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(More customer reviews)Endings
Endings reminds us that a physician is capable of writing more than just prescriptions. This is a first - and one hopes, not last - effort by a Texas-based orthopedist, Barbara Bergin, who draws extensively upon her experience as a surgeon and as a championship horse rider. But while the practice of orthopedic medicine and the love of horses figure prominently in Endings this novel fundamentally has to do with the reality that lies beneath the superficies of our lives - a reality that encompasses the complexity of our human relationships, of love and loss, of matters present and past - of experiences which we may easily own and want to relive or which we may seek to escape. In short, Endings is a complex and challenging book..
The novel is also a love story - not a "romance" - but a story of love lost and love found, as ephemeral as that may ultimately prove to be. The protagonist, Leslie Cohen, an orthopedist who, through personal tragedy, has become a nomadic practitioner - a locum tenens - filling in here and there throughout the country when others go on vacation or medical leave (as is the case in the novel), literally accidentally meets (a collision on a wet Texas highway) an engaging rancher-cum-builder with whom she develops a relationship, in spite of herself. There is "love making" that is intimate in detail and convincing in passion - but without the kind of perfervid expression that often mars the depiction of sexual engagement in "romance" novels.
Leslie Cohen, as nomad, has entered into a journey - but it is a wandering both into the present and into the past. In some sense, she is at a stasis, stuck at a point in time, at which the past and present seem to fuse, beyond which she cannot pass. But is she stuck? Is there a present, and has there been a past? This is the ingenious point of the novel. It would be egregiously wrong for a reviewer to say more. It falls to the reader to get to the ending of Endings to understand and to plumb the depths of this narrative.
From a purely stylistic point of view, the author has a clear talent for creating in her central character a subject locus, a strong point of view, for the telling of a story that embraces in rich detail a broad canvas of the natural world (like Leslie Cohen's wondering about the destiny of vagrant scrapes of paper, wind-stuck on an Abilene fence) and of a shared humanity (as in Dr. Cohen's compassionate treatment of two "illegals" horribly injured while attempting to hop a freight train). While we are brought into the inner world of the protagonist, the narrative does not lapse into tedious introspection, and while we join with the protagonist in viewing her world and the people in it, the author does not fall into any kind of omniscient narration.
This is a novel that deserves many re-readings!
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