Not sure about this to be honest - some of these short stories were quite thought provoking (First Love, Last Rites; Disguises) and the rest make you feel very unsettled and uneasy. I always find it impressive when a writer is able to move you in such a way, but this wasn't the vibe for me. From what I know of McEwan's Atonement, I assume that this collection of short stories is a universe away. I'll definitely be comparing!

Interesting to see where it all started with McEwan, how macabre and twisted his early stuff is compared to the more Booker-friendly later stuff. Love the darkness and the weirdness. 'Homemade' and 'Butterflies' are two of the most disturbing stories I've read, one involving child incest and the other child murder, and both recounted by first-person narrators who are hauntingly believable. He has a real knack for finding the human in the monster, which makes it all the more unsettling.

There's quite a bit of tonal variety here too though; 'Solid Geometry' and 'Conversations with a Cupboard Man' are both delightfully bonkers. 'Solid Geometry' feels very Roald Dahl (his adult stuff) - one of those twisted tales about marital resentment - but with a huge dollop of weirdness thrown in. 'Conversations' is a totally off-the-rails picaresque about a man who is treated like a baby by his mother til the age of seventeen when he is thrown out and forced to fend for himself. In contrast, 'Last Day of Summer' and the titular story feel a bit quieter, a bit more self-consciously "literary" in style, a bit closer to the stuff McEwan would go on to be acclaimed for.

There are only a couple of stories that don't land for me at all. 'Cocker at the Theatre' feels incomplete, more like a drawn-out gag than a story, and not a very funny one; not sure why it was thrown in - padding, indulgence, who knows? 'Disguises' - about a young boy taken in by his eccentric thespian aunt and forced to cross-dress for their evening meals - has a weird and interesting hook but doesn't go anywhere. Interestingly, they're the only two in the collection narrated in 3rd person.

Overall, a decent collection full of macabre weirdness. Would have liked a couple of stories to go a bit deeper, but it's mad to think he was only in his early 20s when he wrote these - such a self-assured voice for a debut.

I was so eager to read these short stories after falling in love with McEwan’s writing. In my imagination, he is the kind of creative who loses himself in his writing. His writing is raw, unapologetic. He writes characters who are unrepentant, too. He doesn’t seem to hold back. His subjects and scenarios are base and deep-seated. But at the same time, he’s thoughtful and inviting, as far as finding the right narrative voice for his subject.

I appreciate the threads of acceptance and identity in this collection. Some of the stories are dark, and perverse, and distasteful, but he writes them in such a nonchalant manner that I felt engaged and engrossed and sympathetic. “Homemade” and “Butterflies” are my favorites because he doesn’t shy away from the ugly. He actually runs toward it.

He’s sympathetic to his characters, even those who enact monstrous acts. McEwan makes the human mind and its decision-making capabilities appear eloquent, I think, because he digs down to the bone, and further still. I suppose it’s a result of voice, and his finding the best one to relay his subject. He seems to have mastered that.

But also McEwan taps into the physiological and relies on the messiness that comes with our being physical creatures. We can connect to that. For all the heady and philosophical ideas, he entertains the ugliness of desire with twice the narrative force. For that, each story is exquisite.

Po dočtení můžu říct, že jsem našla novýho oblíbenýho autora. Přemýšlím, kdy mě nějaká próza (natož pak povídky!) takhle zaujala. Mistrovsky předvedený řemeslo psaní jako takový, kdy příběh graduje tak nějak přirozeně, pozvolna a nenuceně, neotřelý a originální příběhy - každá povídka naprosto jiná (u povídkových sbírek je rpo mě často problém, že mi jejich "nálady" a styl splývaj dohromady, což se tady neděje), pohled na svět očima lidí z okraje společnosti a přesně ta správná dávka nechutností a náhledu bez růžovejch brýlí na reálnej svět kolem nás. Nemám nic, co bych knize vytkla, a pět hvězdiček není dost.

Fanatic debut from Ian McEwan, every story in here has a weird sinister twist to it and some of them are so unnerving and upsetting to the point where one my me cry and another made me gag

Homemade is such a vile story and i do not recommend anyone to read it as the ending made me cry so much and it’s not sad if is just disgusting and i don’t know how he came up with it but the prose is beautiful as it always is inside of McEwans work. My favourite of the collection is Conversation with a cupboard man and is such a great story about not wanting to grow up and it is undeniably beautiful. Read it

Libro que había encontrado en la biblioteca del secundario y no pude recordar cómo se llamaba hasta hace poco.
Los cuentos exploran bastantes cosas turbias, hay algunos que deben tener significados más extensos, pero sinceramente ciertos finales no los entendí.
Aún así fue una lectura llevadera cuando ya estás acostumbrada al "Rey" de lo turbio: Stephen King.

I can sum up this collection of eight stories in one word: disturbing. I have some more words for it though, if you're interested: macabre, beautiful, crafted, horrific, and tragic. But even better than my words are Ian McEwan's words, quoted frequently below.

But first, in general, note that I have to be rather opaque in my descriptions of these stories.  Odd and poignant things happen in all of them (usually at the end), and I’d be loathe to spoil them for you, should you be brave enough to withstand the darker parts of the stories. And, I apologize for my overuse of the word "disturbing."


Homemade.  Disturbing as hell.  The following is from the opening sentence:

. . . [I]f in human affairs there are no such things as episodes then I should really insist that this story is about Raymond and not about virginity, coitus, incest and self-abuse. (9)

Disturbing right?  Even more so when you realize the narrator is a mere 14-years-old and a psychopath to boot.

Solid Geometry.  A weary husband makes use of the “plane without a surface” to deal with his, to his view, pathetic wife.  Here’s a nice sentence from a dying marriage:

‘You don’t speak to me any more,’ she said, ‘you play me like a pinball machine, for points.’ (40)

One of the unforgettable images in this one is a pickled penis acquired by the narrator’s great-grandfather at auction:

It was bottled in a glass twelve inches long, and, noted by great-grandfather in his diary that night, ‘in a beautiful state of preservation’. (31)

Last Day of Summer.  “Hauntingly beautiful” is a clichéd phrase for a reason, right?  Because this story is hauntingly beautiful.  The narrator is a young orphaned boy living with his adult brother, who has turned the family home into a kind of commune.  He spends the summer with Jenny, the newest member of the household who becomes a kind of mother figure to the group, while remaining outside of it:

And there’s something in the way the others treat Jenny.  Like she’s outside things, and not really a person like they are.  They’ve got used to her cooking big meals and making cakes.  No one says anything about it now. . . . And they still think about how fat she is. (64-65)

This one is very sad. But knowing what I now know about McEwan, with a title like "Last Day of Summer," I should have expected tragedy.

Cocker at the Theatre.  I have little to say about this one, which is fitting since it is the littlest story at just under six pages.  It takes place during theatre rehearsals for a sexually explicit play that the director insists is 'a respectable show.’ (73)

Butterflies.  The atmosphere in this one is whole feet thick.  The narrator has nothing to do. He is apparently self-sufficient but lives in a seedy industrial area, near a canal.  He habitually takes solitary walks.  The best way I can describe this is with a quote on the back cover from The New York Times:

“Menace lies crouched between the lines of his neat, angular prose, and weird, grisly things occur in his books with nearly casual aplomb.”

While that describes the whole collection, it is particularly applicable to this story. And the menace in this one comes from the narrator who is a disturbing loner.

I do not meet many people, in fact the only ones I talk to are Charlie and Mr. Watson.  I speak to Charlie because he is there when I leave my front door; he is always the one to speak first, and there is no avoiding him if I want to leave the house.  I do not talk to Mr. Watson so much as listen, and I listen because I have to do into his shop to buy groceries. (87)

Spoiler: This one does not end well.

Conversation with a Cupboard Man. This is one of my favorites in the collection.  It is simply a disturbed man telling an stream-of-conscious account of his life to a social worker.  The details are exquisite and, as I had come to expect by this point, disturbing:

How did I become an adult?  I’ll tell you, I never did learn.  I have to pretend.  All the things you take for granted I have to do it all consciously.  I’m always thinking about it, like I was on the stage.  I’m sitting in this chair with my arms folded, that’s all right, but I’d rather be lying on the floor gurgling to myself than be talking to you.  I can see you think I’m joking.  It still takes me a long time to get dressed in the morning, and lately I haven’t bothered anyway.  And you’ve seen how clumsy I am with a knife and fork.  I’d rather someone came and patted me on the back and fed me with a spoon.  Do you believe me?  Do you think it’s disgusting?  Well, I do.  It’s the most disgusting thing I know.  That’s why I spit on the memory of my mother because she made me this way. (99)

First Love, Last Rites.  This is a story about a summer romance that fades to a relationship.  But it’s more than that too.  The imagery here is great, there are eels and eel traps, and rats, and womb imagery.  It’s deep.  I love how the first line almost encapsulates the story:

From the beginning of summer until it seemed pointless, we lifted the thin mattress on to the heavy oak table and made love in front of the large open window. (115)

Disguises.  Henry’s mother died.  And now he’s been taken in by his Aunt Mina.  Mina was a stage actress.  But now she’s crazy.  And poor Henry just tries to keep afloat.  Mina makes them both dress up in costumes for dinner every night, to sometimes disturbing effect.  And then, Mina decides to have a party in which all of the guests are to come disguised.  Henry mistakenly says that the idea for the party is “nice”:

She stood behind his chair tousling his hair for pretend affection, but pulling it, and stung his eyes.  ‘Henry, dear, it will be formidable, fantastical, awful, but never nice, nothing we ever do will be nice,’ speaking this all the while she ran her hands in his hair, twined it through her fingers. (142)

And, as promised, the things at the party are decidedly not nice.

The whole book made me wonder whether writing a really disturbing story really really well is enough.  But these stories made me react.  Recoil.  Reexamine.  And, ultimately, judge.  I think that is really what the best stories should do.  Don’t you?

Sólo había leído de este autor "Chesil Beach" y me había gustado muchísimo, por lo que me animé a este de relatos...

La verdad es que no es para nada lo mismo, sin embargo, a su manera, también lo disfruté.

En "Primer amor, últimos ritos..." encontramos relatos breves donde hay historias extremadamente perturbadoras y a la cual las acompañan personajes terriblemente perturbados, al nivel de las náuseas o de tirarlo por la ventana por lo desagradable, en momentos. Pero creo que la sorpresa pudo mucho más...

Leyendo tanto, llegó un momento en que empecé a calificar por encima del resto al que autor que me sorprende y me resulta original, por más que sus historias sean desagradables. El primer relato "Fabricación casera", me repugnó, dudo que pueda olvidarmelo en mucho tiempo, y si una novela o un relato breve logran eso, es el elixir para mí.

Creo que la escritura del autor es magnífica y, si tolerás la náusea y las temáticas fuerte verás que te maneja muy bien por un cuento hasta su cierre, te lleva de la mano de una manera ejemplar, como no muchos escritores logran hacer.

Wow, Ian McEwan has got some serious fucking issues

U téhle knihy víc, než u kterékoliv jiné jsem ocenila předmluvu autora a doslov odborníka, pač jen tak mi ty povídky dávaly smysl jako celek! Každopádně, jak bylo zmíněno v knize, je to panoptikum antihrdinů, řekli byste si z jiného světa, ale jde jen o to, že o nich McEwan dokáže mluvit nahlas a psát nahlas. Za postavami by býval byl stál složitý psychologický rozbor, ale musím ocenit i to, že McEwan prostě umí psát o incestu, o pedofilii, o fetiších a jiném zvěrstvu krásným literárním jazykem.

This would be a 5-star book based on the quality of writing, but I had to deduct a star for how awful it made me feel at times. Ian McEwan's talent is undeniable in this debut collection of short stories, with stunning prose and dark, gripping plots. But it's not the genteel Ian McEwan of Atonement or On Chesil Beach, it's a sinister, depraved, twisted McEwan who writes of abuse and incest and rape as casually as he does of impossible disappearing acts and mother's boys. I was as mesmerised as I was unsettled. Let's just say a writer who can tell a story of a brother raping his sister and bring out the innocence of the moment as much as its wickedness, is a writer of extraordinary expertise.

I’m putting a petition to Waterstones about shelving this book in the horror section, this book is so disturbing!