# Read the first page of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Read the opening of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes free, no signup. A middle-aged man's bequest forces him to reexamine his past.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-sense-of-an-ending-julian-barnes
- Genre: Literary fiction
- Year: 2011
- ISBN: 9780307947727
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780307957122&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780307947727
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780307947727

## The opening

I remember, in no particular order: —a shiny inner wrist; —steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; —gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; —a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; —another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface; —bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleas- ure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions

speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.

There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited. The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of disci- pline, calculate how well he’d previously been taught, and if he might prove “scholarship material.” On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom. “Now, you’ll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry the Eighth.” Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn’t be flicked, like an angler’s fly, to land on one of our heads. “Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?” He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. “Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry the Eighth’s reign?” Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inven- tiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response. “There was unrest, sir.” An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.

## Books with a similar feel
- [Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett](https://uncovered.ink/read/percival-everett-by-virgil-russell-percival-everett.md)
- [Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer](https://uncovered.ink/read/here-i-am-jonathan-safran-foer.md)
- [A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-jennifer-egan.md)
- [White Teeth by Zadie Smith](https://uncovered.ink/read/white-teeth-zadie-smith.md)
- [Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin](https://uncovered.ink/read/elsewhere-gabrielle-zevin.md)
- [After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell](https://uncovered.ink/read/after-youd-gone-maggie-ofarrell.md)

---
Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.