I have read many Ian McEwans, and I am always divided whether I like them or not. There is a witty analysis of contemporary life that appeals to me, put into occasionally brilliant prose. There are characters with interesting traits, and plots that usually have an abrupt twist in the end.

It uses to be an entertaining and quick reading experience between heavier, more thought-provoking and more linguistically challenging (and satisfying) classics or historical nonfiction.

But this was below par, even considering my moderate expectations. It makes the impression that the author wanted to answer the ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but without the humorous focus of Douglas Adams, and without the number 42 guiding him through the maze of geopolitical and historical issues that haunt humankind.

He touches on the problems of disillusionment of old communists, but drops it before gaining the power of a Koestler, then moves on to the kind of communist reflection Lessing offers in The Golden Notebook, interweaving the political with personal, intimate relationships, but again without elaborating and giving the characters depth.

There is a tedious discourse between two characters regarding religion versus atheism, without offering any new angle or solution, of course.

“You are in separate realms”, is the solution offered by the protagonist-narrator, not very helpful, as the characters are still presiding over their different world view realms in the same room, and it is “going round and round”.

Throw in short reflections on the Berlin Wall, and the Holocaust, and sex and family life in the 1980s, and being an orphan and turning into a cuckoo in other people’s families, and you are far away from the supposed main theme (according to the title) of depression: Black Dogs.

“So June´s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation´s worst moods.”

It is a typically short McEwan novel, and all these diverse topics are too important to be mentioned en passant, while the characters randomly discuss different anecdotes from their respective pasts.

Too much and too little, at the same time, which the narrator seems to subconsciously understand while he is struggling to keep the story together:

“I am uncertain whether our civilisation at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me.”

Unfortunately, the narrator can’t make the arithmetic mean between the extreme positions work out either, as the ideas are in different realms… If you take a couple of apples and pears, add them together, and then divide them by two, you do not get a perfect pearapple, but rather a mash, which is what this book is to me.

In the realm of my literary universe, this one sank to the bottom of the ocean.

INCONTRO FATALE


Alex Colville: Family and Rainstorm (1955).

Ian McEwan torna a Berlino: c’era già stato per ambientare il suo romanzo precedente, il magnifico The Innocent – Lettera a Berlino, e ci torna adesso, ai giorni del novembre 1989, quando la città si è riunita, est e ovest si sono congiunte, il muro è stato scavalcato, aperto, e poi demolito.
Ma in questo caso, Berlino non è l’ambientazione principale.
Forse non lo è neppure il sud della Francia, ma per l’episodio che vi succede, è quella la parte di mondo che contende a Berlino lo scettro dell’attenzione, la vetta narrativa.
Perché è qui che, durante il viaggio di nozze, che June viene attaccata da due enormi cani neri: randagi, selvaggi, mostri dall’aspetto mitologico, allegoria del Male (più tardi si scopre che sono cani molossi usati dai nazisti).
L’episodio si carica di valenze simboliche e June sente d’essersi salvata per miracolo. Ergo, abbraccia una nuova fede, non più quella comunista, ma una che contempli appunto i miracoli, sia rivolta a un qualche dio: una fede religiosa.
Che nel corso del tempo completerà con misticismo e spiritualità tra yoga e fiori.



L’amore avvincente che univa June al suo promesso sposo Bernard, col quale condivideva oltre la passione una visione del mondo di dichiarata impronta marxista, s’incrina a partire da questo momento. Già nel viaggio di nozze (1946).
Ciò nonostante resteranno insieme per generare una figlia, Jenny, e crescerla per un periodo. Poi, si lasceranno.
Ma i “cani neri” tornano: questa volta sotto forma di un gruppo di naziskin che aggredisce Bernard nella Berlino riunificata.

A raccontare tutto questo è Jeremy, orfano dall’età di otto anni, sposato proprio con Jenny, direttore di una piccola casa editrice. Jeremy è in perenne ricerca di essere simbolicamente adottato, ambisce a ritrovare due nuovi genitori: da piccolo ha provato con quelli dei suoi migliori amici, adesso invece è nei suoceri, per quanto separati, che sente d’aver trovato ostello affettivo.



Mi è sembrato un McEwan meno ispirato del solito, al punto che ho cominciato a diradare la mia frequentazione della sua letteratura, intensa negli anni a precedere.
Forse tanta, troppa carne al fuoco: essere giovani durante la guerra, essere giovani durante il nazismo – incluso detour al lager polacco di Majdanek - crescere credendo nel comunismo, assistere al divenire dei paesi sotto il controllo sovietico fino ad arrivare al crollo del muro e al dissolversi della vecchia Unione, lo scontro tra chi dal marxismo passa alla religione e chi invece rimane fedele a quella interpretazione, nonostante tutto quello che succede a partire dal 1989 – il tutto cucito dell’io narrante impersonato da Jeremy, che si accinge a scrivere un memoir su richiesta della suocera ormai anziana e malata. Due visioni del mondo e della vita che finiscono col contrapporsi, che Jeremy col suo amore – e con la sua ricerca di amore – dovrebbe riuscire a conciliare. Ma senza successo.


Le Gole della Vis, nei cui boschi June incontra i cani neri.

Non so dire se la nostra civiltà che ormai si affaccia alla fine di questo millennio soffra più per una mancanza o per un eccesso di fede, se siano stati individui come Bernard e June a ridurci così, o non piuttosto tipi come me.

Ma forse anche una trama un po’ troppo arzigogolata, perfino per uno come McEwan che non sceglie mai intrecci lineari, quelli che vanno da A a B senza deviazioni.

It's probably quite important when reviewing an Ian McEwan book to make clear straight away that I love Ian McEwan. Pure, full-blown author-love. I'd read his shopping list if I could, and would probably ponder what his choice of milk and bread said about the human soul.

So three stars is pretty low for him. His writing is very good, each individual paragraph is delicately constructed in the McEwan way, prose and dialogue are well formed - it should be a good book, but the plot falls well short of what I expect. I've got such high standards for any book with his name on it I feel myself behaving unfairly towards him, but Black Dogs doesn't provide as good a vehicle for his writing as his better books. (Harsh?)

There's a story around naming and forgetting that occurs to me, nowadays, nearly as often as my own name. It's from a film, and it's one of my favourite moments in film. Perhaps because it's also a rather quiet and inconspicuous one. Julie Christie plays a woman who is forgetting simple things and has taken to labeling drawers and cupboards with handwritten notes. Her husband noticing this one day remarks, 'If you stopped thinking about things the moment you write them down, maybe that's the end of your need to recall.' Christie is arranging flowers in a vase -flowers whose purple colour and novelty she and her husband have just remarked on. The light from the window nearby is covering Christie in a soft glow. And she goes on to speak with a soft smooth texture in her voice:

'I heard a story at a dinner party about the German soldiers on border patrol in Czechoslovakia during the war. I heard it from that Czech student of yours. Veronica. We spoke once at a dinner party. Don't be nervous, it's a good story. She told me that each of the German patrol dogs wore a sign saying "hund". "Why?" said the Czechs. And the Germans replied, [and here Christie points, as if a patrol dog were there among the flowers before her) "Because that is a hund."'

As a scene of filmic text, it enlarges on its themes and shows various things in its details that occur and grow and reoccur later in the film. But it's also one of those limbs that stands separate from the body of its whole, as a kind of gesture. It gestures, for me, at something generally inscrutable about memory being to the present, and something more particular about the strangeness of the Second World War and its impossible and innumerable stories and details, both real and imagined, being told and retold.

I haven't read McEwan for a few years now, and I first read this one back in 2009. But all of what I associate with McEwan is in here: objectivity compromised by memory and perspective; faith and rationalism, their near constant tension and revision; and the Englishness that is always broader than England and expansive into Europe and into the atrocities of the twentieth century that return in the interior of the human and animal.

Black Dogs is about June and Bernard Tremain, the parents-in-law of the narrator, Jeremy. It's about the separate courses their lives took, and the latter's search for an origin of that separation. And it centres on; while diverging from, struggling against, reconceptualising, and problematising; a set of experiences June had and Bernard was present for in 1946, when the couple were on honeymoon together in a newly liberated Europe. The black dogs of the title, the beings of June's encounter, become alternately a Christian understanding of the embodiment of evil, a post-war folktale, and a family legend. And lastly, as with many pieces of the story and the story within its story and its people, they become ghosts of a political past, and the objects of a kind of exposure to that past that none of our storied concepts and categories can capture and contain without residue.

This was an interesting and at times horrifying exploration into a dismantling and destruction of a marriage, and a person, happening at some of the strongest and most earth-shattering moments in the world's history. The story itself is really just an exploration of whether or not true evil exists and what one's personal responsibility is to its response. I think my favorite part of McEwan's novels remains the fact that his books are incredibly well written from beginning to end. His prose is stylish and intellectual, and his stories are peppered with a horror that is not terribly unbelievable most of the time. My only problem with this book is that I have enjoyed his other books more, but it is a beautifully written book and will certainly be recommended to others.

I quite liked this -- like it much more, in fact, than the reviews of my GR friends led me to expect I would. It is richly packed with ideas and character into what is almost only a novella in length, and I found the ending to be particularly strong and well prepared by what had gone before. The book is not flawless, there are technical weaknesses early on -- that is, the craftsmanship sometimes shows -- and there are passages where the 'debate' becomes a bit ham-handed..., but the fundamental insight into the nature of evil and its implications is haunting and effecively conveyed. This is a very good book, and while it is easy to dismiss McEwan as Lit-lite (and there may be some truth in that), the few hours it takes to read this story were not wasted.

Perhaps McEwan's best work, which of course is saying a lot.

One quibble: I don't see what's served by saving the black dogs story until the final section. I would've liked to have known earlier what exactly this whole life-changing experience was.

One of those rare novels of ideas that never feels pedantic or contrived. The characters are real, as real as any characters you're going to find in literature. June represents supernaturalism and Bernard naturalism. We understand the motivations of each character and also the arguments for and against their respective worldviews. Absolutely love the imaginary conversations between the two.

Ian McEwan can really pack a lot into a little novella of 150 pages. The man is a master of the form, and this is a good one. Black Dogs is the history of the twentieth century told through the story of a couple deeply in love with one another, but torn apart by ideology. McEwan writes with his typically lucid prose and psychological insight and the result is very effective.

Kütüphaneden ödünç aldığım kitapları sıralamada öne alıyorum mecburen. Bu defa iyi de olmuş sanki. Her ne kadar takıldığım taraflar olsa da severek okudum ve bu konuyu şayet Javier Marias yazsa idi ne kadar şahane yazardı kim bilir diye düşünmeden edemedim. Bu belki de bir yazara, Ian McEwan'a edilebilecek büyük hakaretlerden biri ama maalesef böyle düşündürdü. Çünkü kitap birbirine aşık ama zamanla ruhen/fikren/bedenen ayrı düşen bir çifti anlatıyor. Ayrı düşüşleri o kadar hassas bir dengenin bozulmasına bağlı ki, bunu duyguları ve insan ruhunu şahane anlatan bir yazar ancak size geçirebilir. İşte bu bakımdan #ianmcewan zayıf kalıyor.

Anlatıcımız, bu çiftin damadı. Kendisi ebeveynlerini çok küçük yaşta kaybetmiş ve çocukluğundan beri arkadaşlarının ebeveynlerine özenmiş, kendisinin de böyle ebeveynleri olmasını dilemiş. Zaten kitabın başlangıcı bu çerçevede. Hatta anlatıcımızın ablası ve yeğeni ile geçen ilk gençliği ve yeğenine duyduğu sevgiye değinilir. Aile içi şiddet ve buna duyılan tepki var. Sonra birden romanın akışı da konusu da değişiveriyor. Sanki yazar fikir değiştirip başka bir hikaye anlatmaya karar veriyor. Takıldım bu yapıya, ya da yapısal (bence) bozukluğa. Çünkü bu detaylar anlatıcımızım karakteri konusunda bize ışık tutmamış, öyle havada kalmış...

Gene de ben severek okudum, hatta bırakamadım elimden. Öneririm...
#okumahalleri #okumatutkusu #okumazamanı #okumalarım #okumaköşesi #okumatavsiyesi #okumalistem #readinghabit #readingchallenge #readingaddict #readinglist #meltemgülsoy #meltemgulsoy #meltemokuyor #kitaplistem #kitapönerisi #kitaplarsevdamız #kitapkurdu #kitaptavsiyesi #kitapkokusu #booklist #bookstgramturkey #bookworm #booklover #bookreview @baukutuphane

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Black Dogs confirms that McEwan was at his formidable best in his early books than in his later works. The themes are peculiar, complicated and even unpleasant. Black Dogs is an odd book. Unlike his macabre novels or stories there is no gradual escalation of psychological violence. It is a quiet book and ends on a quieter note. It is infinitely thought provoking especially when touching upon beliefs (vis-a-vis science), human experiences and the subtle evocation of post-war atmosphere.
I will close with McEwan's summation of the war (I don't think the dilemma of war has ever been more aptly captured) - "....he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend.....what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?"

Different is all I have to describe this McEwan novel. I loved the vivid European references that I now relatively understand post-Europe travel. However, I can tell from this novel written in 1992 to the latest work I have read (On Chesil Beach) in 2007, and the development of his storytelling. “Black Dogs” presents a moral dilemma that grips you and carries you till the final page.

McEwan Rankings;
Atonement
Amsterdam
Black Dogs
On Chesil Beach