So yeah that was rubbish

I think this book has raised more questions then it did answers and it totally failed my expectations. This book follows the plot of Stephen Lewis as he slowly comes to grips with the fact that he has lost his daughter. I had thought it was going to be a perfect book for it to be a tear jerker. It wasn't.

Instead we follow Stephen as he has a mid-life crisis of sorts. He slowly starts to loose his grip of time and has these recurring flash backs that didn't really do anything for me. I also didn't really care about Stephen because he didn't have any redeemable qualities. The writing felt flat, I mean it was alright but not worth while.

Essentially what I'm trying to say that this book was just "Meh". I'm glad I read it though.

In what might be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel, The Child In Time, a children’s book author, Stephen, must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death. Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife Julie, who has hermited herself away in the countryside, and the fascinating and surreal parallel stories of Stephen’s own childhood, and that of his best friends—his publisher and his wife, a physicist. “The child in time” is not merely a title or a play on words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, and how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of others. Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, this is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style (Atonement, Saturday).

A superb book about every parent's worst nightmare (a child goes missing), but you don't need to be a parent to appreciate it because it is primarily a story of loss, family (is it a couple, parents and children or a patriarchal institution such as the RAF?), distortions in (the perception of) time and reality, and of growing up and of regressing.

Stephen Lewis is a children's author who also sits on a government committee that is meant to produce a handbook on child-rearing - to regenerate the UK. He takes his 3 year old daughter, Kate, to the supermarket, where she is abducted. The rest of the story charts the effects on him, his marriage, his relationship with his parents, and his work.

His life is marked by reacting to circumstances rather than instigating things and thus he is even more adrift once Kate is lost.

Language
It is full of painful ironies (Stephen making policy about parenthood, yet losing his own child, while a friend effectively gains one) and wonderful imagery:
* In a lonely flat the "deadly alignment of familiar possessions... the stubborn conspiracy of objects... to remain exactly as they had been".
* The committee meeting with "vestigial stateliness and dozy bureaucracy mingling soporifically".
* Making love "sleepily, inconclusively".
* "The lost child was everyone's property. But Simon was alone."
* "Nappies proclaimed from diagrammatic metal trees a surrender to new life."
* A mother "whose worrying was a subtle form of possessiveness".
* On a train, the “customary search for the loneliest seat”.

Contemporary Past
It is set in roughly the present day of when it was written: 1987. It made me acutely aware of how much the world has changed in barely 20 years: there is no mobile phone at a crucial point, public fear of strangers was clearly much less than now, and the tactics of parents and police are very different from the Madeleine McCann case.

That made for a rather slippery feel about the period, which fits with the aspects of temporal elasticity that are also hinted at.

McEwan does Magical Realism?
Unlike other McEwans I have read, this has touches of magical realism (mainly regarding the nature and experience of time) .

Time is elastic, capricious, malleable, parallel and relative. There are episodes where it seems to speed up, slow down, or short circuit. A train leaving London travels "from the past into the present" in an architectural but also metaphorical sense and Stephen's parents condense all their history into souvenirs in a single room.

Time slows down, cinematically, in a collision, stretches out in an endless cornfield and "time would stop" without the fantasy of her [Kate's:] continued existence". "Duration shaped itself around the intensity of the event".

One of the characters is a physicist who explains something of this, but some incidents are neither explained nor, perhaps, explicable.

A Sprinkling of Satire?
This also has some humorous political satire that I don't associate with McEwan (he "hoped to discover what is was they thought in the process of saying it"), but it works very well.

Damp Squib
It would have been a comfortable 5*, but I disliked the ending, so dropped it to 4*. If he were writing it now, I suspect it would end differently.

TV Adaptation in 2017
I'm looking forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role: CiT on IMDB. I may have to read or skim to book first, to see if the ending is as McEwan wrote it, how I wanted it (eight years later, I don't remember what that was), or something else.

In Bambini nel tempo "c’è amarissima dolcezza e disperato buonumore".

"«il libro è molte cose», tiene a precisare McEwan. Ed elenca: «Una satira della letteratura per l’infanzia, una storia d’amore, una presa in giro delle mode culturali che investono, con i loro flussi e riflussi, l’educazione dei ragazzi: prima solo Spock, poi basta Spock e un po’ di sano autoritarismo, il tutto deciso in comitati e comitatini secondo le esigenze dell’establishment; e persino un discorso sul tempo»"

Dopo L'amore fatale non ho ancora trovato un altro libro di McEwan che mi sappia prendere allo stesso modo, continuerò a cercare.

My fourth book by Ian McEwan. Enduring Love. Amsterdam. Atonement. The more I read his works, the more I get convinced that he is the author who knows how my brain is wired. He knows what I want, what I expect from my reading, how I would like my brain to be stimulated, how to keep me awake and keep on reading till the wee hours of the morning.

Reading his books is like drinking a perfect blend: just enough decaf coffee, enough non-fat milk and brown sugar. Those are healthy choices because had I been younger, my perfect author would have been John Green or Suzanne Collins and the coffee components would have been expresso, coffeemate and refined sugar. The taste does shift as people grow older and wiser.

This 1987 book is included in the 100 Must Read Books for Men and I used to wonder why. Ian McEwan is not the type of writer like Mark Bowden with his Black Hawk Down or Anthony Burgess and his Junky. McEwan is a sensitive author and his prose, though sexless, would cater more on contemporary readers with discriminating (ehem) taste just like my lady friends here in Goodreads. I am not saying that my taste is already the same as theirs (I am still hoping and trying to catch up) since they've read far more books than I would have wanted to.

Back to McEwan.

The reason why this book is included in men's must reads is because McEwan puts man into an operating room and slices him up to know what he is made off and bares his soul. Stephen Lewis, a father lost his 3-year old daughter, Kate. Grieving while sitting as a member of a government committee on child care (irony of ironies), he gets delusional and starts to see his young self as a face in the window looking at her young parents. During these delusional moments, he gets to examine his relationship with his parents as a child in time, i.e., young Stephen who does not get old. He also gets to examine his relationship with his wife Julie, his friend Drake and his wife Thelma who is a quantum physicist providing the theories about man's relationship with time. The story is a bit hard to follow if you do not concentrate as the delusional or flashback moments as they seem to be an unexpected reaction of a father when his child was abducted. I mean, at that point when Kate goes missing, I was expecting Stephen and or Julie to do a Beth Cappadora in Jacqueline Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) crying, shouting while running to and fro the hotel lobby where her Ben got lost. McEwan did not spend a lot of time on that and focused on what goes on in the heart of a grieving man. Of course, he did his frantic share of looking for Kate, but McEwan chose to focus on Stephen's self-examination of his life after the loss. The departure to what I was expecting made this book a worthwhile read and Stephen Lewis is one of the must-know and must-appreciate literary characters in man's world.

More and more books for McEwan and me.

IL TEMPO FUTURO È CONTENUTO NEL TEMPO PASSATO


Lennart Anderson: Still Life with Kettle. 1977

Uno dei primi romanzi scritti da McEwan (mi pare sia il terzo) e uno dei primi che ho letto. Forse quello che ho amato di più, probabilmente ex aequo con un altro early McEwan, The Innocent – Lettera a Berlino.

Ed è come se McEwan fosse cresciuto insieme al suo mondo, è come se per la prima volta si occupasse di adulti – per quanto il titolo faccia riferimento all’infanzia – è come se avesse abbandonato il suo primigenio universo popolato di e dominato da adolescenti.


Padre e figlia

La trama, per quanto ramificata, si può condensare all’osso: famiglia quasi perfetta, lui, Stephen, scrittore di successo di libri per l’infanzia, lei Julie, e la piccola Kate tre anni. Stephen va al supermercato con la bimba, la mette sul carrello, arriva alla cassa, e scopre che Kate non c’è più. La cerca, la fa cercare, ma Kate non si trova, è sparita.
È una bambina, singolare non plurale, che si perde nel tempo, come chiarisce il titolo originale.


Qualche attimo prima che Kate sparisca.

Come la morte di Susie Salmon in Lovely Bones, anche la sparizione di Kate sfalda la coppia all’apparenza perfetta e consolidata: lui rimane in città a elaborare un’assenza che ha molti aspetti del lutto, lei si trasferisce in un cottage in campagna (nella magnifica campagna inglese).
Chiaro che il senso di colpa di Stephen è smisurato: era lui l’adulto responsabile di Kate nel momento in cui è scomparsa – anche se Julie non gliene fa una colpa, Stephen può davvero alleggerirsi la coscienza? E Julie può davvero essere così comprensiva e tollerante, nel fondo non pensa che Stephen avrebbe dovuto stare più attento, evitare…?
Come in Lovely Bones, anche qui è il padre che sembra non darsi per vinto, che cerca, insegue: Stephen passa giornate intere a cercare Kate. Mentre Julie si allontana, va in un’altra direzione, sconfina in un dolore quasi più estatico.


Julie e Stephen

Cos’è successo a Kate: rapita, uccisa, rubata da chi vuole il figlio che non può avere, o cos’altro? Stephen si macera con questi pensieri. Che faccia avrà sua figlia qualche anno dopo, come sarà cresciuta – se è cresciuta – come è cambiata, saprebbe riconoscerla…?

Poi ci sono altri rami di trama, che partono e si ricollegano al tronco principale: la coppia di amici cari di Stephen, Charles e Thelma – la commissione governativa sull’educazione all’infanzia – i genitori di Stephen.
Ma sono occasioni per approfondire e ampliare il tema clou – o almeno quello che io ho percepito essere il centro del racconto – un’assenza che sa di morte, l’elaborazione di un dolore che non si riesce a colmare, a sciogliere.
Può una nascita compensare una perdita come quella di Kate che non si trova più?



Impressiona apprendere – non dal romanzo, ma da altre fonti – il numero consistente di bambini, di tutte le età, che spariscono, sono rapiti, sequestrati, non tornano più indietro…
Come indica il titolo del romanzo, come sottolineo anch’io nel mio titolo che fa riferimento a un verso di Eliot citato da Thelma, Il tempo presente e il tempo passato/ sono forse presenti entrambi nel tempo futuro, il Tempo è un elemento fondamentale del racconto. Il tempo sembra congelarsi nell’attimo in cui Kate scompare, il tempo si riavvolge nel ricordo di Stephen che ripercorre la sua infanzia approdando in una dimensione della memoria che sembra condurlo fuori dal tempo: la memoria, si sa, modifica, non soltanto il tempo. E quindi, se nel bambino convive l’adulto che sarà, così nello ieri è contenuto l’oggi e il domani. Il tempo ha tutto meno che un percorso lineare.
Il tempo di Stephen non è più quello di Julie: e quello di Kate non sarà mai quello dei suoi genitori.



McEwan riesce a essere ironico anche trattando un dolore tanto devastante. E riesce a essere sarcastico nei momenti in cui dalla pagina emerge l’Inghilterra thatcheriana.

Il romanzo è diventato un film per la TV con Benedict Cumberbatch nel ruolo di Stephen. Conferma del buon e fecondo rapporto tra la settima arte e la letteratura di McEwan.
Ho già ricordato il bel libro di Alice Sebold che Peter Jackson ha adattato per il grande schermo mantenendo lo stesso titolo, ma con minor maestria. Ricordo anche una bella serie inglese ma ambientata in Francia, The Missing, dove a sparire è un maschietto.

The book didn't look enticing enough, however, BBC1 is making a series with Benedict Cumberbatch

Sevgi- nefret iliskisi var aramda Ian Bey ile. Her metnini okumak istiyorum ama okudugumda beni rahatsiz eden bir seyler oluyor mutlaka. Tuhaf kalemiyle aramizdaki munasebet.

34th book of 2020.

Well, well, well. I don't like Ian McEwan's books, I only read them because my friend and I are determined to keep reading them so we can argue our hatred for him with well-founded knowledge and because I was half-hoping that at least one book of his would be good. This is my fifth McEwan and let's recap so far:

The Cement Garden - 2 stars.
The Innocent - 2 stars.
Amsterdam - 2 stars.
On Chesil Beach - 3 stars.

And here comes The Child in Time at 5 stars. What happened?

I'm quite pleased with myself that I liked this, loved this, that I am not just hating McEwan because I hate him - that I am genuinely trying and reading him with an open mind. And it finally paid off. This book was wonderful.

McEwan's writing has never worked for me. I find it like some wall on the page that I can't get through. The words just go into my mind and evaporate; they never make me feel anything at all. His scenes are stupid - especially one in Amsterdam, which still makes me angry. His characters are even worse - I don't think I've liked a single one. So usually, the writing is bad, the plots are bad, the characters are bad...

The plot here sounded entertaining, for once, on the blurb. Stephen Lewis', a children's author, daughter is kidnapped in a supermarket. This scene, which happens right near the start of the book got me hooked in. It is well written, sudden, shocking, and McEwan builds the tension with short sentences and good language (finally!). Stephen Lewis isn't a perfect character, but he isn't diabolical, I felt for him at least, I actually felt something (finally!). There are some fantastic characters in this (finally!), especially that of Charles. Some of the scenes were great too, a little surreal, but well-written and well executed (finally!). The ending was moving too (finally!).

Sort of spoilers here, not anything particularly ruining the story except maybe the second, but I'll hide all just in case, but these are the scenes that stood out for me:

A car crash, where time slows down. McEwan plays a lot with time in this novel, hence the title, and this scene explores it well.
Charles, a politician, 'becomes' a child again. He talks like one, plays in the woods, scabs his knees, sleeps in a separate room to his wife, goes to bed at 9pm... this regression also delves into the theme of time and childhood - pivotal for the plot - and strange, so strange! But interesting.
A rather surreal but humorous and fascinating scene occurs when a load of men barge unexplained into Stephen's house and set up offices. He realises it is because he told the Prime Minister he didn't want to go and meet him, but he knew where he lived. So, he came, with his whole office, to Stephen's. At the end they all disappear out the front door and everything is left as it is, even a Polaroid on his kitchen table of what it looked like before they arrived as evidence that they returned everything to order.

This is a novel about, in essence, time and childhood. McEwan addresses both wonderfully, captured through scenes that were original and captivating and dialogue between characters who were, too, compelling.

If I were to recommend any McEwan book it would be none of the others I listed above and only this one. An admirable novel from a writer I dislike. I will say one last time: finally!

elegant writing.
the novel is very weirdly cut and most of it is frankly boring.

Acknowledgements

--The Child in Time