From the end of a story

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The End of a Story is a 2011 novel by the English writer Julian Barnes . In the English original, the title is The Sense of an Ending . For the novel, Barnes was awarded the prestigious British literary Man Booker Prize in 2011 . In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted The Sense of an Ending one of the 100 most important British novels .

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Embellished memories that allow us to live better with our own past and the question of personal responsibility are the two main themes that run through this novel. You employ the first-person narrator Anthony ("Tony") Webster as he takes stock of his life in old age. The novel is divided into two parts.

Part 1

In the first part, Tony Webster looks back at events in his youth. At school he initially forms a clique with two other boys, Alex and Colin, who enjoy looking down on the world of adults with condescension and responding to teachers' ideological questions with phrases. So when his history teacher asked what history was, Tony gave the answer: "History is the sum of the victors' lies" (p. 24), whereupon the teacher points out that history is always the self-deception of the vanquished. This clique is joined by the highly gifted Adrian Finn, who, having matured early because his mother left the family, approaches many questions more thoughtfully. When the teacher asks about the causes of the First World War, Adrian drafts a chain of responsibility: “It seems to me that there is - there was - there a chain of individual responsibility ... but the chain is not so long that everyone can simply blame the other "(P. 19). After leaving school, which the students are eagerly awaiting because they are impatient for their life to finally begin, Adrian takes up a scholarship to study in Cambridge , while Tony studies history in Bristol. He soon has a girlfriend, Veronica, who turns out to be very demanding and bitchy and, above all, keeps him at a distance sexually. A weekend with her - as he thinks - socially superior family becomes a nightmare for him, where he feels that Veronica, her coarse father and her supposedly arrogant brother have treated him from above. His pride is hurt. Only his mother is friendly to him and even admonishes him not to put up with Veronica. Shortly afterwards he introduces the girl to his school friends so that she meets Adrian. After a while, however, he decides to part ways with Veronica.

Finally he receives a letter from Adrian and Veronica, in which they inform him that they are now together. After Tony responded briefly and coolly to this message with a card, he finally sends the two of them a letter in which he insults them badly. Among other things, he refers Adrian to Veronica's mother because she had already warned him about Veronica. Tony suppresses the content of this letter, the wording of which one only learns in the second part of the novel. In his memory "I explained to him (sc. Adrian) exactly what I thought of their common moral scruples" (p. 55). After completing his studies, he spends a while in the USA and when he returns home he learns that Adrian has committed suicide . In his farewell letter, Adrian expresses the view that life is a gift that can also be given back, and then "it is his moral duty to act in accordance with the consequences of this decision" (p. 62). Tony subsequently marries Margaret, followed by a calm, calm marriage that ends in divorce. Tony's uneventful life until retirement is depicted in extreme time-lapse on two pages.

Part 2

In the second part, the past events described above catch up with him. Barnes masterfully succeeds in taking up all the important elements from the first part again, subtly questioning Tony's old perceptions with new facts and making the reader aware of the dubiousness of all memories, including his own. Tony receives a letter telling him that Veronica's mother has died, leaving him 500  pounds and Adrian's diary. The diary is in the possession of Veronica, however, who purposely only gives him a photocopy of a page, on which the chain of responsibility is again questioned and a strange equation is opened that apparently a network of relationships between Tony, Adrian, Veronica, her mother and a puzzling b represents. The page ends with an open sentence: “For example, if Tony…” (p. 110). Veronica also passes him the wording of the evil letter, which Tony is genuinely appalled. The past catches up with him like the tidal wave of the Severn , a natural phenomenon that he has observed with friends. The water of the river floods against its natural course back up the river bed. This image is a leitmotif of the novel. Tony feels deeply repentant and wishes to be able to turn it back into guilt in order to find forgiveness, which of course turns out to be impossible.

Eventually, Veronica brings him together with a group of disabled people. One of them, Tony finds out with difficulty, is Adrian's son and - as it turns out later - not conceived with Veronica, but with Veronica's mother, he is the enigmatic b (= baby) from the equation. Tony remembers the teacher's words about history as the self-deception of the vanquished and realizes: “I looked at the chain of responsibility. I saw my first letter in it. I remembered asking Adrian in my ugly letter to question Veronica's mother. I rewound the words that would haunt me forever. Just like Adrian's unfinished sentence 'For example, if Tony…' (p. 181). ”Tony completes this sentence for himself with“… would not have been Tony ”(p. 110).

Literary references

With the English title The Sense of an Ending of the novel, Barnes took up the title of a study by the literary scholar Frank Kermode , who examined in a study of the same name in 1967 how people process apocalyptic events and how writers interpret the tremors of their time. Peripetia , the tragic turning points, are a central concept at Kermode. Peripetia is also an integral part of classic tragedies. In Julian Barnes' novel, the structure of which is reminiscent of an ancient tragedy, the letter from the lawyer informing Tony of his inheritance forms the peripetia that turns his life around and from that moment on makes it head for disaster . Similar to Sophocles ' analytical drama "King Oedipus", the disaster has already happened in the second part and only needs to be cleared up, whereby the protagonist's own research drives the protagonist further and further into the tragedy.

Veronica reads a novella by Stefan Zweig at a meeting with Tony (p. 141) . The title is not mentioned, however. Julian Barnes did not choose this reading arbitrarily. Stefan Zweig's protagonists, too, are usually tragically prevented from realizing their happiness and give up.

criticism

Most of the critics rated the book positively. The FAZ called the novel, which is referred to here as a novella due to its length of 182 pages, on December 3, 2011, “one of the outstanding works of this season” and attested Barnes: “The novel 'From the end of a story' shows its full mastery ". According to his review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on December 24, 2011, Christopher Schmidt was impressed by the “narrative economy, the coherence of motifs and the moral depth”. Die Zeit speaks of an elegant novel, “stylistically perfect, narrow, concentrated, thoughtful”, and the NZZ praised in its review of December 27, 2011: “Adrian's death: That is the heart of this lucid novel - which you can read ... only worth it because his antihero is so devilishly close to us in so many ways. "

The novel's outstanding literary qualities also convinced the Booker Prize jury, chaired by Stella Rimington , in October 2011, who awarded Barnes the Man Booker Prize in October 2011 . In her laudatory speech, she praised the novel as an “almost archetypal book” that speaks “about humanity in the 21st century”.

filming

The BBC , together with the production companies FilmNation Entertainment and Origin Pictures, produced a film adaptation of the novel , which premiered on January 2, 2017 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival . Ritesh Batra directed, and Nick Payne wrote the script. Filming with Jim Broadbent as Tony and Charlotte Rampling as Veronica took place from September to October 2015 in London and Bristol . The US theatrical release was on March 10, 2017 and April 14, 2017 in the UK . The film was also shown in eight other European countries as well as in Australia , India , South Africa and Singapore . The film will also be released in German cinemas on June 14, 2018. The Rotten Tomatoes website garnered 75% positive reviews overall for the film, with an average rating of 6.4 out of 10.

Susanne Ostwald wrote in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the film shows "where the crux of literature adaptations lies". More plastic elaboration of the female figures would weaken the central narrative situation, which is particularly evident “at the harmonious end”. While the novel ends with the unsettling sentence “There is great unrest”, the film adaptation “just makes no sense of the end”.

expenditure

Reviews

In the English-language press

In the German-language press

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016
  2. http://www.buecher.de/shop/booker-prize/vom-ende-einer-geschichte/barnes-julian/products_products/detail/prod_id/34286938/
  3. Susanne Mayer: Julian Barnes: What was or what could have been . In: The time . No. 50/2011 ( online ).
  4. When the Severn flows backwards. In: nzz.ch. December 26, 2011, accessed October 14, 2018 .
  5. ^ British Literature Prize: Julian Barnes wins Booker Prize. In: Spiegel Online . October 19, 2011, accessed June 10, 2018 .
  6. a b From the end of a story in the Internet Movie Database , accessed June 17, 2018.
  7. The Sense of an Ending at Rotten Tomatoes (English) Template: Rotten Tomatoes / Maintenance / Lack of knowledge in Wikidata, called on 17 June 2018th
  8. Susanne Ostwald: On the beach, at the end - two novel adaptations are reaching the limits of their art. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . Retrieved August 19, 2018 .