Nu-i cel mai bun roman al său, de acord, cu toate astea nu m-a dezamăgit - chiar și cînd nu-i pe culmi e mereu o plăcere să-l citesc pe McEwan.

Not one of my favorites from Ian McEwan, although as I love a few of them, that is likely a compliment... I only found this to only be alright. I felt I only partially knew the characters; their stories were only partially told.

The title refers to what the main character's mother-in-law saw as a symbol of all that was bad & wrong in the world; in the end, it was what changed her life forever. She became a different person, becoming religious, etcetera. Supposedly they were once used by foreign authorities to intimidate the locals, even once (yes) used to rape a young woman.

Ian McEwan writes, as always, with a simplicity that is somehow also graceful. His words can be picturesque, often describing emotional situations with such insight I have no idea how he does it. As always, he addresses dark topics, rape, Communism, The Cold War, Nazis, The Berlin Wall, etcetera, with mastery.

This one, however, was more of a novella that did not seem substantial by the end at all. His others of this size, most notable Amsterdam, The Comfort of Strangers, I found much better.

A beautifully written novella but hollow in the centre, and leaving me dissatisfied at the end. It essentially revolves around a biography that the “author” Jeremy wants to write about his in-laws, June and Bernard. (To understand why they are so important to Jeremy, you need to read the introduction which is actually part of the novella itself and not, as I first thought, an autobiographical note on the real author’s life. Nice one, Ian).

June and Bernard get married just after WW2 but on their honeymoon in France, June has a traumatic experience with two black dogs. This event becomes a defining moment in their lives that marks a gradual separation, with June regarding it in mystical and religious terms, while Bernard remained a rationalist. June retreated to France a few years after the attack, to write and paint and live a hermit’s life, while Bernard remained in London and became something of a media personality.
In an effort to understand what happened, Jeremy followed both of their lives closely, and returns to the black dog scene four times: in conversations with June and with Bernard, again on his own and in a final chapter where more details of the event are revealed.

What I found unsatisfactory was this: why would the attack be such a defining moment and lead to a separation for over 40 years, even though June and Bernard remained in love? It isn’t explored, and we learn little about the rest of their lives, except for two current episodes: Jeremy visits June in her nursing home shortly before her death, and Jeremy accompanies Bernard to Europe at the time the Berlin Wall is coming down. That’s about it.
If it had been a real autobiography then you could understand the gap, and such is the power of McEwan’s writing that I tended to forget that it wasn’t. But the attack is so obviously an allegory about good and evil that when the details are finally revealed, it is – well not quite an anticlimax, because it is horrible – but, there’s nothing to follow:

“June told me that throughout her life she sometimes used to see them ... running down the path into the Gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones ... fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.”

Sobering.

I like my reviews short - I find haiku loquacious.

While Ian McEwan continues to be one of my favorite authors, his book 'Black Dogs' was not my favorite book of his.

The title apparently comes from the name that Winston Churchill bestowed on his depressions. As used in this book it actually seemed to signify something more evil and irrational, "civilization's worst moods." McEwan applied this metaphor into a meditation on Europe's past and future.
McEwan used a fictional family (Bernard and June Tremaine) to demonstrate the impact time past has over time present.
Several times I was actually confused about some events not really knowing whether they were real, fantasy or a metaphor for something else.
At the end I was left somewhat unsatisfied but with no regrets for having read it.
I recommend it to anyone who really likes Ian McEwan’s writing and is patient.

This is a story about Jeremy, who is writing a memoir about his mother-in-law, June, and her husband, Bernard. June has a life-changing experience on her honeymoon that impacts her perspective on life.

I found the story interesting, especially the literal and metaphorical stories of the black dogs. The historical framework of this story provides insights into the impact of the story. This was the first Ian McEwan book that I've read.

Me gustó muchísimo por momentos, me aburrió en otros. Obvio que la prosa es impecable, pero hay algo que no terminó de convencerme, creo que se queda en el medio entre el drama familiar y la política y la filosofía y a mí sólo me gustaba el drama familiar, como siempre, para qué negarlo.

Живот на убежденията
Цялото ревю тук: http://knijenpetar.blogspot.bg/2015/1...

Разбрах, че не мога да приема присърце стилът на писане на Иън Макюън, но поне се убедих, че от подобен стил може да произлязат много добри неща. Не го познавах като автор, преди да прочета тази книга, не бях наясно с разбиранията му, начинът му на изразяване и изобщо историите, които го вълнуват. Сравнително кратката „Черните кучета“ („Колибри“, 2015, с превод на Огняна Иванова) ми напомни за онези романи, които не следват определени сюжетни линии, а просто безредно изследват дълбочината на човешките чувства и убеждения, сякаш са подвастни на предварително изградената философия на автора, който следва някаква своя скрита нишка, без да упътва читателя си. Дори самото заглавие не подсказва посоката, в която Макюън се е насочил, въпреки че в края на книгата разкрива тайната, блуждаеща откъслечно през всичките тези малко повече от двеста страници. Тук „черните кучета“ са израз на убежденията ни в доброто и злото, и всеки от нас е призван да ги следва, докато не се убеди в своята правдивост. Но не е лесно да се постави точка на този спор за истинност, за усещане на света според определени принципи и превръщането му в среда, в която да виреят различните ценностни системи.
(Продължава в блога: http://knijenpetar.blogspot.bg/2015/1...)

Black Dogs follows on smoothly from McEwan’s previous novel, The Innocent. At the end of the latter, the elderly hero takes a final look at the Berlin Wall. At the start of Black Dogs, the hero flies to Berlin to see it fall and everything that it stood for. He imagines he is seeing the break of a new dawn. Then there is a commotion. At Checkpoint Charlie a group of Neo-Nazi thugs set upon a Turkish immigrant, while well-heeled passers-by grin with approval. History’s grip isn’t about to slacken just yet.

The novel’s title refers to Churchill’s term for depression. Here, it comes to stand for something far more – or far less, depending on which character you ask. Our perspective and its power to shape - warp? - our reality is one of the book’s fascinations. This is symbolised by Jeremy’s in-laws, Bernard and June Tremaine. Both were ardent communists in the 1930s and believers in the perfectibility of man. (‘We founded a private utopia’, June says, ‘and it was only a matter of time before the nations of the world followed our example.’) But while honeymooning in France in 1946, an event occurs that will separate them forever.

June encounters two gigantic black dogs. To her, it becomes apparent these are no ordinary dogs: ‘the alien black gums, slack black lips rimmed by salt, a thread of saliva breaking, the fissures on a tongue that ran to smoothness along its curling edge, a yellow-red eye, and eye-ball muck spiking the fur, open sores on a foreleg, and trapped in the V of an open mouth, deep in the hinge of the jaw, a little foam to which her gaze kept returning.’

Suddenly she feels a rush of power from an unseen source; the dogs are routed. She has met evil but found God. From here onwards, it becomes clear to her that there is a divine order to human existence, and with the same fervour she once embraced Marx, she embraces spirituality. The dogs, she is convinced, are harbingers, recurring throughout history at times of great disturbance. To Bernard, a convinced materialist, this is simply a reminder of how people – especially religious people – bend the facts to fit the theory. God is a fiction, religion the bloody and destructive by-product. In place of June’s intuition, he asserts common sense: (‘Face to face with evil? I’ll tell you what she was up against that day – a good lunch and a spot of malicious village gossip!’)

As Jeremy puts it, the two were exact opposites – rationalist and mystic – ‘the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest.’ Through artful parallels, McEwan shows much they had in common - and how much in love they were - right until the end. McEwan uses multiple flashbacks told from different perspectives, as in Rashomon. As well as moving, it’s also instructive about humanity's potential for waste.

I’ve mentioned before how McEwan affirms the family without descending to the level of grade-z politicians. I think that’s true here as well. Jeremy is an orphan. While his friends were sniffing glue or affecting Cockney accents, he became a surrogate son to his friends' grateful parents, a tireless babysitter and eager receptacle for adult wisdom. He learns ‘the simplest way of restoring a lost parent was to become one yourself [...] there was no better way than having children of your own to love.’

The novel is sometimes called a ‘meditation’ - the infallible signal you're getting an essay instead of a plot. Some may find it too neatly schematic, and perhaps they have a point. I find it says a lot in a short space, treats its characters as human beings rather than cyphers (think of June's comic but revealing chat about sex). It’s more successful than McEwan’s treatment of the same theme in his next book, Enduring Love, published four years later. I don’t know what happened to McEwan in the gap (though I can guess), but his later books feel like the work of someone else, and not for the better. Before McEwan got stuffy, before his prose style started to rust, he was writing books like this. Read them.

Black Dogs is a brilliantly moving tale though it reads like a bunch of disjointed short stories. The main tale is built around an English couple honeymooning in a French village and they encounter two terrifying and rabid black dogs. The wife fights off the dogs, stabbing one of them with her small pocket knife while the husband’s a few yards away gazing at a rare species of caterpillar. From there their lives spiral into woe and bitterness and disillusion that makes them live apart though they deeply love each other. Fast track fifty years later they are forced to reconnect and their son in law embarks on a righteous endeavour to write the mother in law’s memoir.

It is a deeply compassionate book that strays from the pitfalls of sentimentality. A surprisingly easy read, full of clever honest idealism about humanity, moral complexity and a utopian vision of Europe that the main characters hoped to have achieved.

This was a really something and nothing book.

I read it a few months ago and normally even confused or disjointed novels look clearer to me from a distance. Rather like seeing a landscape with a fuller perspective and you can catch the beauty of the overall effect, the roll of the hills, the gathering of the woodland, the undulations of the streams which you miss if you are too close. It is only when you step out of the immediacy of the thing that you see its meaning, its purpose.

This hasn't happened here. It just has not gelled for me, the lack of fluidity in and of itself is not the problem, though it has a jarring effect. No, rather is it the fact that I am not sure what I am supposed to be taking from the relationships, not sure who or what I am supposed to be focusing on. I do not mean that I want spoon fed literature but I just want something which either hangs together and means something or doesn't and doesn't. In my opinion, I am not sure if McEwan really knows which it is supposed to be either.

Maybe I have just wholly misunderstood and a few more metaphorical leagues travelled will have me browing another line of hills and then I shall look back and it will all fall into place but at the moment......nope.....sorry.

Dopo ormai 3 libri letti ("Espiazione", "Bambini del tempo", "Miele", anche se l'ho amato in misura minore rispetto ai precedenti), posso dire che con McEwan è ormai amore puro.
Lo stesso amore che, purtroppo, non ha potuto provare Jeremy, che, in seguito alla morte dei genitori avvenuta quando aveva solo otto anni, cerca quell'amore vero e naturale che esiste tra una madre e un figlio e che alla fine troverà nelle figure di June e Bernard, i suoceri della moglie Jenny.
In un viaggio che si snoda tra Wiltshire, Berlino durante gli anni della caduta del Muro e St. Maurice de Navacelles, McEwan racconta con meraviglia, stupore, coinvolgimento la storia di June e Bernard, ma anche i due modi diversi di vivere la vita: quello più spirituale e asceta di lei e quello pragmatico, concreto, razionale di lui, dando l'ennesima grande prova del suo talento facendo emozionare e riflettere.