his unreliable narrator. Tony weaves people and plots from his foggy memoir that spans more than four decades, while all the time the reader sits on an edge doubting the selectivity of his memories. What we remember as the truth and what really is the truth are two very different things. With his patchwork of additions and subtractions, permutations and combinations, he finally arrives at the truth. One that could never be retold.

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."

~ Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending



8 comments:

  1. Hello Suman:
    It is so strange how, on occasions, what one is reading really matches one's mood of the moment. It is almost as if fiction and reality become one, even if for just a short while.

    We have not yet read this book of Julian Barnes which is in itself somewhat odd since we very much rate him as a writer and have many other titles by him. We are now reminded and shall seek it out.

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    1. Dear Jane and Lance, thank you for your ever thoughtful words. True, when the reader becomes a part of the story, the boundary between fiction and reality blurs. Must say, that is one magical moment.
      I'm happy to have given you a curtain raiser of this book. I'm yet to read Barnes's earlier work, mainly 'Falubert's Parrot' and after reading this I am more than impatient to get hold of it.

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  2. It has been said before: we reinvent ourselves and our past as we go along. The way you romanticised the rain, so we romanticise our experiences.

    You have whetted my appetite, this is a book I must read.

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    1. I shall wait for your take on it then, it'll be fun sharing opinions.

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  3. Sometimes, we feel nostalgic about "little things" such as rain. Sensitive persons enjoy the beauty of the world and feel emotions more intensely than others.

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    1. That is a good enough explanation now. Thank you Celine, you sure saved me from drowning into this self-created trap!

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  4. Good summary of the book, which I read a while ago. I do like Julian Barnes — and would much rather read him than many of his illustrious contemporaries, such as Martin Amis or Will Self. The book was compelling, wasn't it? And so "readable". My only quibble would be that, although stuff was revealed at the end, there were still some ambiguities and questions left unanswered. Now, I don't mind that normally — but the precise style of Barnes seems to beg a more lucid conclusion.

    I read his first novel "Metroland" a long time ago and can hardly remember what it was about. However, I read his second novel "Before She Met Me" comparatively recently, and would recommend it. Quite shocking, though.

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    1. I agree, Robert, it was quiet compelling and that too from the very start. Regarding the few missing links, it took me a while to understand the shocking yet very abrupt end, and I ended up reading the information-brimming last page some good three times! May be Barnes is just too clever, but as you said some lucidness and afterthought always gives a narrative that wholesomeness, for the reader at least.

      I would definitely pick "Before She Met Me" for my next Barnes. Thank you for the recommendation.

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