I do not remember much about this book read more than 10 years ago but I remember clearly that at one point I was reading it in the subway. I do not know why this memory printed in my brain.

This was a slightly odd, well-written and reasonably enjoyable book – but a surprising Booker Prize winner. What I love about McEwan is his ability to look inside different people’s heads, his sometimes Woolf-like free indirect style of viewing the world, introspectively and polyphonically. He does that best in Atonement, in my view, but then I love the ambience and the story in that novel, and the characters drew me in completely.

In this novel, however, we follow three men: a musician, a politician and the editor of a newspaper, who are all ex-lovers of the same woman – the one whose funeral kick-starts the novel – and they are none of them particularly likeable. In Atonement I cried my eyes out (all three times), whereas in this book, well, I was interested in the language and the story but not so much in the three men. They were too full of themselves and seemed to have few redeeming traits.

Interestingly, the tone and thematics of Amsterdam felt to me more similar to his latest novel, The Children Act, and to some extent to Enduring Love: a few characters only, who all have secrets and regrets, who are fed up with certain other people in their lives and find themselves in need of making new choices. Lengthwise, it’s also about the same. McEwan has said himself that Atonement was a one-off, which I would agree with so far, having now read five of his novels.

The title baffled me a bit, but I guess Amsterdam, the city, is the point of convergence – to begin with and at the end, which is thematically the point: how the lives of these three men are woven into one another, for better or for worse. A strange death pact is involved, the consequence of which felt just the tiniest bit ridiculous to me. A relatively interesting book.

McEwan'ın hemen hemen tüm kitaplarını büyük bir keyifle okumuş biri olarak, üstelik 1998'de Booker ödülü de almış olan Amsterdam'ı maalesef hiç sevemedim, zorlanarak bitirebildim. Ahlaki sorunları işleyen bu kısa romanı hiç ikna edici bulamadım. Düzensiz, dağınık geldi bana. McEwan çok üstün bir yazar, birçok tarışmalı temayı ustaca romanlarına yedirebiliyor. Ama naçizane tavsiyem Amsterdam'dan uzak durun.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Is it just me or do other people "shy away" from books that look a little too intellectual for them? I read because I enjoy it. I am at an age where I don't need to read to impress. I like a good book (and I hate a bad book) and will read anything that interests me. I am shallow enough to pick a book up because I like the picture on the front or I like the title. I occasionally read books that others have recommended but I have to know what the other person likes. Too often I have started books that people tell me are "absolutely brilliant" to get halfway through and wonder what the hell I am doing. At this point I should mention I hated The Da Vinci Code with a passion however I will defend it with a greater passion. You see, the other thing I hate is book snobs. People who start off with the line: "Oh I never read any book on the best seller list - they are too populist!" In an anti-snob way I have a tendency to avoid any book that says "Winner of the Booker/Pulitzer Prize", more fool me! I worry that the book is going to be full of "big words" and "purple patches" - sometimes studying English Literature at school can kill any desire to read a "literary must read". I love my Neil Gaiman/Nick Hornby/Mil Millington. And then I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and enjoyed it. It was only afterwards that I noticed the big sticker on the front "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" - hey, maybe all intellectual books aren't that scary :^)

Amsterdam is the winner of The Booker Prize. It is a small, dull looking book. It tells the story of three men, linked by being ex-lovers, and what happens after the love of their lives dies. The three men are "the greatest living composer", the editor of an intellectual newspaper, the foreign secretary. It just sounds dull, dull, dull. It sounds like a book that I would pass up reading every single time I finish one book and return to the bookshelf trying to find another book to read.

Picked it off the shelf yesterday morning at just past ten, lived a fairly active "doing" day and yet, before ten at night, I had finished the book. I realised, as I closed it, that I had been secretly (or not so secretly) going back to it at every possible chance: sitting on the balcony for a cigarette - read; waiting for a scan of Dani's drawing to upload - read; watching the Yorkshire puddings rise in the oven - read; sit watching Spirited Away with the kids - read.

A very enjoyable book and not as dull as it pretends to be :^)

Lovely page-turner. Ideal for a drizzly winter day of power reading. Based on a traversal of a number of McEwan’s later novels - Saturday, Amsterdam, The Children’s Act - it seems that McEwans artistic project is increasingly assuming the character of a anthropological research project. His protagonists are professional archetypes - the healer, the judge, the messenger, the artist-prophet - who are fated to exercise their specialist duties in a fractured 21st century post-industrial society. I love how McEwan recreates the texture of these distinct ways to interact with the world. It is as if we are able to experience how a neurosurgeon or a newspaper editor extracts meaning and purpose from exercising his craft. Inevitably these people, who operate within the confines of highly specialized professional protocols, are exposed to the messiness and unpredictability of contemporary society. Moral dilemmas - marital infidelity, changes in political fortunes, exposure to wanton violence, the vicissitudes of chronic illness - intrude on their carefully scripted existence. The novels play out how these people, equipped with tremendous skills and confronted with inevitable vulnerabilities, work through these moral questions. As readers we can’t help to stake out our position as well. Fascinating.

Entiendo que Ian McEwan actualmente goza de las preferencias y los favores de un importante y variado público, digamos que este autor Inglés está de moda entre un vasto sector de lectores tanto de los llamados “profesionales” como entre los lectores ocasionales, ya que su estilo se presta a una lectura ágil e interesante, sin menoscabo de algunos toques moralizantes y artísticos. Me parece que McEwan es de esos autores que poseen el don de gustar universalmente. Su obra Amsterdam contiene una historia dinámica, interesante y desde el inicio hasta el final nos mantiene interesados en ella y que aborda básicamente la amistad y algunos valores morales, todo esto tejido alrededor del pasado de una mujer recientemente fallecida y que dispara la participación de cuatro hombres relacionados íntimamente con ella.

La temática que desarrolla el autor está sustentada básicamente por dos personajes principales, dos ex amantes de Molly, la mujer fallecida. Uno de ellos es un Director de un Diario Londinense cuyo entorno laboral descrito por el autor nos proporciona algunos interesantes conocimientos sobre los entretelones de los diarios. Pero los detalles bellos de la novela son proporcionados durante las descripciones del trabajo del otro protagonista, un músico afamado y talentoso llamado Clive. Mediante las descripciones que hace McEwan de sus horas de trabajo en la creación musical de una Sinfonía podemos penetrar un tanto ese mundo cargado de belleza, inspiración, tranquilidad y euforia.

Los pasajes de la novela en donde el músico se interna en la naturaleza para lograr la inspiración final para concluir su obra me han parecido de una gran belleza. Merece mención aparte una apreciación personal o una asociación que ha quedado en mi memoria y que me surgió cuando el músico encuentra las notas finales de su obra en plena soledad y en contacto con la naturaleza por la acción inspiradora que suelen proporcionar la soledad y el mundo natural. Me imagino que esta inspiración es algo parecido a lo que le sucedió a Nietzsche en Sils-Maria cuando estando en total soledad junto a una roca, la roca de Silvaplana, (“a 6,000 pies sobre el nivel del mar y mucho más por encima de todas las cosas humanas”) se apoderó de él un estado de exaltación y concibió la idea del “eterno retorno”.

Mención aparte, siempre me han gustado sobremanera algunas descripciones que se hacen acerca de lo que es la música o de lo que significa para el ser humano y en este libro he encontrado una definición o propuesta que me ha parecido bellísima:

“… crear ese placer a un tiempo sensual y abstracto, traducir en aire vibrante ese algo inefable cuyos significados se hallaban siempre, eternamente, más allá de nuestro alcance, seductoramente suspendidos en ese punto en que se funden la emoción y el intelecto.”

I gave Amsterdam two stars because it's so short and there's this weird kind of peculiar joy when you read it. Look, 20 pages! 50 pages! Halfway through!
Other than that, it's one of those boring white-collar novels featuring the seemingly enlightening but nonethelessly ponderous, intelectual and philosophical musings of succesful, rich people who live in their big villas and feel sorry for themselves. None of the characters is memorable or likeable, and the novella (it's under 200 pages) never really gains any sort of coherence. I don't think McEwan himself knew what he wanted to do - a nostalgic love story? A social parable? A morality tale? Character study? Bits of these surface, but are swallowed by the meandering and unfocused plot (or what can be described as one) and boring, self-absorbed characters. It's not humorous enough to be funny, not suspenseful to be gripping, and not challenging to be thought provoking. It just is, bland pseudo-intelectual pulp fiction masqueraded as "novel of ideas" that are supposed to be challenging but never really hit the mark. McEwan should have won the Booker for Atonement which is a far, far superior work, moving and memorable. Amsterdam reads fast, but the memories of it evaporate even faster.

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
Amsterdam is a 1998 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. At the funeral of photographer and writer Molly Lane, three of Molly's former lovers converge. They include newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley who are old friends, and British Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony.

Clive and Vernon muse upon Molly's death from an unspecified rapid-onset brain disease that left her helpless and in the clutches of her husband, George Lane, whom they both despise. Neither man can understand her attraction to Julian Garmony, the right-wing Foreign Secretary who is about to challenge his party's leadership.

Shortly after Molly's death, Clive, who is single, begins to ponder what would happen to him if he began to decline in health. He reaches out to Vernon and asks him to perform euthanasia on him should he ever reach that point. Vernon reluctantly agrees on the condition that Clive do the same for him.

Vernon, whose newspaper is in decline, is given a tip by George, a series of private photographs taken by Molly of Garmony cross-dressing. Vernon decides to use the scandal to unseat Garmony, whose politics he disagrees with. He faces push back from his editorial staff and the board members of his newspaper about publishing the clearly private pictures.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و دوم ماه دسامبر سال 2014 میلادی
عنوان: آمستردام؛ نویسنده: ايان مک‌ ایوان؛ مترجم: میلاد ذکریا؛ تهران: افق‏‫، 1391؛ در 179 ص؛ شابک: 9789643697419؛ چاپ دوم 1392؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویندگان بریتانیایی - سده 20 م
عنوان: آمستردام؛ نویسنده: ایان مک‌یوئن (مک ایوان)؛ برگردان: شمیم هدایتی؛ تهران، نیلاد، 1398؛ در 188ص ؛ شابک: 9786001220388؛

در یک روز زمستانی در ماه فوریه، دو دوست قدیمی، در بیرون مرده سوزخانه ای واقع در لندن، یکدیگر را ملاقات میکنند، تا برای آخرین بار به «مالی لین» ادای احترام کنند. هم «کلایو لینلی» و هم «ورنون هالیدی»، پیش از رسیدن به مقام کنونیشان، عاشق و شیفته ی «مالی» بوده اند، «کلایو»، موفقترین آهنگساز مدرن در بریتانیا است، و «ورنون»، سردبیر روزنامه ی شناخته شده ی «جاج» است. «مالی» جذاب و زیبا، شیفتگان دیگری نیز داشته است: وزیر امور خارجه ی کنونی، «جولیان گارمونی»، سیاستمداری راستگرا و بدنام، که به مقام نخست وزیری چشم دوخته است. در روزهای پس از خاکسپاری «مالی»، «کلایو» و «ورنون» عهدی با هم میبندند، که نتایجی غیرقابل پیش بینی به همراه دارد. در این میان، هر یک مجبور به گرفتن تصمیم اخلاقی فاجعه باری خواهند شد، دوستیشان در معرض آزمایش قرار خواهد گرفت، و «جولیان گارمونی»، برای حفظ زندگی سیاسی اش، خواهد جنگید. رمان «آمستردام»، حکایتی معاصر، تیزبینانه و با طنزی هوشمندانه است، که خواندنش برای هر خوانشگری، بسیار لذتبخش خواهد بود. نقل نمونه هایی از متن: «اینکه ورنون بخواهد آشتی کند و به همین خاطر به آمستردام بیاید مطمئنا چیزی بیش از تصادف، یا تصادف صرف بود. او جایی در قلب سیاه و نامتعادلش، سرنوشتش را پذیرفته بود. او داشت خودش را به دست کلایو میسپرد.»؛ «او تمام شب را کار میکرد و تا ناهار فردا میخوابید. در حقیقت کار دیگری برای انجام دادن نبود. چیزی بساز و بمیر.»؛ «اگر بخواهیم از منظر آسایش و منفعت تمام موجودات زنده ی روی کره ی زمین نگاه کنیم، پروژه ی خلق انسان نه تنها یک شکست بوده است، بلکه از ابتدا یک اشتباه بوده است.»؛ پایان نقل. ا. شربیانی

Mordace.

A novel about moral dilemmas. From the title, the main theme is assisted suicide, legal in the Netherlands. Not only that, but suppose your lifetime best buddy asks you to pledge that you will accompany him to Amsterdam if he becomes incapacitated? The book opens with this theme at the funeral of a beautiful woman, 46 years old. She had been a lover or wife of four of the main male characters in the book. She died incapacitated from a debilitating disease. Her slimy husband took care of her and barred all visitors from her bedside.

And how about moral dilemmas that grow out of freedom of the press? For a book published in 1998 one of the main characters is an amazingly Trump-like character who is the British Foreign Secretary (right-wing, family values, anti-immigrant, pro-Brexit, anti-environment). Suppose you are an editor of a British tabloid and you are offered photos of this man posing in drag? Is it right to publish them to embarrass him? And is it right to make the presumption for all your readers that, of course, this behavior is “wrong” or “perverted” or “demeaning?”

And what moral responsibility do you have in this scenario: you are hiking. At a far distance you see a male-female couple having a somewhat violent argument: grabbing and pushing. Do you intervene? Maybe it’s just a domestic squabble, but maybe it’s an attempted rape?

These are the dilemmas faced by our two main characters, one a nationally-known music composer and another the editor of a major London daily. The details of their daily work lives are well-researched as is a hiking trip to the Lake District.



It’s a good read and held my attention all the way through. The moral dilemmas are laid out in conversational style with no pedantry. The only beef I have with the book is its melodramatic, highly implausible ending, but I still recommend it.

My third Ian McEwan and another excellent read. Not quite on the level of Atonement, but still good, good enough to win the Booker Prize. It has a different feel than the other two, more of a modern day intrigue. Interesting characters, though not all that likeable, a little too elitist for me, but McEwan's storyline carries the day. The best character may be the one they buried at the beginning of the book, Molly. McEwan should write a prequel centering around her character. 4 stars.

1998 Booker Prize Winner.

This is not a review-type comment, but my reaction to McEwan’s work, after reading my third novel by him, is that I love the familiarity I feel: the way he thinks about characters, the way they think about one another, the honesty about all the dark, embedded ego reactions. This is my primal, private language, so even though our writing styles are almost opposite—McEwan writes effortless narrative descriptions and inner dialogues that go on for pages, and I prefer the fewest words possible—I feel as if I’ve found a kindred artist. And that alone makes me love his work.

Amsterdam is about the wiggly nature of our judgments about what is or is not moral and justified behavior, about how “spin” makes our human herd so certain that one thing is good and another is evil, about how our self-delusions (particularly those founded in elite personal perfectionism and devoid of a connection to other people) can so easily pass as self-truths when it is convenient, and finally about how, when we devolve completely into this insane ego battle, we destroy ourselves.

This is the kind of material I’ve spent my life thinking about and it brings to mind both that old Mad Magazine cartoon “Spy vs. Spy” and the conclusion to McEwan’s magnificent Nutshell about the roiling human soup we are born into—“one huge unhappy family with domestic problems that were of their nature insoluble. (p. 166, Amsterdam)”

Despite my enjoyment of the theme, I do have some criticisms: the ending, telescoped way in advance, struck me as unbelievable and comparable to the wackiness of “Spy vs. Spy” rather than in keeping with a novel that, in all other ways, felt realistic.