I get why these short stories are smart and written masterfully, and why they brought the author such critical acclaim. I would have probably loved the book more if not for the unsettling feeling it aims to create in the reader's gut (quite successfully, in my case at least).

The stories aim for breaching taboo topics and making them familiar, almost at as random but oh so expected occurrences. Incest, handicap, familial abuse, pedophilia, death of women and children, that kind of stuff. At points, I tended to even resent the author for making me read this (although it's true that no one was making me read it, right?) and even get suspicious when noticing that somehow men never seem to be on the receiving end of these horrible acts in his narratives. The impression was later corrected, but you still get a bitter aftertaste.

Edit: thought about it, and yeah, I kind of hated it. This was recommended to me because people have told me it’s disturbing and depraved, and it was at times, but I never connected to the writing style (I thought it was frustrating) and was left with a feeling of like -is that it?- after every story. But yeah, mostly the bad taste remains even a few days later. I will probably read more of his stuff, but I just did not like this.

Gonna need to think about this one for a bit. I didn’t particularly like it and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

I didn't realise this collection of short stories had been re-published in a collection ('The Short Stories') which I had already read. However it was 2010 when I read this, and hence I'd forgotten almost everything I'd consumed back then, except that it was read on the train home from work. It was a pleasure, though not always pleasant, to re-read these tales.

It's a strange mix, themes of sex and adolescent confusion recurring repeatedly, and though this short format is ideal for exploring strange avenues, at times I felt like the author was aiming to shock as opposed to writing what he might have without aspects of the audience in mind. Nevertheless, several of these will stay with me.

Mostly modern societies outcasts and/or outliers are featured in these at times dark and macabre short stories centred round compulsion, sex and mortality - Eight interesting and original tales by the literary giant that is Ian McEwan. 6 out of 12, Three Star read.

2011 read

This is a very disturbing collection. Rape, incest, forbidden love, juvenile antics, etc. It's not gross per se, Ian has this thing where he writes about potentially gross endings but he prepares you for it. You kinda know what's coming up next but you can't not flip the pages, you want to know. He's a master craftsman of story telling and subject matter aside, these are some very impressive stories. Mildly Disturbing though it is, this is an impressive collection.

Stories are dark and moody. I could often feel some Charles Bukowski's influences though the tales are told with quite original bleakness.

My relationship with Ian McEwan did not get off to a good start. I was an 18-year-old student at Cambridge, and a friend came to visit over the weekend. He had a copy of this book, which he praised extravagantly. Out of curiosity I read the first story. I really didn't like it.

That evening, he went out to visit another person he knew in town, and came back late and much the worse for wear, after having sampled the beer in three or four pubs. Somewhere around 2 am, I was woken by sounds of vomiting from the living room. I went to investigate, and discovered that Paul had thrown up all over "First Love, Last Rites", which he had left beside his sleeping bag. I remember commenting approvingly that, if he was anyway going to be sick, he had picked the very best spot in the room to do it.

Who would have guessed that McEwan would now be one of my favorite authors? Initial impressions can sometimes be misleading.

Difficult to use one rating for complex literature.... subject matter, dark and troubling, but the writing is amazing.

First Love, Last Rites is the first book published by Ian McEwan, a collection of short stories written while he was a MFA student at the University of East Anglia.

The first story in the collection is "Homemade", the highlight of the book. The story focuses on the unnamed narrator, who proclaims proudly that he has just lost his virginity and thus has finally attained adulthood. This moment represents the culmination of a long process of gaining experience about the adult world in partnership with his more knowing friend, Raymond. Together, they finance their adventures by stealing books from a local store. What really makes this story work so well is the darkly humorous way that McEwan presents the earnest quest of his narrator to grow up. For while he does lose his virginity, he does so by raping his ten-year-old sister, Connie. He thus achieves entry into adulthood in only the most technical sense; his naivete otherwise marks him as still, in truth, a child.

In "Solid Geometry", the narrator has inherited two things from his great-grandfather: the pickled penis of Captain Nicholls, and the forty-five volumes of his diary, which he reading and editing. In the diaries, he follows the relationship of his great-grandfather with his good friend, M. One day, M. recounts the astonishing discovery of a Scottish mathematician named David Hunter, who claimed to have discovered how to create a plane without a surface. To demonstrate his discovery, he folded himself into space until he suddenly disappeared. The narrator comes to suspect that his great-grandfather performed this same trick on M., who likewise vanishes from the diaries. While this history is being recounted, the narrator is endlessly fighting with his wife, Maisie. During a particularly tempestuous fight, she smashes the jar containing the pickled penis. The narrator, pretending to reconcile with Maisie, pretends to engage in sexual intercourse, but instead uses Hunter's method and folds her out of existence.

The female narrator of "Last Day of Summer" is twelve years old and lives with her adult brother, Peter, in a house they share by letting out rooms to support themselves. This situation has come about as a result of their parents' death in a car accident. The newest addition to the house is Jenny, an awkward and overweight young woman who is very good at domestic chores. The narrator and Jenny often take care of baby Alice, the child of Kate, another woman in the house. One day the three of them go boating on the river, and the boat overturns. The story ends with the narrator resurfacing, unable to find her two companions, and contemplating the fact that summer is over.

"Cocker at the Theater" is about a play that requires several couples to simulate sex on stage. Real intercourse is forbidden. However, one couple break the rules and make love on stage during a rehearsal, and are fired from the production.

The narrator of "Butterflies" is talking to Charlie Watson, a motor mechanic from his local neighborhood. They are discussing the recent disappearance of a young girl, Jane, whom the narrator claims to have discovered floating, dead, in a nearby canal. As the story unfolds, the narrator reveals the true story: he first gained Jane's interest by buying her a doll, which she discards, and then some ice cream. They then take a walk along the canal, where the narrator lures her under a bridge by telling her that there are beautiful butterflies there. After sexually assaulting her, he pushes her into the canal, where she drowns.

Another damaged narrator is at the center of "Conversation with a Cupboard Man". For most of his life, his mother had kept him in an infantile state, rendering him incapable of adult skills and emotions. When the narrator's mother met a new lover, however, she suddenly discarded her seventeen-year-old child, leaving the helpless boy to fend for himself. After four years in an institution, the narrator has to leave, and so he moves to London and gets a menial job working in a kitchen. The chef, referred to only as Pus-Face because of his bad complexion, bullies the narrator by locking him in a big industrial oven. When this cruel trick is repeated, the narrator takes some boiling oil and pours it over the chef, sending him to hospital. The narrator realizes suddenly that he longs to return to his mother's infantilization, and so he returns to their old house in Staines, only to find his mother no longer lives there. Unable to work, he starts to shoplift, gets caught and sent to jail, where he makes friends and enjoys his lack of freedom. Upon release, he gets a job in a factory, but tells the social worker, the implied audience of this story, that he mostly relishes sitting in a cupboard, dreaming of returning to the confinements of early childhood.

"First Love, Last Rites" centers on the relationship between the narrator and his lover, Sissel. They have particular location, a mattress placed on an oak table, where they make love. Their only visitor is Sissel's ten-year-old brother, Adrian. The narrator embarks on a new business venture: trapping eels and selling them, even though the probability of success is low. Meanwhile, there are strange noises coming from behind the wall of the room where he and Sissel make love. The narrator imagines some strange monster there, and the lovers grow increasingly distant. The distance grows when Sissel gets a job at the local cannery; one day she refuses even to acknowledge him when he comes to meet her. Things come to head when the three of them witness the emergence of the creature from behind the wall: a rat, which the narrator kills with a poker. The rat splits open, revealing the baby rats that were inside. The narrator also releases an eel he has trapped, and the story closes with the couple resuming their lovemaking.

The final story is "Disguises" which, together with "Cocker at the Theater", is the only one told in third person. It recounts the story of a young boy, Henry, whose mother, Brianie, dies. As such, he goes to live with his aunt Mina, an accomplished actress. Every day she and Henry dress up in different outfits and act out various scenarios. Things take a dark turn when she dresses Henry up as a girl, plies him with alcohol, and presumably sexually assaults him while dressed as a male soldier. Henry becomes close friends with a girl from school, Linda, who lives in a big house and introduces him to art. Whenever he dresses as a girl, he imagines himself becoming Linda. The story concludes with Mina throwing a costume party, to which he wears a Boris Karloff-style monster mask he bought for the occasion. At the party, he consumes too much wine, and this triggers a series of dissociative images in which Henry, looking in the mirror, again sees himself as both Henry and Linda, his identities multiplied.

Although there are elements of interest in all the stories in this collection, for me only "Homemade" achieves the crystalline perfection for which McEwan seems to be aiming. It captures perfectly the way in which the world of the symbolic, so outwardly important for establishing our subjective positions, functions as a trap, a lure. That is why each of the stories central characters is a kind of Caliban: they achieve a kind of voice that, instead of empowering them, limits and enslaves, causing them to curse their condition.

First Love, Last Rites is the first published work of Ian McEwan and the first collection of his short stories to win the Somerset Maugham award. I must say I prefer the work of the more mature McEwan. This collection of stories is extremely disturbing and I had to take a break after the third story (a first for me for a McEwan book). Why can't his characters be permitted to enjoy a perfect summer? I could barely stifle a scream of revulsion at the close of many of the stories. In them you find a steady supply of the grotesque, dysfunctional, perverse, depraved. There is, however, the unmistakable touch of a compelling story teller. In "The Last Day of Summer" and "Butterflies", the unexpected and startling unravelling of horror was superbly staged. I kept reading even though I wanted so much to discontinue. Another book I can read only once.

Yeuch. These are, in the main, frightful stories which leave a really horrible taste in the mouth. Thakfully I have read enough of his other stuff to know that I quite like some of it. When he wrote these he was one weird man. There is murder, incestuous rape, child abuse by a neighbour in one story, an aunt in another and a mother in another. These are foul stories with, to my mind, no real value other than showing how shocking McEwan thought he could be. They do not address issues, they simply create monstrous stages on which the writer can let rip with lots of adolescent swearing and skewed sexual encounters.

There is one story called 'Last Day of Summer' whih is genuinely poignant and seems to have something of significance to say about different ways of loving and relating and manages to express itself in some lovely phrases. It is the only story which does not have some form of sexual depravity or, in the case of 'Cocker at the Theatre', just some pointless account of sex and offensive gay stereotyping.

I recall reading a quotation from McEwan after the 9/11 attrocity when he said that imagination is the beginning of compassion because had the terrorists been able to imagine themselves into the hearts or minds of the victims they would have been unable to continue. Is this his intention here?All the stories apart from 'Cocker' and 'Disguises' are written in the first person, presumably an attempt to 'enable us to be inside the mind of a murderer/fiend/tosser'; To make us more sympathetic or understanding of the struggles of people sexually sick in mind? It doesn't really work. If that is his intention then he needs to do more than simply relate the behaviour. There is no value to this collection, it is a man scratching his groin very brazenly in public and unzipping his flies and waving it about.

Thank God I came to these stories having read some of his later work otherwise I would not have bothered to pick up another of his books ever again.

Ian McEwan is one of the best. And this little book of short stories does not disappoint. Rather than rate the book as a whole, I'm going to rate each story on the usual 5 star scale:

1. Homemade. This one was shockingly good. It was disturbing in the same way The Cement Garden was disturbing. 5 out of 5.

2. Solid Geometry. Probably my favorite story in the book. 5 out of 5.

3. Last day of Summer. Another great story with a solid, beautiful ending that snuck up on me! 5 out of 5.

4. Cocker at the Theatre. The shortest story in the book and also the reason I didn't rate the whole book five stars. Very strange story. Strange to the point of being sublime. And also disturbing. 2 out of 5.

5. Butterflies. Excellent, heart breaking, and terrifying. 5 out of 5.

6. Conversations with a Cupboard Man. Another scary one but less emotional than Butterflies. 4 out of 5.

7. First Love, Last Rites. Interesting characters and a solid story. 5 out of 5.

8. Disguises. The longest story in the book. This one has everything McEwan is famous for. It's funny, sad, shocking, scary, and features interesting characters. 5 out of 5.