I have decided to re-read this book, remembering that I liked it very much when I first read it several years ago, after watching the movie with Keira Knightley.

The book is just as excellent as I remember it.

It is about an imaginative 13 year old, who witnesses a few things between her sister and a young man. She doesn't understand those things, draws her own very wrong conclusions and ends up ruining the lives of several people.

McEwan's prose is gorgeous. It's beautifully written and a joy to read. It's a book I can't put down after starting. It's a book that made me shudder, wince and sigh. And it's a book that in the very end made me cry and still it's a the most gorgeous written piece of fiction.

Es lo primero que leo de McEwan y seguro que no será lo último.

Expiación es su obra más conocida, leída y alabada, y eso supuso unas expectativas enormes. ¿Las ha alcanzado? Por lo general sí, aunque no me ha entusiasmado tanto como esperaba que hiciera. Creo que en parte es porque me olí el final, pero porque iba esperando el temido "spoiler" y eso me hizo estar muy alerta.
Creo que es un libro que veré más redondo aún en una relectura.

Mientras lo leía pensaba en que me habría gustado ver más integración entre las partes II y III, pero cuando terminé el libro entendí también el por qué de su estructura.

Lo mejor ha sido la caracterización de los personajes, en especial la de Briony.

Una scrittura coinvolgente. Una storia emozionante. Che si può volere di più da un libro?
Non conoscevo Mc Ewan, all’inizio ho trovato qualche difficoltà a prendere confidenza con lo stile di scrittura, a volte ridondante ma efficace. Poi sono stata sbalzata dentro la storia e non ne sono uscita fino alla fine.
Il libro è diviso in tre parti: la prima parte si svolge tutta in un pomeriggio, nel 1935, nella villa inglese della famiglia Tallis. E’ la parte più lunga, ed è quella in cui tutto accade.
In questa prima parte Mc Ewan tratteggia-pennella potrei dire- i personaggi, come un pittore impressionista, dipingendoli là, nel giardino e nella villa: Briony Tallis, una adolescente di tredici anni che si trova in quello “spazio transitorio che estendeva i propri confini imprecisi dalla nursery al mondo degli adulti”; sua sorella maggiore Cecilia, incaricata di fare le veci di sua madre Emily, alle prese con tormentose emicranie; Leon, il fratellone amato che finalmente torna a casa con un amico, industriale della cioccolata; Robbie Turner, il figlio della domestica dei Tallis, bello e intelligentissimo, che ha studiato a Cambridge grazie alla generosità dei Tallis; tre cuginetti lentigginosi e dai capelli rossi, sbarcati contro la loro volontà a villa Tallis a causa del divorzio dei loro genitori, Lola e i gemelli Pierrot e Jackson.
Me li sono visti davanti, pennellati magistralmente, chi più in profondità, chi solo nei contorni, ma comunque sempre con maestria, come in un quadro.
Nella seconda e terza parte l’atmosfera cambia completamente: per rimanere nell’ambito artistico, direi che il quadro che mi si è presentato dinnanzi potrebbe essere “Guernica” di Picasso: urla, disperazione, morte. E’ scoppiata la seconda guerra mondiale e Robbie si trova in Francia con l’esercito inglese, in una marcia da incubo verso Dunkerque.
L’ultima parte è quella in cui il lettore trova spiegazione del titolo del libro, è il racconto del rimorso dovuto ad una “colpa” inespiabile.
Il finale è geniale, e la lacrimuccia è uscita.
Il collante tra le pagine è un amore grande, grandissimo, più forte dell’ingiustizia e della guerra, intenso e … bellissimo.
Il legame tra le tre parti è perfetto, quasi calibrato geometricamente, in una costruzione finale che potrei paragonare a un ricamo, dove ogni punto è collegato strettamente con l’altro per formare un’opera d’arte.
Mc Ewan è non solo un fine conoscitore dell’animo umano, ma ha la grande capacità di trascinare il lettore e renderlo partecipe di ogni emozione descritta. Almeno questo è quanto è accaduto a me.

[3.2⭐]

It's 1935, and 13 year old Bryony has a traumatic day that will eventually impact on her sister, her sister's first lover, and Bryony's entire extended family for the next 65 years! An awesome book, one of the best McEwan's I have read, encompassing the horrors of World War II at home and abroad; McEwan looks at what Bryony can and cannot do as atonement for her fateful actions on that day in 1935. I don't need to watch the film, the book has given me everything! 8 out of 12.

2011 read

There are fantastic stories and there are fantastic writers. I think not every book is made of either of these components. And presumably it doesn't need to, because some plots are so great that they speak for themselves. Again, other works shine with a precise and grandiose use of language, so the actual story doesn't have to be so extraordinary to sweep the reader along.

For me, Ian McEwan's Atonement is one of the novels that can do both.

I could write you down a brief summary here, tell you about the tragic love between Cecilia and Robbie, of Briony, whose young age and unbridled imagination affects the course of so many stories before and during World War II.
But for me, Atonement is a novel that shows me the high quality and linguistic intricacies with which a novel can be written. Not for nothing was the novel described by the #TIME as a "deep psychological masterpiece," because the images that ran through my head while reading, in black and white, befitting the grim current events, didn't make me let go of the book even once.

The introspective approach of an emerging writer such as Briony made me fall in love with the process of becoming a writer. Questioning one's actions is one of the messages I took from this book. Just as the motivation and inspiration to continue to improve my own writing skills. I could never write at a McEwan level today, but who knows... maybe in some 40 years perhaps.

“Tutto ciò che voleva era lavorare, fare un bagno e dormire, finché non fosse stata ora di lavorare di nuovo. Ma era inutile, lo sapeva bene. Per quanto sgobbasse, per quanto umile fosse il lavoro che svolgeva, e per quanto zelo e fatica ci mettesse, per quanto avesse rinunciato a chissà quali illuminazioni intellettuali, a chissà quali insuperabili momenti sul prato di un college, non sarebbe mai riuscita a rimediare al danno. Lei era imperdonabile”.

A dispetto del titolo, non c'è nessuna Espiazione.
Non esiste alcuna possibilità di un rimediare a determinati errori.
Non esiste "perdono"...né da parte di chi ha subito, né da parte di chi è stato causa di tanto dolore, di sconvolgimento, di distruzione.
"Perdonarsi" è ancora più difficile che perdonare...si può convivere con i sensi di colpa, si può diventare bravissimi a sopportarne il peso, ci si può fingere distratti, occupati, perfino accidentalmente felici, ma il mostro è sempre lì, insediato tra le pieghe della tua pelle.
Una trama intensa , a tratti commovente , gli
affreschi psicologici e relazionali dei protagonisti mirabilmente descritti , e la figura di Briony, artista poliedrica e camaleontica che vive un duplice tormento interiore , la propria colpa , ed il cercare di espiarla .
McEwan mi ha fatto riflettere, in maniera brutale. Ma non potevo negare quello che con le sue parole stampate mi diceva: siamo capaci di trasformarci in veri e propri mostri. Capaci di errori madornali; errori come quelli di Briony, gravi eppure così piccoli se paragonati al supremo errore della guerra, ma che lasciano i loro strascichi lungo tutta una vita.

In World War II England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets her older sister’s love affair with their family’s gardener to be something much worse than what it is. Her innocence and partial understanding of the world begins a chain of events that tears the family apart and alters the course of the rest of the girl’s life.

Sounds a little dry, right? Wrong! I guess I forgot to mention that the book was written by Ian McEwan, the king of uncomfortable moments, weird sex stuff, the rotating third-person close perspective, and - I’ll say it! - writing about the human psyche. While I’ve found some of his earlier books to be a little too uncomfortable (or, rather, too uncomfortable without good reason) or a little too sexually deviant (again, in the way that it seemed for shock value than with a reason), this was a freaking great book.

I think the one thing that makes this book so wonderful is McEwan’s eerily accurate understanding of how a 13-year-old girl’s mind works - her understanding of the world and her emotional reaction to it. Briony is trapped between childhood and adulthood. She’s old enough to recognize the dark and startling behind-the-scenes facets of her proper British family’s life, but not old enough to properly analyze or judge them. She’s old enough to impose her will and her ideas on others, but not wise enough to know when to act or when to question herself. It’s a frustrating and fascination (and uncomfortable) time, and he has it down pat.

McEwan also experiments with structure in ways that are truly innovative and new without being gimmicky. Briony is an aspiring writer who grows and develops her style throughout the 60 years that the novel covers, and McEwan’s novel mirrors her literary growth. Part One of the story is extremely traditional (broken into chapters, with a clear rotation of perspectives and a uniform chronology). Parts Two and Three are much more modern - the story, which switches gears to follow the gardener into WWII France and Briony to her experiences as a nurse in London, loses structure and fluidity and uses more modern storytelling techniques. Finally, the last section is utterly contemporary - the story becomes even more abstract, with unreliable narrators and more conceptual writing favored over simple narrative.

And yet these games with structure and story and perspective in no way take your focus from the story and the characters. Instead, they add to the experience of watching the main character grow and develop.

If the book suffers from anything, it might be a little slow in some places and move too fast in others. Since McEwan tends to be very thorough when it comes to interior thought, the story often slows down a bit more than it should so that he can explain how every single person felt about a certain moment in time (although the story spans 60 years, the first 200 pages span a single afternoon and evening). The slow story a necessary evil, though, if we want to keep the detailed character studies in place. And we do. And the action-filled second half of the book, which covers the British retreat from the Germans in 1940 and the over-capacity army hospitals of London, makes up for the sometimes austere and rigorous first half. It just takes a while to get the story rolling.

That I can remember, I've never before disliked the start of a book so thoroughly, and by the end, gone on to think so much of it as a complete work.

The last 2/3 of this novel are as good as contemporary fiction gets. The first 1/3 is like reading a Jane Austen plot trapped in amber.

As the title indicates Atonement is about a future artist's massive effort to redeem herself for ruining the character of a young man when she is a younger girl. There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or if they aren't they appear so because the opening act moves so slowly that one is barely conscious and later unable to recall that anything much happened at all.

Halfway through this novel, when its greatness starts to happen, a reader almost laments his earlier opinions of it. But whose fault is that? The beginning is such an act of endurance that the later parts make a reader wish that McEwan had moved things more quickly in the beginning - and used those words for more character development in the middle - so the reader could declare this novel, unequivocally, one of the five best novels he's ever read.

McEwan is at the top of the art form throughout, though, whatever a reader opines of the product. He knows what he's doing every step of the way, right down to an allusion to the disjointed narrative methods employed by Virginia Woolf.

The ending is brilliant, unexpected and harsh. But unlike the case of the returning Baxter character in the third act of Saturday, this ending is consistent and at once surprising and inevitable.

After a person has read a few hundred novels, he grasps the art form well enough to know when an author is writing - usually it's when the author's employing some top-heavy descriptive technique that makes the water droplets gathered on a rose petal somehow more important than the protagonist's motives for anything she's done to that point - and it fairly well cries out, "Look at me, my creator is a writer!"

Knowing when an author is writing means knowing that if there's a surprise coming, it's either going to be predicted about 50 pages out or done in such fantastically poor form that its inconsistency mars the rest of the work.

McEwan is fine enough at his craft that the ending is both unanticipated and perfectly consistent. That alone makes this novel excellent.

If Briony has million haters, then I'm one of them.
If Briony has one hater, then I'm THAT ONE.
If Briony has no haters, that means I'm dead.

This book has remained festering unread for a long time. However, following my read of the Author’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ I was forced to reconsider. That plus my wife reading it and passing to me.

I found the writing style similar to Sebastian Faulks - one of my favourite authors. Superb characters, storyline and prose. The story is set in three parts - the action by Briony that tears the lovers (Cecilia and Robbie apart); an injured Robbie at Dunkirk; Briony as a nurse in London and with a final wrap set in 1999. With Briony bringing us upto date.

It started slowly and for a moment I began to regret starting it. But only for a moment. A story of jealousy, betrayal and love with a pervading sadness.

I have to say that I often get dust smotes affecting my eyes during a read. But I ended up blubbing so much at the end I had to continually put the book down to wipe my eyes. I feel better having read this and again wondering why it took me so long.

Now I will have to dig out the film version. But not yet. Spurs v Liverpool on tonight

Atonement is an incredible story of ignorance and youth.
Younger sister Briony catches her sister in the thralls of a passionate embrace - being unsure of the meaning of this situation it leads her to accuse a young man of one of the most hideous acts.
The story follows the three characters as they lead separate lives, forever tainted by this one accusation. Briony is unable to find peace when she finds how wrong she was as a child, and how everyone's lives could have been different, had she come forward.
It follows Briony's path of redemption and atonement - with an ending that is so heartbreaking and dramatic, I will forever ache whenever I think of this book.