Este libro es imperfecto, roto de origen, con partes intensas, otras soporíferas, algunas más extrañas, algo de redención y misticismo, pero esta mezcla logra entregar una narración que te va seduciendo y hace que te olvides de las partes malas y sólo perdure lo bueno, casi como los recuerdos o el pasado, que se van magnificando conforme se hacen más lejanos.

Stephen es un escritor de cuentos infantiles con una vida hecha, una esposa artista, una hija de 3 años adorable, un día la vida se rompe en miles de pedazos sin posibilidad de regresión.

Stephen tiene un amigo llamado Michael que ha destacado en la profesión que emprende, su última trabajo es de asesor político muy cercano al primer ministro, Michael tiene una esposa que es psicóloga y juntos forman una pareja sin igual.

Stephen esta roto cuando empieza su relato, de manera mecánica acude a un comité en el cual participa para discutir sobre leyes que puedan beneficiar a la niñez, de vez en cuando escribe pero lo hace más para justificarse que por tener un interés verdadero.

Hay mucho dolor palpable en los personajes y no lo tienen que decir o demostrar, se percibe en el ambiente, en las conversaciones, en los comportamientos, parece un sopor que ha inundado la vida y parece no tener fin.

En algún momento Stephen se enfrenta a algo que parece un espejismo, que lo hace desbordarse y regodearse en su dolor y sin quererlo este quiebre lo devuelve a la vida.

En esta nueva vida Stephen tiene que recorrer todavía un camino de obstáculos, golpes, y pérdidas pero sobre todo deberá llegar al fondo de su miseria y despertar al hecho que la vida nunca volverá a ser la misma, que lo perdido, perdido esta, y que deberá rehacerse e inventarse un nuevo yo que le permita crear algo nuevo, nunca algo mejor que lo que tenia, pero si algo que le de esperanza.

n   “He wanted the security of childhood, the powerlessness, the obedience, and also the freedom that goes with it, freedom from money, decisions, plans, demands. He used to say he wanted to escape from time, from appointments, schedules, deadlines. Childhood to him was timelessness; he talked about it as though it were a mystical state.” n

I found The Child in Time in the library through Benedict Cumberbatch.

I was browsing through my library’s DVD collection, which is one of my favorite ways to find movies. If I look the new-fashioned way, I usually spend 15 minutes mindlessly looking on Netflix and Amazon Prime then get tired and turn off the TV.

I saw Benedict Cumberbatch on a DVD cover, and I thought what?! He’s one of my favorite actors, and here’s a movie he’s in that I’ve never heard of and wait? It’s based on an Ian McEwan novel I’ve also never heard of?

I loved the movie and the poignant yet joyful ending, so I went to the library the next day and checked out the book.

The book has a premise that is every parent’s worst nightmare — a little girl disappears at the supermarket while at the grocery store with her father. Yet, the message of the book is tender and hopeful.

The father is Stephen Lewis, and the book touches on the disintegration of his relationship with his wife following the loss of their child, and the ways they both cope with their grief. But in the end, the book is an ode to the timelessness of childhood, probably not an accident since McEwan wrote this book around the time his first child was born.

It touches on many themes around childhood —how a child perceives time, the agelessness of children to parents, the way a child sees her parents, the pressures parents feel in raising a child correctly, the joy a new child brings, the beauty of a child’s mind, what we can learn from children — through a beautiful narrative about the loss of a child. I love how McEwan wrote about the sense of time, using Thelma, a quantum physicist to explain man’s various theories with time — a storyline that the movie cut out for the worse.

The prose in the novel is beautiful. In this passage, Stephen and his wife are building a sand castle with their daughter, killing time until they have to leave. In this moment, they enter their child’s world, losing sense of time and their urgency to go:

n  “But soon, and without quite realizing it was happening, they became engrossed, filled with the little girl’s urgency, working with no awareness of time beyond the imperative of the approaching tide.”n

And in this passage, Stephen says goodbye to his parents, and we see how a child is timeless in the eyes of parents. It doesn’t matter if they are 5 or 50, their child will always be a child:

“As always, they stayed out on the front path waving at their son as he receded in the sodium dusk, waving, resting their hands, then waving again as they had on the desert airstrip, till a slight bend in the street lost him to their view. It was as if they wanted to see for themselves that he was not going to change his mind, turn round, and come back home.”

I didn’t enjoy some parts of the book at first. There is a storyline about Stephen Lewis’ participation in a government committee whose task is to produce a handbook on childcare for the UK that didn’t resonate with me at first. And the ending of the book, didn’t hit me as strongly as when I watched the movie, but as with  On Chesil Beach, sadly, the only other McEwan novel I’ve read, I have been thinking about the book non-stop since I finished it. And all the pieces are coming together. It’s a very deliberate and purposeful book, written to help us think about the beauty of childhood. Christopher Hitchens called this Ian McEwan’s masterpiece, and I understand why.

"The Child in Time" is an unusual book with themes of childhood and time. It starts with a terrifying event for any parent--a child is kidnapped in a grocery store. The book explores the effect of this tragedy on the father Stephen, his relationship with his wife, and their different styles of grieving the loss of their daughter.

The author, Ian McEwan, plays with time using magical realism where Stephen's present time morphs into an episode in his parents' past. We see how time can speed up or slow down in our minds depending on whether we are relaxed or in a state of panic (such as a traffic accident). Mentions of time are sprinkled throughout the book.

Some incidents revolve around the idea that there is a future adult in a growing child, and a bit of the child remains in an adult. One adult character is trying to experience the childhood he always wished he had. Stephen is a member of a government commission on childcare and literacy where the members hear various theories about childhood. Some experts want a child to be a mini-adult, but others want to prolong childhood.

The book also has some amusing political satire as well as some scary thoughts about the possibility of a nuclear war. Since I'm not British I'm sure I missed some of the references to the Thatcher years.

"The Child in Time" is slow and introspective. While it's not a book that everyone will enjoy, it will make the reader think. I gave the book four stars because McEwan writes well, and his ideas are creative and different.

SO. BORING. DO. NOT. READ.

Closer to early, surreal Ian McEwan than what we've become used to over the past few years and unnerving in the manner of his first short stories. I enjoyed it; I just didn't warm to the tone of his narrator. Interesting that it contains a fantastic set-piece ( a car crash) that is a telling foretaste of the balloon incident in his following book, Enduring Love. And the ending; very human and very emotional.

I'd like to think that reading this book is akin to taking a guided tour through Ian McEwan's mind. It is not what I thought - based on the cover material - it is about. It is about the nature of time, and relationships, especially our relationship to ourself. It is about the fact that we know very little about ourself, about the people closest to us (never mind those at a distance) and about what is really going on in our lives. It is about grief, the healing nature of joy, and about the way the mind compensates to avoid what it cannot bear.

Ian McEwan is always worth reading, but for me, this book is probably his most challenging and, at the same time, rich.

"A Criança no Tempo" é um trabalho no qual McEwan procura subverter a estética do romance trágico, evitando focar-se sobre a tragédia e levando o leitor pela mão ao longo dos momentos comuns de um regresso à normalidade por parte dos seus protagonistas. Teria sido muito mais simples focar toda a energia na narrativa do drama que emerge depois de um rapto de uma criança, mas McEwan optou por se colocar no lugar dos pais, nomeadamente do pai, na sua tentativa para regressar ao mundo, vendo através deste o mundo lá fora, que continua na sua banalidade. Deste modo o autor acaba se focando sobre o tempo, a sua relatividade e efemeridade, e nós somos transportados para um mundo visto de forma indiferente.
De certo modo o trabalho acaba por nos fazer sentir o lado de quem sente a dor, sem o espetáculo da tragédia, mas antes por via da ausência do mesmo e pela força da indiferença. É claramente um trabalho que procurar gerar no leitor um estado não imediato, mais racional, sobre aquilo que nos relata.
O livro acaba por perder um pouco com o passar do tempo, já que se serve muito da discussão política dos anos de Thatcher, o livro é dos anos 1980.

3.5/5

"The Child in Time" is a complex book: there are so many philosophical aspects intertwined within it. The tone changes several times throughout the narration. There is a very sensitive issue introduced by the writer in a delicate way. The culmination is absolutely marvellous, to say the least.

I enjoyed reading this book. McEwan’s descriptions and writing style gave me the sense of being pulled into the pages, getting entangled with the words and jostled along by the narrator as though one were on a guided tour through McEwan’s mind; the characters being held up, described and critiqued then ‘swiftly, please’ to a different time and place – where the children of our world are considered, including the one that lives inside each and every one of us.

Insightful and profound.

Ian McEwan... Damn you for somehow always seeing into so many realms of the brain... seriously. How does he know so much about so much? This is my seventh one by McEwan. Admittedly not my favorite, but somewhere in the middle. As is often the case, the synopsis was far from what I expected. I feel like the publishers do this with intention. As if I should have keyed in on "Time" in the title, not at all on "Child", nor the missing child, Kate, the makings of a marriage, etcetera. I found it to be much more about magical realism, how time transforms us all, regression....

One of the most redeeming ending lines:

"Well... A girl or a boy?" And it was in acknowledgement of the world they were about to rejoin, into which they were to take their love, that she reached down under the covers to feel."

A long, dull, meandering read because McEwan seems to have decided to stretch out a short story into a novel.

If you want to read the book, I suggest reading only the first chapter and the last chapter, because everything in between is filler.

nel dolore, quello vero, si rimane soli
Mi ha preso meno di Sabato, forse per un ritmo più lento e uno stile meno logorroico, ma mi ha confermato nell'idea che McEwan sia bravissimo nelle descrizioni minuziose di eventi della durata di pochi minuti, che lui sa far ricche di tante osservazione cavillose ma realistiche. Ma bravo anche nel descivere con poche parole un evento, una situazione, un'emozione. Quella partenza poi, con la scoparsa della piccola Kate fin dal principio, che porta l'attenzione non sul dramma in sé, ma sul dolore e la capacità di rielaborare il lutto dei due protagonisti, è una scelta coraggiosa ma che l'autore ha saputo governare ben per tutto il libro. Molte osservazioni sull'infanzia mi hanno fatto sorridere, come quelle sull'attenzione al bambino che è dentro ognuno di noi e che, a volte, ci prende la mano. Un soggetto da approfondire, questo McEwan.