![]() ![]() So let's spoil the plot, shall we? The narrator is the 60-ish Tony Webster, looking back over his life. It's more like The Sixth Sense than like The Happening or The Village that way. Night Shyamalan movie, with a twist at the end, only less infuriating. Exquisitely, Barnes has shaped this book in a way that embodies these problems, so that the world you may have thought you understood in the first part of the book has to be re-evaluated in light of the ending. It's a meditation on the malleability of the past-unreliable memory, selective preservation of data, the ways in which different people understand events differently. If books came with instructions for use, the way shampoo does, then this one would definitely say "Read, repeat." In fact, this is book that you should really read more than once-possibly re-reading it as soon as you have finished the last page. It's a beautiful work, sharply observed and stuffed with telling detail. It's very very short, and beautifully crafted, and Barnes has clearly considered everything he put into it as carefully as it is humanly possible to do. ![]()
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