This was exactly the novel I didn’t want to read, but at least it’s official now – NO MORE IAN MCEWAN BOOKS FOR ME, EVER. I would like to tell you how stupid this novel is, but Maciek beat me to it – see his great review here

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

So let me tell you about the boring sentences you have to accept into your life if you read this book. Here’s one:

Now, in the late afternoon, although the sun was still high, the eastern sky had lost its vivid purple and, fading by degrees through nursery blue to diluted milk, effected, across the precise line of the horizon, the most delicate of transactions with the pale grey of the sea.

This is, I take it, what people mean when they harp on about the Ian McEwan prose style. It looks, to me, as if, Mr McEwan, has broken in to James Ellroy’s office, and, stolen all James’ commas. Never have, I seen, so many clauses, and commas, in one short, novel. For me the effect is akin to reading through a stocking mask, the kind that robbers used before they all switched to balaclavas. Especially when our prose stylist is continually, dementedly, describing the weather, the streets of Venice, or the furniture in the rooms. Ah how he loves furniture. Cutlery too.

You can tell this is pretentious I mean literary because although it’s set in Venice the V word is never mentioned.

By now I have realised what Ian McEwan’s USP is. What he does is he describes in tedious detail a couple of ordinary novocained middle class English types in an ordinary situation and just when you’re dozing off he has a page of lurid violence. Sometimes the lurid violence comes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, and here at the end.

Here’s another McEwanbite for you. I think this is the way dead people would write, if they could :

In the evening they decided they were suffering from lack of exercise and made plans to catch the boat across the lagoon the next day to the popular strip of land whose beaches faced the open sea. This led them to talk at length and euphorically, for they had just smoked another joint, about swimming, their preferred strokes, the relative merits of rivers, lakes, swimming-pools and seas, and the precise nature of the attraction water had for people : was it the buried memory of ancient sea ancestors? Talk of memory caused Mary to frown again. The conversation became desultory after that, and they went to bed earlier than usual, a little before midnight.

Notice “the popular strip of land whose beaches faced the open sea” – he can’t give it its name, which would be the natural thing to do, because for some reason of high literature, he has decided not to say that the city with its canals and no traffic is Venice. So he has to use this forced circumlocution.

This novel means nothing. It portentously gestures towards some kind of statement critical of men who think that women really like to be beaten up and by extension how feminism is destroying life as we know it but the denouement capsizes any attempt to make sense of the plot.

This novel promotes yet another version of the concept that (some) victims actively participate in their own destruction. Why do they do this? Well, who knows, not Ian McEwan, that’s for sure. They just do. Too much novocaine maybe.

I am promoting the idea that readers can do without Ian McEwan.

Los títulos de Ian McEwan nos suelen enviar en la dirección equivocada: en este viaje no hay placer – o más dolor que placer en todo caso – y no hablemos ya del título inglés The comfort of strangers, ya que los desconocidos no aportan ningún consuelo en esta historia. Más bien el propósito de la narración es crear incomodidad y una tensión que va creciendo hasta el final.

La cita inicial de Cesare Pavese ya nos da la clave de lo que significa el viaje aquí, la ruptura con la normalidad, el quedar desprotegido ante las amenazas:

Viajar es una brutalidad. Te obliga a confiar en extraños y a perder de vista todo lo que te resulta familiar y confortable de tus amigos y tu casa.

El telón de fondo es una oscura ciudad turística que no se nombra en ningún momento, pero que identificamos con Venecia – de hecho la versión cinematográfica de 1990 El placer de los extraños se rodó allí.

Conocemos a una pareja que llevan años juntos, Mary y Colin, y que buscan en estas vacaciones un aliciente para su relación. Perdidos en los oscuros callejones y canales que les resultan hostiles, son rescatados por Robert, residente en la ciudad, que les convida a un bar y luego a su casa donde conocen a Caroline, su mujer. A partir de aquí se desarrolla una turbia relación entre los cuatro, con una sensación de peligro que se va incrementando ante la mirada pasiva del lector, inquieto ante el cariz que toman las vacaciones de la pareja.

Es una novela relativamente corta, unas 150 páginas y es de las primeras del autor, no se puede decir que sea una obra redonda. Pero ciertamente da que pensar, esta exploración de las relaciones de amor y dominio que pueden desembocar en formas de sexualidad ligadas con la violencia. Son temas que el autor desarrollará de manera más elaborada en otras novelas como Sábado y On Chesil Beach.

Geniale come sempre

Io non ci ho trovato proprio niente di particolare in questo libro. Il finale, abbastanza prevedibile, non mi ha né sconvolto né entusiasmato. Non mi è piaciuto affatto.

Critics like to divide Ian McEwan’s fiction into two groups. There’s the work of ‘Ian Macabre’, circa 1974 to 1982, noted for its obsession with death, decay and sex. Then there’s the work of ‘Ian Mature’ circa 1987 to the present, keen to address us on the big subjects: politics, society, science. At the time, The Comfort of Strangers seemed to mark the end of a phase in McEwan’s career. Things, of course, are rarely that simple. Nor is this book.

Our heroes are a long-term couple, Colin and Mary, who have been seeing each for several years but never married or chosen to live together. Their relationship is floundering; they have hopes a holiday in Venice (never named in the text) will revive it.

McEwan doesn’t go for cheap melodrama: there are no teary breakups in restaurants, no frenetic make-up snogging in the rain afterwards. Instead, he is faithful to the day-to-day, undramatic stuff of a relationship trying to go forwards, and not quite managing it. Regarding Colin, Mary reflects that ‘She loved him, though not at this particular moment’ – a seemingly throwaway phrase that sums up an entire relationship. They worry about Mary’s children; they quibble about feminist politics; they wander aimlessly throughout the city. They chance upon a stranger in a restaurant. His name is Robert.

It soon becomes clear that Robert’s appearance is far from accidental. He appears ‘as if summoned’, and that phrase is crucial. The lack of geography and place names, and the characters forever getting lost or walking down blind alleys feels like something out of Kafka – another writer that used realism as a runway for take-off into something more dream-like, and, by turns, more horrifying.

Robert tells the couple his life story, and provides the novel with its most memorable scene. It also contains the book’s twinned themes, gender and power, in capsule form, and it’s perhaps no accident that a key line from it was used like a musical refrain in the 1990 film version.

Like most believers in a Golden Era (when men were men and wives were beaten), Robert detests the human fall-out from the sex war. Feminists are ‘too ugly’, ‘women who cannot find a man.’ Worse, they spread confusion like a virus. Men no longer believe in themselves as men; women no longer respect them. For women, according to Robert, ‘love aggression and strength and power in men...And though they hate themselves for it, women long to be ruled by men. It’s deep in their minds. They lie to themselves. They talk of freedom, and dream of captivity.’ Robert’s wife, it turns out, can only move with great difficulty. Her back gives her great pain, and she is unable to travel downstairs without help. When Mary is out the room, Robert winds Colin with a meaty blow to the gut.

Soon our progressive couple return to their hotel room to have sex with renewed zest, trading sex fantasies light-heartedly afterwards. (Like the chambermaid that only turns up to clean your hotel room at the worst time, this is something else you see often in life yet rarely on the page.) Mary applauds a local feminist group for wanting convicted rapists castrated, but also thrills to the thought of amputating her lover’s arms and legs, using him as a living sex toy and passing him round her friends.

The couples meet one last time. They notice Robert’s place has been emptied: the couple are due to leave shortly. After drugging Mary, Robert kisses Colin’s blood-smeared lips, and kills him with a razor. The scene is narrated coolly and without comment, which only serves to heighten the proceedings. Again, the dream-like feeling: there is a sense that Colin and Mary, on some level, even if they never consciously felt it, followed some warped inner script – something McEwan also touches on in his early short story ‘Pornography’. ‘Want’ and ‘need’ are poor words, inadequate tools to explore the tangled nature of the sexual imagination.

In some quarters, the novel’s implications caused outrage. Admitting that what people actually feel and get excited by, and daring to suggest both might be beyond rational action to correct, was seen as a step too far, and a back-handed endorsement of Robert’s warped world-view. But it is Robert’s story that suggests monsters are made, not born; that a lot of what we think of as ‘natural’ behaviour is mere cultural baggage we can drop. It may not be neat or tidy, but it is at least honest.

In truth, this is more of an outsized short story than a novel, and the first two chapters – which should be speeding us into the action – drag on too long. As usual with the early McEwan, by and large something needs to actually happen for the prose to start pouring smoothly. Some might find the dreaminess a mere screen to cover lack of plausibility - not being able to find an open restaurant in Venice after 9 pm, and just why do Colin and Mary go back to see Robert and Caroline anyway?

If it’s the least of McEwan’s novels, it’s still a worthy, serious-minded thriller with an erotic twist, and driven by a restless intelligence.

Lettura veloce, incalzante che trasmette gradualmente la curiosità e l'angoscia del finale. La riuscita è decisamente migliore rispetto a "Chesil Beach". A questo punto, mi cimenterò con qualcos'altro di McEwan, anche se sono ancora un po' scettica.

Big disappointment, since I loved some of McEwan's other books. Bizarre, disturbing, depressing but ultimately pointless.

cortesie inaspettate

una coppia in vacanza a Venezia e un uomo che li spia, si intromette nella loro vacanza e si insinua nella loro indolenza...il suo fine è oscuro, ma si intuisce la tragedia, o almeno il crescendo dell'ombra di questa, nel non detto di McEwan, il quale si muove silenzioso dietro le descrizioni accurate di una vacanza/fuga...fino a poche pagine dalla fine potrebbe essere una storia come tante sul potere corruttore di una vacanza italiana e sui tanti luoghi comuni che ammantano quest'esperienza, che a mio avviso McEwan ha fatto...ma poi le cortesie si sprecano e gli ospiti si trovano in grossi guai, immotivati per giunta, si perchè McEwan si diverte a lasciare il lettore a chiedersi come mai gli sia venuto in mente un finale così asciutto e avulso da ogni tentativo di interpretazione...

Book 23:
النصف الأول من الرواية جميل على عكس النصف الثاني الذي أغضبني لركاكته. كما أن الترجمة ليست جيدة...

HOLIDAY IN HELL.

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/KCY6XVofaMQ

Una vacanza all'inferno, quella che fanno Colin e Mary, innamoratissimi ma con la passione sessuale non più accesa come un tempo. Un continuo girovagare in una città marittima disorganizzata e senza indicazioni (È Venezia? Il lettore se ne accorge, ma è come se gli stessi personaggi non lo sappiano affatto), un non-luogo torrido, incredibilmente desolante e privo di coordinate come la psiche umana (o di coppia?). Un romanzo psicologico/psicopatico (bellissimo, per giunta) sullo svelamento del sottobosco ferino, violento, nascosto dentro di noi.

Обожавам Макюън , в този му роман отново авторът ни въвежда във възможна реалност този път във Венеция. Когато една двойка-туристи изгубвайки се посред нощ из лабиринтите на градчето, едни човек преобръща идилията им.

Non so cosa mi turbi di più di questo libro.

Forse il fatto che sono riuscito ad associare ad ognuno di questi 4 personaggi delle persone che realmente conosco?
Oppure l'aver indovinato come andava a finire tutta la faccenda già a metà lettura?
Boh!

Più che di turbamento però possiamo parlare di una riflessione personale, un esame di coscienza che pone la lente d'ingrandimento sulla "qualità" delle mie frequentazioni e sul mio "sense of wonder" oramai assuefatto da anni di letture assurde.

Nulla da dire su McEwan, un autore che ho in più di un'occasione paragonato a Dahl e Murakami.
In questo breve romanzo c'è anche un po' di Hitchcock ma la costruzione di questo thriller l'ho trovata fin troppo artificiosa e a tratti mi ha anche leggermente annoiato.

"Cortesie per gli ospiti" è un libro per cui avevo aspettative medio-alte che sono state in parte disattese per motivi completamente soggettivi ma di cui comprendo perfettamente la fama e il successo di pubblico.
Per me non supera la sufficienza ma questo non mi fermerà dal leggere altro di questo autore!