The Book Instinct

I originally wanted to write a review of a completely different book but all my thoughts kept going back to this one. I finished The Sense of an Ending yesterday and my mind don’t seem to be able to let it go. So, for the sake of my sanity, I shall give in and try to make sense of my thoughts and feelings about this book. This is not going to be easy but I hope that it will make sense in the end.

The Sense of an Ending is a tiny book – merely 150 pages – and I think most of the people will regard it as a quick read, but that is where they are wrong. I don’t think that this book is meant to be read in one go or over few days. It is more of a book that is better to be read in bite sizes to get the most of it. It feels like this book is offering a mirror to each reader and it is up to every one of us whether we decide to reflect upon our lives when reading the book or just take it at a face value and read just the story as it is.

The story itself is a reminiscence of a childhood and adulthood of a retired man, who is forced through some current events to see his past and its consequences in completely different light. For me, the story itself would have been interesting enough to read, but what I found more intriguing was that the book was literally littered by provoking thoughts. When I read a book, I always mark any interesting parts that I would like to either quote or go back to when I finish the book. With this book I marked 39 of them! Some of them are sentences, some are paragraphs. I don’t think I can say that I was reading this book. I think it is more accurate to say that I was working through the book. I read few pages (sometimes just few paragraphs), I paused, I reflected, I let the book work on me and I continued when I was ready to continue. This book took me on an incredible journey and when I finished it, I was lost for words. And believe me, that doesn’t happen very often. And then, out of nowhere, great sadness washed over me because of the though, that we all have great and highly treasured memories, that we are fond off and no one can guarantee us, that what we remember is actually what happened and how it happened. And I got this urging wish to take back time and to be able to re-live the moments again.

Most of the time, especially when we are young, we don’t even think how much our actions impact on other people and how much damage words can do. I think that one of the wisdoms I took away from the book is that we all need to try to make peace with our past because it has much more influence on our future than we can ever imagine. But then as the book says ‘You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.’

I would recommend to have a go at this book as it is beautifully written and there is something essentially human delivered through the story and some more is left to be found when you read in between the lines. Let me know what you think.

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