sense of ending

Author Name: Julian Barnes

Teenager Tony Webster withdraws from a love affair with Veronica, only to find her immediately reunited with his best friends. They both wrote him a letter asking for understanding. He replied and lived forty years of his life, carefree and comfortable, until he became a middle-aged man: married, had children, and retired. Then, a letter arrives that upends all those long years of his life; it brings him back to a relationship he had completely forgotten, opening a door that can only be described as a hell of regret. He left behind things that had grown in his absence and become wild like the trees of a forest, and he must now confront them again. In a literary style described as postmodern, presented to us by one of England's greatest contemporary writers, we read a philosophical novel that questions the concepts of time, memory, and history: Is the search for the self a continuous journey? And do maturity and old age not promise comfort and a happy life, as everyone thinks? The novel says: “History is not the lies of the victors. It is more like the memories of the survivors: those who were neither victorious nor defeated.”