The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

At first, I thought mainly about me, and how--what--I'd been: chippy, jealous, and malign. Also about my attempt to undermine their relationship. At least I'd failed in this, since Veronica's mother had assured me the last months of Adrian's life had been happy.  Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

England, the 60's: Tony Webster is a young and clever, but not quite as clever as his friend Adrian, who everyone seems to admire. They go their separate ways after high school, and at university Tony has his first real girlfriend, a girl named Veronica whom he describes as manipulative, but mostly seems rather humorless or charmless. Meeting Veronica's family, he feels condescended to by her father and brother, though her mother is more welcoming. There's a single awkward sexual encounter, and the relationship goes bottom up. Later, she begins to date Adrian, a fact about which he is informed through a rather self-serious letter. Not long after he sends a childish reply, he gets a piece of shocking news: Adrian has killed himself.

After setting this story up, The Sense of an Ending jumps forward forty years: Tony is now divorced, but more or less happy, having an adult daughter and a good friend in his ex-wife. He is shocked, then, to find this history, which he has more or less put behind him, rear up again when he's bequeathed a strange gift: Veronica's mother has left him five hundred pounds and Adrian's diary. Why would she think of Tony, whom she met once over a long weekend, and why would she have Adrian's diary? The answers are not forthcoming; the diary is in Veronica's possession, and the adult Tony finds it very difficult to track her down. Only after a persistent email campaign does Tony manage to get her to meet him, but she remains sour, standoffish. She makes cryptic remarks about him not understanding the situation, and as he struggles to do so he comes face-to-face with the person he had been as a young man.

The Sense of an Ending reminded me most of Remains of the Day: a staid, British book about the way we efface our own memories, or fashion them to our own purposes, and how difficult it is to pull the wool from our own eyes and see our pasts, and thus ourselves, as we really are. Veronica refuses to send the diary except in pieces, and she sends, too, a copy of the letter that Tony sent when he was informed of her relationship with Adrian. It really turns out to be a nasty letter, and though Tony must reevaluate his own hurt at Veronica's hands in light of his own stupidity of cruelty, it really seems like a young man's sin. Tony even begins to fantasize about reconnecting with Veronica and rekindling a relationship, but perhaps this only goes to show that our ability to tell ourselves comforting falsehoods is not limited to the past.

You feel reading The Sense of an Ending that a great revelation is coming, and you feel, too, that the book can only end up being as successful as that revelation. Is it successful? I'm rather torn. SPOILER ALERT--Veronica takes Tony to witness the scene of an adult man with a learning disability being led around by a caretaker. Tony guesses that this is Veronica's child with Adrian, and that his cruel comments in his letter about the pair's future offspring have continued to cut deep. But, as it turns out, the man is the child of Adrian and Veronica's mother, and that warm reception he received all those years ago was something that Adrian received as well. He even, we're asked to believe, helped it to happen by encouraging Adrian to talk to Veronica's mother in the letter (to find out how messed up she is, in this case, but it seems that Adrian discovered much more).

Is this satisfying? Well, one can see how it might have stuck in Victoria's craw after all these years, and how Tony's letter must have gotten mixed up with the pain of her mother's pregnancy and her boyfriend's suicide. But the revelation is a little too large; there's no small but meaningful difference of perspective here that illuminates the human condition, just one big melodramatic secret. It seems ironically to overpower Tony's youthful dickishness; it's so much beyond anything he might have said or done that it seems a little silly to even suggest he had a part in it. The book makes much of the idea of blame; as boys they talk in their history class about how the complex web of causation leads us either to blame no one or everyone, and the truth must be somewhere in between--but I think if I were Tony, I probably wouldn't feel too bad about this one.

Translation is like sex.

...or at least, that's what Julian Barnes seems to be implying in this article about the difficulties of translating Madame Bovary. Witness:

1.) If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines.

2.) Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

3.) Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel.

4.) When my novel Flaubert’s Parrot was being translated into German, my editor in Zurich modestly suggested some additional flourishes: for instance, a pun on Flaubert as a ‘flea-bear’, and a German slang phrase for masturbation which literally means ‘to shake from the palm tree’. Since Flaubert, at this point of my novel, was being masturbated in Egypt, this felt like a happy improvement on the English text.

What's the connection? My guess: Translating literature is like sex because two writers come together to create one new work, and you can never tell how ugly (or not) it's going to turn out.