The Sense of an Ending
2013-12-05


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? ... There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

It is hard to say anything new about Julian Barnes' book that was not told before. Everybody should read it. But there is something to be mentioned about that cover, Suzanne Dean's beautiful artwork. Astonishing works often take a lot of time: she made some 20 cover options and even then she asked for two more weeks from the author. And yes, she used it all, to hand paint the letters over and over again, and to scan those in. Then she started to manipulate them even further digitally.

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