The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Much like with Ali Smith, at some point I just had to read something by Julian Barnes, so I went for the book that got him the Booker Prize. In all honesty I came in with fairly moderate expectations, and I was pretty much blown away.

I normally want books to have an ending that makes sense (what a glorious pun!), or at the very least one that answers roughly the same number of questions that it leaves unanswered, but I didn't have a problem with this one because it's so majestically written and because throughout its chapters it calls into question not just the reliability of the author, but that of all our individual memories.

The jabs at the pretentiousness of some Cambridge students are also something that makes me giggle and doesn't feel (too) gratuitous, and the references to the wobbly Millennium Bridge make me happy as a Londoner. 

Barney’s Version – Mordechai Richler

This book is the single greatest source of great North American Jewish anecdotes I’ve ever come across. While I liked Solomon Gursky Was Here better because of its epic family history, Barney’s Version is probably the better book.

Barney is, for want of a better word an incredibly charming son of a bitch, like probably the same Richler was. Readers (and women) are bound to love him and simultaneously wish they could head-butt him, mostly because you can’t let someone like Miriam (in particular if you picture her as Rosamund Pike, the best thing of the ok movie taken from the book) walk away.

We’ve all wanted to kill our best friends at some point in our lives (well, surely I have), but being accused of actually having done so and having to write some unreliable memoirs in order to clean one’s name is pretty heavy stuff...

Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

This was the last book of my collection of great 20^th century novels. I kept it for last not because I wanted to save the best for a grand finale, but rather because I had the dreadfully mistaken idea of potentially reading the remaining books of In Search of Lost Time after this one.

Needless to say, after crawling my way through this thick endless flashback, I didn’t feel the need to immediately follow it up with more Proust. I still don’t, and I don’t think I ever will.

I wonder whether people praise Proust essentially just for the sheer scope and ambition of his work and nothing more, because I really couldn’t see much great literature in this pointless (yes, there I said it) book.

I want to meet someone who’s actually managed to read the whole of Proust (for real, no cheating) and actually explain to me why this is a great work. Call me boring, but I actually need to see something happening in order to like a book...