This post will be short. For a while now, I’ve been using a silly spreadsheet to keep track of the books I read. I guess I want to simplify the chore of picking out presents in the future. Next to the title and author, I note who, if anyone, recommended it to me—you don’t want to regift a book you got yourself. For basically the same reason, I write down who already received it. I also add a couple of highly descriptive adjectives like “amazing,” “fantastic,” or “impressive.” As you can see, adjectives are reserved for the books I like. To make the class differences even clearer, the ones I liked get colored green, those that left me cold stay white, and the few I really didn’t like get a tasteful light brown. Okay, I just added a clear green. The adjective was “impressive.”

I just finished The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I’d never read anything by him before, but this definitely won’t be the last of his books on my list. I won’t try to summarize it—Wikipedia can do that for you. Let me just say that it starts by talking about Tony’s high school and college friends, about how they began to drift apart, first slowly and then suddenly. Fast-forwarding through the next 40 years, we find Tony again, retired. We learn that he married, had a daughter, and gets along with his ex-wife; they sometimes meet for lunch and talk about traveling somewhere, though it never happens. His life seems uneventful. Also quite peaceful.

At some point, one of these old friends reappears in Tony’s life. The reason is strange. From the estate of the late mother of that friend—whom Tony had only met once—he inherits £500. He’s also told he’ll receive an object. Trying to get that object is what brings him back into contact with his ex-friend. Many years earlier, they had parted on really bad terms, and their meetings are weird. There’s a lot that isn’t clear, but the behavior of the friend—or, really, of both of them—seems somehow similar to their past interactions, with Tony being much more interested and the friend much less so. The friend isn’t painted in rosy colors, but it’s clear that blame was distributed in a less one-sided way than Tony had thought. He’s confronted with the fact that he used to be much less nice than he’d pictured himself.

The book tells in a fantastic way a universal story. There are people you were once very close to, only to drift apart. This can happen because life pulls you in different directions, or because of some specific event. Though, in fairness, such events tend, in hindsight, to look more like a magnificent obituary for a friendship than the real cause of its end. Sometimes you truly reconnect, and that’s one of the best things that can happen. Other times, there’s sporadic contact, during which it’s clear there isn’t much interest on either side. Sometimes it’s just awkward. I guess it’s always awkward at first, because no one really knows how the other will react or how the conversation will go. It’s probably also awkward because you’re aware of your own faults, of what you did wrong, how you were unfair, and you don’t know how any of that is remembered. In fact, encountering an ex-friend can also just be cold because, at some point, a sentence was spoken that was just too well-formulated, the kind you can’t forget. Though sometimes, when things go well, you have the vague impression that there must have been such a sentence, but you can’t remember what it was. I guess this means either that the sentence wasn’t as well-formulated as it seemed at the time, or that the raw nerve it touched is no longer as exposed. Either way, in the interaction between Barnes’ main character and his ex-friend, you see aspects of all of this. It feels universal to me.

And then you reach the last few pages—five or ten—and everything changes. The whole book. Everything you thought might happen disappears. The Sense of an Ending is the perfect title.