The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Honestly, I am so disappointed. After Flaubert's Parrot, I had really high expectations for Julian Barnes and assumed that this (as the Man Booker Prize winner of 2011) would be amazing. But it really wasn't. The writing was dry and uninspired, the twist ending was a letdown and most of all, the main character was repulsive and depressing. I couldn't relate to the main character at all, except for his frustration with his own 'average-ness', but his dryness, his self-righteousness alternated with self-chastisement, his depressing, dreary voice, his morals, his attitudes, just everything about him was so awful. And of course, he is an unreliable narrator and they're all a little like that, but this was just too much. The entire thing engulfed me in a sense of the most soul-draining mediocrity. There were a lot of potentials for it to go right, but every time the story turned aside to something dull. And the writing was so irritating to me; the short, blunt sentences supposed to be laden with meaning, the heavy-handed self-analysis, the blasé imagery. Good thing it was short.