Grazie Mc. Ewan!! (ma grazie anche a Letizia Ciotti Miller, traduttrice spettacolare!)

Ci sono periodi, capitano a tutti, in cui prendiamo coscienza che “siamo per gli dei come mosche in mano ai monelli. Essi ci uccidono per divertimento.” Sono quei momenti in cui vedi attorno a te gli dei distribuire dolori e disgrazie senza equanimità, sempre a quelli, quelli che hai vicino, che conosci, e ti chiedi perchè sempre su di loro si accanisca il destino, e le prove più difficili e ingiuste. Ed è in momenti così che spesso mi rifugio in un romanzo, non uno di quelli che ti raccontano la realtà, no! quella la conosci già, la tocchi con mano ogni giorno. Un romanzo che ti porti via, lontano, almeno per un po'. E' così che ho cominciato questo Sabato, di Mc Ewan, sperando di partire dietro a lui, in una storia che mi aiutasse a prendere le distanze da una realtà fin troppo reale. L'incontro con la sua scrittura precisa, meticolosa, con l'uso perfetto della lingua, la capacità praticamente logorroica di descrivere il flusso di pensieri che accompagnano il protagonista per un giorno intero, un sabato appunto, mi è apparso di primo acchito molto simile ad una radiocronaca dell'indimenticabile Nicolò Carosio: talmente piena di parole da lasciarti senza fiato. Preciso, rapidissimo, perfetto come il taglio di un bisturi, ma altrettanto freddo, difficilmente empatico, raramente capace di emozionare. Poi, col passare delle pagine, mi sono accorta che Mc Ewan ce l'ha fatta: mi ha trascinato dietro ad Henry Perowne, neurochirurgo di fama, uno che ti apre il cranio come una scatoletta di Simmenthal, oh mamma!, uno che ti elimina con uno ZAC tumori piazzati nelle circonvoluzioni precentrali più impossibili, lasciandoti con una prognosi sicura al 100% (ma quando mai!), niente chemio, ne capelli persi, ne sterilità indotta dalle cure. Quasi quasi lo cerco Perowne, per fargli operare il figlio della mia amica che a 17 anni lotta contro un tumore di quelli...ma niente Perowne qui, nella realtà. Sì, grazie Mc Ewan, che con la famiglia Perowne, da far invidia a quella del Mulino Bianco, mi hai fatto sognare un mondo diverso, dove si vive in una casa di tre piani nel centro di Londra con tanto di biblioteca e serra, e si fanno le vacanze nel castello di famiglia in Francia, mentre da noi ci si dà fuoco per una casa di 60 mq. messa all'asta per un debito di 10.000 euro. Perwone, quarantenne sempre innamorato di sua moglie (ecco, questo proprio irreale!), lei avvocato di grido, capace di vincere cause in primo, secondo e terzo grado, mentre qui, nella realtà, dopo la Cassazione non puoi neanche sperare nella giustizia di Dio. Perowne e i suoi due figli magnifici, padre attento e partecipe di ogni loro successo, di ogni loro conquista, capace di preoccuparsi del senso di vulnerabilità che pervade le società occidentali subito dopo l'11 settembre. Perowne, che mentre si pone domande esistenziali sulla guerra e l'intervento contro Saddam in Irak, snobba la marcia per la pace di migliaia di manifestanti che sfilano sotto casa sua per andare a giocare una combattutissima partita a squash. Una favola magnifica, raccontata col ritmo rapido e ipnotico delle fiabe ascoltate da bambini, con il suo momento di suspance che vede minacciata la sua famiglia, fino a quel meraviglioso lieto fine (Dio! come adoro i lieti fine in periodi come questi) con Perowne calato nel ruolo di eroe omerico con tanto di pìetas, capace di soccorrere e perdonare il cattivo, vittima incolpevole della società e della natura beffarda. Grazie Mc Ewan, malgrado tutto ce l'hai fatta a portarmi via da questa quotidianità tragica e insopportabile, e a regalarmi una vita da sogno. Perché "la letteratura non deve rappresentare la realtà, ma quello che la realtà dovrebbe essere"
Per questo leggo. Quando la realtà è insopportabile leggo!

To state that I read this is not exactly true. This was my second attempt to read this book. I want to preface my statements to say that I have enjoyed many of McEwan's books very much. Although I am a medically educated person and understand the relevant language, I found the narrative tedious, tremendously rambling and slow to reach any point of interest for me. Apparently I am in a minority, but fortunately, there are many more books of interest for me to read.

This one deserves the four stars. Of the four McEwan novels I've read, it was the best. Not just that plot device of one bad thing happening, but a series of events plus layers of meaning.

The book takes place entirely on one eventful day, hence its name.

I read this book in about 2006.

Later I heard this book preached against in a mainline Presbyterian church downtown. It must have been 2009, because we were there to hear Douglas Blackmon speak on Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, then stayed for the service. It is not a fundamentalist church. I remember because that's the only time I've heard a book preached against. Not that I've been listening to sermons my entire life; only in the last five years or so, but it was memorable nevertheless. What I remember as the aggravating factor for him was that at the end of the book, after all the events of that day, the protagonist looked at the nape of his wife's neck and said it was the whole world. The clergyman thought that was godless, or idolatry, or something, whereas I had thought it was profound; the protagonist saw the whole wide world in the particular. In the beloved. I thought that minister really blew it.

I am not a big McEwan fan but did enjoy this preposterous day in the life of a neurosurgeon with the perfect family. I particularly liked the technical jargon of neuroscience and what a surgeon does during an operation.

The very upper class family with the brilliant lawyer wife, the musically talented Theo and the poetic Daisy were perfect. All that was missing was a family pooch. Odd no pets in their perfect world.

Dr Henry Perowne foes a considerable amount of navel gazing, more than an audience for a belly dancer. As a surgeon he tends to daydream and see the world only from his or his interpretation of how a sick person would see the world like Baxter.

Still an enjoyable read.

I think McEwan took the approach James Joyce used in Ulysses, that is, to detail the events of a day, in a narrative driven by a character's thoughts. Ulysses is a stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Saturday isn't in that league. (It's probably unfair to compare a novelist with James Joyce, but literary publicists do it all the time. McEwan has received plenty of positive comparisons with the likes of Dickens and Hardy, even Shakespeare.)

There is some beautiful writing here, and that kept me going. Still, I kept asking myself whether something, anything, was going to happen. Occasionally plot breaks through, specifically the protagonist Henry Perowne's confrontation with some thugs over a minor traffic scrape. When McEwan allows plot to drive the narrative, it's superb. McEwan also writes convincingly about the personal lives of his characters and the relations between them. He captures the complicated tangle of emotions we have for the people we love. For this, for style, for his portrayal of confrontation, this should get 4 stars.

Unfortunately, this book is not defined by its good bits. Admittedly the novel didn't quite match its American promotion, which tended to stress the backdrop of the post-9/11 world and the run-up to the war in Iraq. McEwan certainly uses these themes; at times they are prominent, but I didn't feel it was integral to the story. It was a subject that inspired characters' thoughts and conversations, but I didn't get the sense it was anything like the zeitgeist of the novel's world. [I'm waiting for that book, not a book about 9/11, but rather about how people live their lives in this awful new world in which we find ourselves. (I thought Jonathan Coe did a decent job of this in Closed Circle. I would like to see how someone like Nick Hornby might handle this.)]

The biggest problem I had with the book, the one that really kept me from enjoying it, was that too much time was spent focused on what Henry himself refers to as the 'white noise' of his thoughts. If the character were a real person, he would be admirable, a gifted neurosurgeon, a loving husband and father, a decent cook. The problem is that he's a bit dull.

In Ulysses, Joyce used multiple interior voices and packed in so much detail that there's always something to look at. Also, Joyce's Dublin is seen from the pavement; as pedestrians we have time to take in more. What we see of London through Henry Perowne's eyes is from his car. Mostly we're stuck in traffic. When Henry gets out of his car, he spends a lot of time thinking about his squash game or recalling time spent operating on brains. Interesting, maybe, but not sufficient to drive a novel forward.

All in all, sometimes pleasant, often frustrating, ultimately disappointing.

Saturday, a day in the life of a neurosurgeon, is my first experience with Ian McEwan, and I'm afraid it didn't go well for me. The tedious writing style with umpteen unnecessary subject matters thrown in pretty much put me off. There are a couple of OH NO! moments though, and I did want to find out how the good doctor handled his revengeful last surgery of the day, so 3 Stars it is and a hopeful move forward to Atonement bc I happen to own that novel too.

"e il loro sabato cederà il posto alla domenica."

McEwan è in questo racconto talmente dettagliato, minuzioso e chirurgico nel descrivere i pensieri del protagonista Henry da sfinire chi legge.

In apparenza si racconta di un sabato della vita di quest'uomo,vita che comprende una moglie, amatissima, due figli, altrettanto amati, una casa meravigliosa e un lavoro di prestigio, la neurochirurgia.

Il romanzo risulta in realtà essere una intensa riflessione su legami famigliari, sulla vita del nucleo ristretto soggetto alle turbative indotte dal contesto più ampio delle relazioni urbane e mondiali, alle soglie del finir della giovinezza, metaforicamente il sabato, di un uomo di successo.
Riflessioni sull'uomo, sulla pochezza di una vita al di là degli affetti, e sul mistero della composizione della mente dell'uomo.

"Ma la sua vita, come qualsiasi vita del resto, gli appariva inconsistente, constatando con quanta rapidità, con quale disinvoltura, tutte le suppellettili, ogni minimo dettaglio di un'intera esistenza potessero finire imballati, distribuiti, buttati via. Gli oggetti si trasformavano in spazzatura non appena venivano separati dal loro legittimo proprietario e dal loro passato;"

"Ma anche allora, non cesserà il nostro stupore nel constatare come questa modesta poltiglia sia in grado di allestirci dentro uno spettacolo di pensieri, immagini, suoni e sensazioni da cui scaturisce la certezza illusoria di un presente istantaneo, mentre un sé, altra ben congegnata illusione, dal centro, domina come un fantasma ogni cosa. "Sarà mai possibile spiegare come la materia diventi cosciente ?"

Sarà che ho la stessa età di Henry, sarà che mi sento anche io al limitar del mio sabato, ma questo McEwan, nonostane la perizia e l'abuso di esposizione di pensieri di Henry, mi ha curiosamente conquistato.

McEwan uses the "day in the life of" format, similar to" Ivan Denisovich" and "Ulysses" to combine a novel and his views on the current state of the world. Islam, mental illness, the impending (at the time of writing) war in Iraq, urban living, winning, competitiveness,the intricacies of the operating theatre,family, literature, poetry, even the possibility of his own bodily waste recycling to fall on his head one day as rainwater, is grist for his mill. A lesser writer would have been chastised for moralizing.
Henry Perowne, the protagonist, emerges as a heroic and saintly character in the end, able to forgive the threats and near damage inflicted on his family and to rise above the need for revenge. Perhaps, George Bush should have read this book before going off to Iraq to exact revenge on behalf of his daddy.

McEwan's story begins with an insomniac neurosurgeon gazing out his London home window and seeing a plane going down in flames at Heathrow. It is 2003 and a huge peace rally is planned for the coming day. The juxtaposition of the crashing plane and the expected peace picketers creates tension from the novel's opening placing all events against the 9 11 scenario. Worried about the plane the surgeon goes down several flights of his 7,000 square foot near mansion into the basement kitchen where he finds his 18 year old talented blues musician son. He tells him what he's just seen. After a cozy cuppa with his son he goes back to bed where he makes love to his wife. There's a slow push pull of domestic harmony against outside menaces that stalks him on his Saturday activities, activities which include a squash match with a colleague that gets ultra competitive, a traffic accident that leads to a dangerous encounter with a thug and his sidekicks, a visit to his loved but memory less mom wandering lost in her nursing home and then back to the bosom of his family for a reunion with his two grown children and his award winning but angsty poet father-in-law. He lets the day's events play at the back of his mind as he enjoys preparing an elaborate fish stew with salad and wine to eat with his loved ones. And then, as always happens in a McEwan novel, things get ugly, really ugly. I don't want to spoil your reading experience so I won't say anymore about that. McEwan ties up his plot threads more neatly than he usually does in this novel, there are less dangly bits. Also, he gives us people who we can like, another departure from his norm. For me Saturday was right up there with "Atonement" and "On Chesil Beach" on the enjoy ability scale.

Review to follow

Patiko.

https://knyguziurkes.com/2021/03/19/s...

as usual expertly written - so why 2 stars? Because it is stupidly unbelievable - the hero is not only a great brain surgeon but an excellent squash player and a good cook, with a beautiful wife who loves him, a son who is a marvellous bass player (tutored by Jack Bruce!), and a daughter who is not only a good poet (and just out of her teenage years), but an award winning one too. The parents too are distinguished. There are maybe families like this around but I've never met them or known anyone that's ever been within 1000 miles of anyone like them. McEwan's world maybe different of course. The plot is preposterous and its denouement silly. The Iraq war connections are stuck on. Having said all that it's meticulously planned and superbly rendered, if you like reading about beautiful rich people ruminating on their lifestyles and being slightly ruffled by the world you might enjoy it.