Enduring Love

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Joe planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after 6 weeks in the States. The perfect day turns to nightmare however, when they are involved in freak ballooning accident in which a boy is saved but a man is killed. In itself, the accident would change the couple and the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that same night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in de-familiarisation. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. --Alex Freeman

245 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1997

About the author

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Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

McEwan lives in London.

Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
37(37%)
4 stars
30(30%)
3 stars
32(32%)
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99 reviews All reviews
April 17,2025
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Credere una cosa coincide col vederla

L’incipit è un pezzo di bravura tale che leggendolo per caso in rete ho comprato il romanzo.
Narrazione in prima persona, scrittura superba, suspense misurata e funzionale. L’autore si prende i tempi giusti per raccontare, mette nella ciotola dei gatti lettori un po’ di croccantini a fine capitolo ma poi il capitolo successivo si apre e il cibo nella ciotola è sparito.. è un trucco, ricomparirà di lì a poco.
Joe Rose è un divulgatore scientifico e il suo mestiere lo fa piacevolmente anche in alcuni intermezzi del romanzo. La divulgazione è un ripiego, ha abbandonato la sperimentazione e benché guadagni lautamente sente di aver tradito i propri sogni. Ha avuto in sorte una donna letterata che ritiene troppo bella rapportata a sé. Un incidente spezzerà la lastra di ghiaccio dove ha camminato negli ultimi dieci anni della propria vita e lo farà in un modo impensabile.
Si definisce forma pura (o primaria) di sindrome di de Clérambault quella di un individuo i cui convincimenti religiosi risultano essere in stretta relazione con le manifestazioni deliranti. Si rilevano altresì tendenze auto ed eteroaggressive.
«la convinzione delirante di essere in comunicazione amorosa con un’altra persona; che tale persona sia di livello sociale più elevato; che per prima si sia innamorata e abbia scelto di dichiararsi; che l’esordio sia improvviso; che l’oggetto del delirio erotico resti invariato; che il paziente fornisca una spiegazione di ogni comportamento paradossale dell’oggetto; che il decorso della malattia sia cronico; che non vi siano allucinazioni né deterioramenti cognitivi».
Molto probabilmente McEwan è partito da questa interessante categorizzazione per imbastire il proprio romanzo. Essa è presente nella prima appendice a margine del testo insieme al riassunto della vicenda narrata, quasi si trattasse di un fatto realmente accaduto.
McEwan con la sua prima persona, facendosi protagonista, ha fornito una delle sue prove migliori. “Cani Neri” e “Giardino di cemento” mi son sembrati assai inferiori a questo romanzo.
L’inizio è facile da individuare…[…]
L’istante fu quello, quella la bandierina sulla mappa del tempo: tesi la mano e, nel momento in cui il collo freddo e la stagnola nera mi sfioravano la pelle, udimmo le grida di un uomo. Ci voltammo a guardare dall’altra parte del prato, e intuimmo il pericolo. L’attimo dopo, correvo in quella direzione […]
Che idiozia, lanciarmi dentro questa storia e i suoi labirinti […]


Scegliete se rischiare anche voi di compiere un’idiozia..
April 17,2025
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I don’t know why this book has such a “low” average rating here, I thought it was brilliant. After the long, intense, dramatic - and tragic, introduction with the ballooning accident (that you will know about if you know anything at all about this book), the aftermath with the seemingly smitten (later to prove obsessed) Jed feels much like a less important side track in the beginning. The pace of the story drops significantly (which is why, I assume, some readers lost interest), but I found the reverberations on the lives of all involved both painful and irresistible to learn more about.

The fact that some later developments and reactions may have been “easily” avoided had the protagonists just chosen different words, or slightly different actions is not making this story less believable - it’s actually the opposite - it makes it all the more real.

McEwan complicates things in a very challenging way, when we late in the day realise Joe is an unreliable narrator in more than one way. The letter from Clarissa is a game changer in that we finally get to see her side. This kind of makes her partner unreliable, in a way that I suppose all first person narrators are - he’s giving us his view - and with the few meaningful conversations the couple manages, that’s really all we have before this point.

It’s harder to explain how come Joe turns out to be unreliable when it comes to facts, and certainly seemingly less important facts. I’m still not sure what to make of this, but I’m sure it will stay with me for some time. As of right now, I have a tiny urge to start over and read it again (which in itself warrants the 5 stars, I guess).

The ending completes the story and the realism of it. It’s very dramatic, but not at all unexpected or illogic.

A first by the author for me, I’m sure I’ll seek out more.
April 17,2025
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Another brilliantly-written work that springs from a single defining event. McEwan does that a lot, this time it’s a ballooning tragedy, but the real purpose of it is to allow McEwan to explore his characters. Joe had been picnicking with his partner Clarissa when they see a man attempting to hold a balloon down to free a child trapped inside. Joe and five others run to help but through an unfortunate set of actions, one falls to his death. Thus two men meet: Jed is a lonely religious fundamentalist who falls obsessively in love with Joe, hounding and pestering him to return his love, yet maintains that Joe initiated the whole thing. Joe, a hyper-rational ex-physicist and respected science reporter, soon determines that Jed is suffering from de Clerambault’s Syndrome.

(At first I thought that that McEwan-esquely-named disorder and its symptoms must surely have been invented by the man himself, but no, it is a real illness; though McEwan does cleverly present the entire story of Enduring Love as the basis for a psychiatric case history in an appendix. That in itself is brilliant: it’s written as a perfect facsimile of a dry academic paper, complete with real references – yes, I checked! – but the British Review of Psychiatry that it was supposedly published in is fake. It is so convincing that it apparently fooled both physicians and book critics - one complaining that Enduring Love was a too-literal interpretation of a real case. See this Guardian article for more.).

Back to the story. But how much is Joe the cause and how much the victim of the unfolding drama? Because Joe is himself obsessed with proving that Jed is actually unbalanced, to the extent of destroying his relationship with Clarissa, who has never even seen Jed since the accident and points out that the daily letters Jed keeps sending him look suspiciously like Joe’s own handwriting.

There is a lot more going on – there is an important parallel story involving the widow of the man who was killed in the accident, which provides Joe with a mystery to solve – and the overall pace and tension is great; I found it hard to put down, although strangely it was not a fast read.

Actually some elements were a little far-fetched (I mean, really, if you were struggling to keep a balloon on the ground, would you notice how many doors were open on a car parked some distance away? But at least two of them supposedly did). And I thought the story did become a bit strained towards the end with Joe discovering that de Clerambault sufferers can become violent, just before that did actually happen, and immediately deciding he needed to get a gun for protection just as he discovered that Jed was holding Clarissa hostage.

But no matter; it’s not that I found the development unconvincing in any way, or that it wasn’t well-paced. Like many of McEwan’s works, there is a thread of unreality or rather dream-like menace through it which is thoroughly engrossing; so this may not be his best, but it’s damn good.

April 17,2025
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In a blink of an eye, life can drastically change through no doing of your own, and this is precisely what happens to Joe when he and a group of other people try to avert a hot air balloon accident. A study in OCD, this gripping story is based on a real-life case of Clerambault's syndrome: a homo-erotic obsession with religious overtones. Jed begins to stalk Joe, and his obsession threatens every aspect of Joe's life. Written with a sense of deep foreboding, this is one of my favorite novels despite, or perhaps due to, its overwhelming creepiness. Fantastic!
April 17,2025
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Another great piece of work by the much lauded McEwan. A very well written suspense driven fictionalised account of a victim of a man with De Clérambault's syndrome (erotomania) where the sufferer absolutely and truly believe that their target is in love with them, and also essentially made the first advances and continues to do so. On top of this the initial meeting of both erotomaniac and his victim was an innovative and gripping introduction to the characters. 7 out of 12, Three Star for my first read of this one (2010). Second read 2021 (better) 4-star review

2010 and 2021 read
April 17,2025
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Wow, ce carte!

Nu am mai stat de mult cu sufletul la gura să termin un roman.
E un fel de "Baby Reindeer", varianta queer. Și cu foarte multe detalii științifice despre tulburarea psihiatrică a hărțuitorului.

Mi-a plăcut foarte mult, mai ales că a fost prima întâlnire cu Ian McEwan.
April 17,2025
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Good book, nice attention to details...

I have to admit, however, that what won me over was the fact that Ian McEwan managed to pull one over most of his readers, including some renown doctors with the appendix which makes a near perfect case for a real condition... with unexpected medical vernacular... It turns out McEwan fabricated the entire story, including the premise that it was based on a true story; a true condition, De Clerambault's Syndrome.

To be able to pull that of... that is... well, genius...
April 17,2025
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Enduring Love has a simple but fascinating premise, which I was at least halfway familiar with before beginning the book (I think there's been a film version, which I haven't actually seen, but remember reading about whenever it came out). Joe Rose, a scientific journalist, is about to enjoy a reunion picnic with his girlfriend Clarissa when he witnesses an accident involving a hot-air balloon; he and a small group of strangers rush to help, but the incident results in a man's death. During these events, one of the group, Jed Parry, catches Joe's eye and thereafter develops an obsession with him. As the story progresses, Parry's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing and Joe finds his relationship with Clarissa disintegrating, leading to an inevitably dramatic climax.

At first I thought this was a fairly straightforward tale (rational man is harrassed by religious fanatic, relationship suffers) but to my delight, it became much more than that. Joe is a complicated character - obsessed by the rationality of science, he is nevertheless completely inept in the way he handles both Parry's behaviour and the problems in his relationship with Clarissa. In the first few chapters, his ruminations on matters scientific irritated and bored me, but later I began to understand that they are essential in establishing the basics of his character, the rationality that leads him to deal with his stalker in entirely the wrong way, only making matters worse. Parry's obsession, meanwhile, begins to reflect Joe's single-minded determination that he can restore Clarissa's love for him to its former state, creating a fascinating parallel between the two men - is Parry's love only categorised as madness because it has never been returned; does love require reciprocation to be validated as a normal mental state?

However, I couldn't help thinking it was all just too slight. Joe and Clarissa's relationship, Parry's obsessive behaviour, Joe's struggle to be taken seriously by Clarissa and the police - all would have benefited from further exploration, and the book could easily have been twice its actual length and still just as compelling. The opening of the book is incredibly effective - the reader is plunged straight into the action of the balloon incident - but because this is the first time Joe and Clarissa appear, and the problems between them start very soon afterwards, I found it difficult to get a handle on them as a couple deeply in love and happy (particularly as we only see Joe's viewpoint). I LOVED the element of uncertainty, the narrative's implication - as well as Clarissa's obvious suspicion - that Parry is actully a figment of Joe's imagination, some expression of post-traumatic stress, but again, this was resolved too quickly. Additionally, I didn't see much point in the sub-plot involving the balloon accident victim's family, which only made me want to jump back to the main narrative.

To sum up: very good, full of interesting themes and meanings, but simply not long or detailed enough for me.
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