The Namesake: Book Review

 

The Namesake: Book Review 

This is certainly a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation – as well as the way that names subtly (and not so subtly) alter our perceptions of ourselves – but it's very much to its credit that it never succumbs to the clichés those themes so often entail. Instead, Lahiri turns it into something both larger and simpler: the story of a man and his family, of his life and hopes, loves and sorrows … All Lahiri's observations jolt your heart with their freshness and truth. Her skill at deploying small physical details as a path into character is as exceptional as it is enjoyable.

Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, ''The Namesake,'' is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision.

It is a novel about two generations of the Ganguli family, and at the same time it is a novel about exile and its discontents, a novel that is as affecting in its Chekhovian exploration of fathers and sons, parents and children, as it is resonant in its exploration of what is acquired and lost by immigrants and their children in pursuit of the American Dream.

It more than fulfills the promise of Ms. Lahiri's debut collection of stories, ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The novel begins in Boston in 1968, with the birth of a boy named Gogol Ganguli. Gogol comes by his name through a series of random accidents and misunderstandings that will come to represent for him the unexpected trajectory of his family's life.

And yet slowly, cautiously, the Gangulis make their way in America. Ashoke becomes a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ashima has a second child whom they name Sonali (soon to be called Sonia). And the family moves to the suburbs, buying a new house in a development.

''Their garage, like every other, contains shovels and pruning shears and a sled,'' Ms. Lahiri writes. ''They purchase a barbecue for tandoori on the porch in summer. Each step, each acquisition, no matter how small, involves deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends. Was there a difference between a plastic rake and a metal one? Which was preferable, a live Christmas tree or an artificial one? They learn to roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne, at Thanksgiving, to nail a wreath to their door in December, to wrap woolen scarves around snow men, to color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter and hide them around the house.''

She uses her unerring eye for detail to annotate their emotional lives: Ashoke's hatred of waste, which makes him complain ''if a kettle had been filled with too much water;'' Ashima's meticulous upkeep of three address books, which contain the names of all the Bengalis she and her husband have known over the years.

In chronicling more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, Ms. Lahiri has not only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait, she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft.

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Study of Film adoption The Sense of an Ending

Study

of 

Film Adoption 

Indian director Ritesh Batra’s genuine gem of a debut, “The Lunchbox,” in which an accountant on the brink of retirement exchanges intimate notes with the complete stranger who has been cooking for him each day. That low-key treasure displayed Batra’s unique touch for the subtle sense of longing and mystery that can haunt men of a certain age, and proved to be an ideal precursor to the director’s first English-language film, “The Sense of an Ending,” a well-acted, if somewhat trickier dish to digest, focusing on a British divorcé’s futile search for closure to a long-ago relationship.

As source material goes, “The Sense of an Ending” is rather more literary, adapted from Julian Barnes’ 2011 novel by playwright Nick Payne, and one can feel the ideas knocking about behind the deceptively simple-looking facades of its characters. Fusty curmudgeon Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) appears content to have traded his ambitions as a poet for a life spent tending a tiny vintage camera shop. It was an early girlfriend, Veronica (Freya Mavor), who gave Tony his first Leica camera, though the humiliation of losing her to an old schoolmate also seems to have shaped his younger self (played by Billy Howle). But whose love was Tony more devastated to lose: hers or the golden boy they both admired?

“The Sense of an Ending” wallows in such ambiguities for much of its running time, even as it comes straight out and states its thesis early on, when Adrian (“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” star Joe Alwyn) recites in class: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” Adrian claims to be quoting a scholar named Patrick Lagrange to explain why he considers it futile to ascribe responsibility to a fellow student’s suicide. Lagrange, as it turns out, does not exist, but then, isn’t that the film’s point? This flashback to Tony’s school days has been lifted directly from his memory, which is itself distorted not only by time, but by a sort of deliberate rewriting on Tony’s part, for he must find a way to live with himself after what happened to his good friend. As it turns out, he doesn’t know the half of it.

Tony’s rather unflattering plunge into self-absorption begins with the receipt of a letter, and like those wonderful thoughts that take shape only gradually over the course of several days in “The Lunchbox,” he takes rather a long time to get around to reading it. In places, “The Sense of an Ending” seems almost frustratingly uninterested in establishing, much less solving, the riddles at its core, when in fact, it’s merely uninterested in pandering to those who lack the patience to appreciate its nuances. Its most receptive audiences will almost certainly be older, with enough life experience to recognize the mix of curiosity and regret that ensnares us like so many wild brambles each time we hazard a stroll down Memory Lane.

The letter refers to a diary, which once belonged to Adrian but had since passed into the hands of Veronica’s mother, Sarah (Emily Mortimer, by far the liveliest presence amid all the film’s flashback scenes), for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — though in bequeathing it to Tony, Sarah dredges the past back up again. The movie, which fairly pulses with a latent homoeroticism just beneath the surface every time its hot-blooded young characters look at one another, teases us with possible explanations: What exactly is the nature of Tony and Adrian’s past relationship? Does Tony fancy both Veronica and her mother, or perhaps it’s her brother who occupies his solitary late-night fantasies? And what does his ex-wife (Harriet Walter) — or their very pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery) — make of all this?

The explanation is at once simpler and more complicated than any of these questions could suggest, and it is revealed only after the last of the onion’s layers has been peeled away. It works to the film’s advantage that someone as benign as Broadbent should be playing Tony, since it offsets what a disagreeable character he might otherwise have been: Despite not being a particularly interesting or clever person in his own right, Tony is single-mindedly obsessed with resolving a relationship that played itself out decades earlier, to the point of stalking an ex who had otherwise left all memory of him in the dust.

Charlotte Rampling plays Veronica in the present, though she doesn’t appear until late in the film, like an ace that Batra has been keeping up his sleeve. Still beyond his grasp, Veronica has intercepted Adrian’s diary and has no intentions of returning it to Tony, which drives him crazy, sending him deeper into the spiral of his own narcissism — a far more unpleasant space to share if it weren’t for the wry way that Walter’s character (augmented significantly from the novel) has of humoring him.

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Critic of the text The Sense of an Ending

 

Critical Analysis 

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The novella divides into two parts, the first being Tony's memoir of "book-hungry, sex-hungry" sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It's a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression at a time when yes, it was the 60s, 

"but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country". 

In one of the book's many slow-rumbling ironies, the second section undermines the veracity of these expertly drawn memories, as Tony reopens his relationship with Veronica, a woman he had previously edited out of his life story.

It was a "slightly odd thing", he cautiously admits, to pretend to his ex-wife when they first met that Veronica had never existed and then later give such a one-sided account of her that she's known within their marriage as "The Fruitcake". 

Barnes builds a powerful atmosphere of shame and silence around the past as Tony tries to track down the elusive diary, which promises, as missing diaries tend to do, some revelation or closure. In a book obsessed with evidence and documentation – verification for unreliable, subjective memory – the most powerful depth charge turns out to be something forgotten yet irrefutable that Tony has kept from himself for 40 years. With it Barnes puts the rest of the narrative, and his unreliable yet sincere narrator, tantalisingly into doubt.

There's the atmosphere of a Roald Dahl short story to Tony's quest; the sense that, with enigmatic emails and mysterious meetings in the Oxford Street John Lewis brasserie, he is somehow being played or manipulated by others. 

"You don't get it. You never did," 

Veronica tells him repeatedly. A secret permeates the text, heavily withheld. But this schematic element pales beside the emotional force of Tony's re-evaluation of the past, his rush of new memories in response to fresh perspectives, and the unsettling sense of the limits of self-knowledge. 

As ever, Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator's unique subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision: only he could invest a discussion about hand-cut chips in a gastropub with so much wry poignancy.

With its patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. But it gives as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken – lost to memory – as it does to the engine of its own plot. Fiction, Barnes writes in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 

"wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability". 

The Sense of an Ending honours that impossible desire in a way that is novel, fertile and memorable.

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Questions related to The Sense of an Ending

 

1. “Eros and Thanatos . . . Sex and death. . . Or love and death, if you prefer. The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict.” How far this statement encircles the central theme of the novel The Sense of an Ending’. (Key: First explain concept of Eros and Thanatos and then illustrate from the text – love and suicide incident – and conflict in the memory of narrator)

The terms, Eros and & Thanatos - Greek mythology

• Eros is the god of love and desire

• Thanatos is the god of death. 

Sigmund Freud makes use of these mythical figures to name the life and death instincts that co-exist within the human psyche.

Eros, the life instinct, deals with basic survival, pleasure, and reproduction. It appears as biological needs for human survival.

Thanatos, the death instinct, appears in opposition to Eros. It pushes a person towards extinction and an inanimate state. Often associated with negative emotions like fear, hate and anger. This drive was initially described in Freud‟s book Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he proposes that 

“the goal of all life is death”

Applying the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of Eros and Thanatos to The Sense of 

an Ending, The idea of the interplay between Eros and Thanatos first appears in the novel when 

Adrian speaks up in the English class. He opines that the poem they are reading is about “Eros and Thanatos … the erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle” (Barnes 6). This loaded phrase signposts the main idea that pervades the novel.

Another incident that reflects the conflict between Eros and Thanatos is the suicide of Robson. Robson, a student of Science sixth form, commits suicide after getting his girlfriend pregnant.

His libido drives him to instinct of Eros in him. As his sense of morality activates the death instinct and thus he commits suicide. In the case of Robson, “Thanatos wins again” (Barnes 13). 

Tony is keen to satisfy his id at all times. His relationship with Veronica is an indication of his tendency to satisfy his Eros. Meanwhile, His relationship with Veronica also becomes physical but he avoids her later. Thus, the conflict between Eros and Thanatos begins.

Even after many years of his separation from Veronica, Tony is still attracted to her. He himself admits:

Another thing I realized: there was a mistake, or a statistical anomaly, in Margaret‟s theory of clear edged versus mysterious woman; or rather in the second part of it, about men being attracted to either one sort or the other. I‟d been attracted to both Veronica and Margaret. (Barnes 92)

He is not completely prompted by his Thanatos and that is why he manages to survive through all his obstacles.

The other instance of destructive impulses of Tony can be seen in his letter to Adrian, in which he has made his effort to demean both Adrian and Veronica. In that letter, Tony has urged Adrian to consult Veronica‟s mother to learn about her true colours. Tony‟s anguish is that his letter might have been a key reason for Adrian‟s suicide. 

he opines over the concept of Thanatos or death, “The only true one. The fundamental one on which all others depend” (Barnes 14). Adrian's family circumstances do not appear to disturb the psychological and mental stability of Adrian on the outset:

His mother had walked out years before, leaving his dad to cope with Adrian and his sister. This was long before the term „single-parent family‟ came into use back then it was „a broken home‟, and Adrian was the only person we knew who came from one. This ought to have given him a whole store tank of existential rage, but somehow it didn‟t; he said he loved his mother and respected his father. (Barnes 8)

Adrian comes in contact with Veronica and they fall in love with each other after Veronica‟s separation from Tony. At that time Tony receives news that Adrian committed suicide. Adrian is also much driven by his Eros and that makes him come into a sexual relationship and the instinct of Thanatos leads him to death. 

1. Julian Barnes center in not to discuss ‘class difference’ or ‘culture’. They are rather shifted on the periphery of his discourse that centers on ‘memory’, ‘history’, ‘time’ and ‘quest for truth’. Illustrate with your reading of ‘The Sense of an Ending’.

The first thing is the fact that memory and reality do not always match and that memory is strongly influenced by the feelings that invaded someone regarding a specific event. 

The novel actively questions the realness of memories. The protagonist and narrator of the novel raises a number of questions related to the quality and function of memory as one gets into old age. The novel is told by Tony Webster, a man in his sixties; he talks about his past, or certain select events of his past. 

The readers are made aware of the slips in Tony‟s narrative, making them question the veracity of Tony's memories. The memory of Tony Webster, Julian Barnes justifies the universal truth that 

‘one cannot know what one does not know’.

Tony's earliest memories of his friend Adrian Finn are from school. Adrian was the smartest of his class, quite different from other boys and became a part of Tony‟s best friend circle very soon. Most of Tony‟s recollections are centered on his relationship with Adrian and his ex-girlfriend Veronica Ford. Veronica has asserted that 

“You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying”.

 Veronica assumes the image of a dominant, stoic and cruel girlfriend in Tony's memories; she broke up with him right after she took him to her parents house and then started dating Adrian-his best friend from school. Both of them had caused Tony's great pain and his memories are nothing but a reflection of his pain and hurt. Webster remembers himself as a carefree young man interested in 

discovering the intricacies of sex more than in understanding relationships or in analysing 

the behaviour of his peers: 

“the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed” 

Barnes begins The Sense of an Ending pondering on this kind of malleability of time. We read:

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 visions. 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 pleasure 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. (The Sense of an Ending 3)

Past is difficult to document and understand if the person at the centre of it all is no longer alive and any possible attempt at documentation can only be achieved through fifty year old memories of Robson‟s friends and family. Adrian‟s understanding of history was this: 

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (17).

As Tony Webster points out,

 “[we] live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that 

memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that 

memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time 

doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent” (2012: 63)

Tony tries to build his shared history with Adrian and Veronica, through few available documents and from blurry fragments of memory. Tony is in search of a certainty, but that seems elusive.

Damage’ recurs as a motif in the novel. Whom do you think is ‘damaged’ and who is the ‘damager’?

a.                Damage : the letter written by Tony to Adrain and Veronica

b.               It damages Veronica’s relation with Adrain

c.                Perhaps, leads Adrain to meet Sarah Ford > their affair

d.               Sarah’s pregnancy > which may have lead to Adrain Finn’s suicide!

e.                The child, names Adrain is born with metal retardness > damage caused by suicide of Adrain to Sarah while she is pregnant > or her middle-aged pregnancy

f.                 The letter damages several lives > Veronica, Adrain, Sarah and young Adrain

Denying the Narrator: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending 57his forties, the second part introduces his maturity, when certain documents haunt him in his struggle to come to terms with what the first part remembers. In other words, the first part is Tony’s past while the following one is his present which is shaped and then re-shaped by the revealed documents. 

 It is apparent, then, that Tony applies his “damage theory” to Veronica by aiming to repress those memories which give harm. Tony does not tell lies only to Margaret, or to the reader, but also to himself. However, the past he desires to omit haunts him; for he receives a letter indicating that he has been left £500 and two “documents” by Mrs. Ford, Veronica’s mother. One of the documents is Mrs. Ford’s letter to him explaining the motive of her will. The other document is Adrian’s diary now in the possession of Veronica and his unyielding search for the full document, Adrian’s diary starts. He explains he is determined in his search because: 

“The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what (77).” 

After a long labour, he receives not the original but a photocopied fragment from the diary which relates Adrian’s intellectual exercise concerning accumulation and loss in life and which ends with the sentence: “So, for instance, if Tony... (86).” The revealed document increases tension rather than bringing any solutions. Tony does not give up and asks for more and Veronica, who is most unwilling to share the diary, provides 

He explains that 

“when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others (80).” 

What Tony does is also to invent a past for himself. Confronted by the documents, Tony loads fresh meanings onto the photo that shows Alex, Collin, Adrian and Veronica together; this is another historical document. For the first time, he perceives in the photo the moment when Adrian and Veronica began to get closer to each other. 

Towards the end of the novel, Veronica takes Tony to meet a group of disabled people which includes a man named Adrian. To the disappointment of Tony – who at first believed Adrian to be Veronica’s son – the disabled man is revealed to be Veronica’s brother, her mother’s son. Tony works out that Adrian and Veronica’s mother had an affair which led to the birth of the disabled Adrian. However, Tony’s working out of past events still feels incomplete and unstable since the reader is not given any clue concerning the identity of the real father. What remains are the questions which may have no answers but may bring up another questions as suggested by the last sentence of the novel. 

“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest. (163)”

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Thinking Activity: The Sense of an Ending By Julian Barnes

 

The Sense of an Ending

Hello Readers, 

Warmly welcome to my blog. I hope you will find something new as well as basic information about particular topics. This blog will throw some light on the text THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by JULIAN BARNES. Basically this novel is worth reading. If you haven't read then read it as soon as possible and share your experience with the text in the comment section. Therefore if I elaborate something about this text then it connected with the SENSE OF UNDERSTANDING.

• Have you ever thought about how you will react at a certain point of time when you will find trouble?

• Do decisions are consciously taken or not?🤔

• How will you reflect your sense of Understanding? 

This question asked to you that what you think about how you will reach the end. It was satisfactory or not. This blog will cover the below given topics, click on the 3 questions to reach the another blog 👇

1. Questions related to Sense of an Ending.

2. General critic of the novel The Sense of an Ending. 

3. Study of the Film Adaptation (Book V/S Movie).

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