We've just come back from Nelligen. Although we live in Nelligen, we live across the river on what they call "the dark side" for reasons unknown to us as we live safely tucked away on our seven acres and hear nothing of the sinister side of life farther up the lane.
Every second Sunday of the month the local hall hosts a market which sells homemade and homegrown as well as outgrown and unwanted things. Padma picked up two dozen "homelaid" eggs and I an unwanted book by Julian Barnes, "The Sense of an Ending", which I already have but which I thought would make a nice present to someone still stuck in the Wilbur Smith/Hammond Innes/Jack Higgins reading phase.
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but mainly to ourselves.” from 'The Sense of an Ending'
'The Sense of an Ending' is a short, sharp novel about a man who tells his own story and then comes to doubt it. It was also made into a movie which is far from a straight film conversion but beautiful in its own right. It's Barnes at his usual contemplative; it's about the fallibility of memory; it's about the cycle of life and this urge for what we describe now by the ugly word 'closure', to loop back to a moment in the past.
"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?" from 'The Sense of an Ending'
I think I read the book one more time before I give it away as a present. As for the Markets, I may open my own stall selling only German books.
