I had heard of McEwan's novel Atonement, which I have yet to read, but this particular short, but intriguing story, was quite a pleasant surprise, and wasn't what I expected.

We meet two young newlyweds, who are very different, but nonetheless, they found one another, and chose to marry, and this is where the story begins; in reverse. I thought this was a very interesting way to do this, and for me, it worked.

The young couple are highly anticipating their wedding night, but not in the way one would expect. This story was told in a time where sex wasn't really discussed, so both parties were in the dark about how they each felt about finally sharing intimacy.

Florence is especially anxious and the very thought of sexual intimacy makes her nauseated, and she wrongly presumes that Edward has had much experience with other women.

I thought the characters were each portrayed well, and both were very deep, and I found I felt pity for both, in a way. The writing was mostly excellent, and I enjoyed McEwan's unique prose.

The amount of background information written was slightly tedious at times, and some of it even felt unessential to the plot, but still, this didn't have a huge impact on my thoughts about the book overall.

This was a short, but somewhat powerful novel, about love, destiny and the power of fate.

My first McEwan since "Atonement" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and he didn't disappoint. "On Chesil Beach" is a short novella set in the late 1950's, about a young couple's wedding night. Edward and Florence are young and in love, but they are also very proper, and by that I mean completely sexually inexperienced. As soon as they get the dinner waiters out of the wedding suite, they both know they should be consummating their union; alas, they both have very different feelings and expectations of what that entails. It goes without saying that things don't go very smoothly for them...

The prose was beautiful, and while the ending was frustrating, it was also realistic. People were obviously not encouraged to talk about sex with their children and prepare them in any way, shape or form for this moment of their lives, and a little ignorance goes a long way to ruin a beautiful human experience...

Honestly, this story made me very happy to have had many sexual partners before I got married: the awkwardness of early sexual experience combined with the pressure of a life-long commitment must have been one of the most awful experience one could go through. I was raised by hippies, who (probably as a reaction to their more conservative parents), felt the need to make sure my siblings and I knew the proper name for all our body parts at an early age - and when we became teenagers, their only request was that we used protection and birth control if we were to have sex, since they were quite realistic about what teenagers are up to when unsupervised. As awkward as that might sound, I'm glad that was their attitude because I was able to avoid a lot of potentially devastating experiences with the knowledge and understanding they gave me access to.

When Florence expresses disgust about the idea of penetration and "being entered", I could definitely understand how that would sound less than pleasant if sex was only ever explained to you in a clinical way. The ridiculous manual she had access to described the mechanics of the act, but no one ever talked to her about intimacy or pleasure. Parents think it's uncomfortable to have "the talk", but do they ever think of the potentially shitty consequences of not having it?

Four stars for beautiful writing a deep, fascinating character study; but I would have liked to know more about what happened to Florence after that awful night.

Приемаме за нормално, че светът в който живеем се променя. Бързо и из основи, на всеки пет, десет години през последните 60-70 години. Преди това, масата хора са живеели съвсем различно и доста по-монотонно.

Това е книга за предрасъдъците и невъзможността за общуване. И за жалките резултати постигнати от тях. Направо не е за вярване, колко много се различаваме от предците си, от които ни делят не повече от няколко поколения.

Огромна спънка по време на прочитането и осмислянето на "На плажа Чезъл" за мен се оказа убийствено тромавия стил на автора. :)

WOW! Ian McEwan is a master story teller and writer. He has taken a moment in a young couple's life and written and exquisite tale with accurate descriptions and emotions. It is 1962, a young British couple from different social and economic backgrounds have married. McEwan artfully describes the moment in time that is their coming together on their wedding night. I was expecting to be wiggling in my seat and screwing up my face for the uncomfortableness of reading this personal experience. However, it was not that way at all. Florence and Edward are both fearful and nervous in different ways.
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.

This was their main issue, not being free enough to talk about their anxieties before reaching this moment when it really mattered. Edward is so utterly excited, waiting for this moment for so long and Florence, on the other hand, has a disgust and dread about the physical act yet doesn't want to disappoint her husband. The narrator goes back and forth telling the story of their meeting and courting and revealing subtly other events that may play a part in the results of the wedding night. The background and upbringing of these two young lovers played into their ultimate decisions.

The only criticism from me is the rather quick wrap up of life after the wedding night. I think I wanted a bit more and definitely would have liked to see a different ending. Apparently McEwan's original manuscript included more evidence of the subtle events but he reworked and deleted things to give the reader the responsibility to pick up on them or not. I believe this was definitely the best choice. I will definitely read more from McEwan!

n  A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.n

This little novel is so deceptive. It's under 200 pages, and the story seems simple: the 1962 wedding night of Edward and Florence, two young, virginal people in love. Edward is ready to burst with the desire to consummate their marriage; Florence is dreading it.

But it isn't so simple. The night is a disaster, and wrought with the secret scars and fatal flaws the two people carry around. The writing is so revealing of the complexities each person brings with them to a relationship.

The crux lies in what is not done, what is unsaid, and then, painfully, what is unlived. Nothing matters except what could have been. Inconceivably, it is easier to live a whole entire life unfulfilled rather than utter one's truth or javelin over the barrier of pride. A whole life. (And my heart is wrenched without mercy.)

That McEwan captures this so poignantly in under 200 pages demonstrates his mastery of the written word and his deep understanding of the human condition. He has rapidly risen in the ranks of my favourite authors.

n  All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.n

McEwan is such a famous and well reviewed author that he should stand up to scrutiny unlike say a first time author feeling their way .
I found the whole story unrealistic and artificial and some of the writing lazy .
we are asked to believe that 2 people so in love and apparently still so years after their disasterous wedding night should not have found a way to overcome the inauspicious start .

we are also led to believe that somehow this problem was because they were living in an era before sex was invented and emotional problems were talked about .this warped view is also compounded by the post Florence life of Edward which as the years roll on seems to be exaggeratedly liberated .it's suddenly all freelove and drugs . the two characters seem to be cyphers for their generation .

The fact that she lived in Oxford , was a classical musician , hated pop music , had a distant father , an intellectual mother and lived in upper middle class Summertown are a lazy shorthand to explain her reticence about lurv making .

he of course lived outside in the country , geddit , loved rock music ,and had a charmingly chaotic crazy family , is just a normal bloke eager to get his hands on a girl and marriage seemed to only way .

that two so disimilar people should be in love at all was totally daft .

the author also ruins the scene setting by intruding from his desk and computer to says things like " this was not a good moment in English cuisine " , the poor things no ciabbata , so unsophisticated !

Iiving in Oxford i did like the local references but if you lived in Croydon i should not think this meant much . it would just reinforce the idea that everyone in Oxford was called Rupert and cycled everywhere with a basket on his bike . ok some people do .

if this was someone's first novel all this would be accepted but as the umpteenth novel from McEwan it all seems very narrow and unreal and superficial , so there ! BTW i think the author is not a nice man .

Probably my favorite McEwan book; I liked that it was so tightly constructed and the writing was great, as usual. I think he got the atmosphere of the period just right but I could have done without the present day bit at the end. Finally, I felt that he set the reader up for some act of violence which he then failed to deliver, leaving me a bit confused.

(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

Regular readers know that this month CCLaP is taking an extended look at the nominees for the 2007 Booker Prize; and regular readers also know that so far I've been mostly disappointed by the nominees I've read, finding most of them to be inconsequential little wisps of stories, many of them well-written but certainly not weighty enough to be called "The Best Novel of 2007." And thus do we come to the fifth Booker nominee to be reviewed here, as well as the one easily most well-known, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; and let me tell you, if a common complaint about this year's Booker nominees is of their slight and inconsequential nature, On Chesil Beach isn't helping matters at all, in that it is such a non-excuse for a novel as to almost not exist. In fact, I can literally give you the entire plot of this 200-page, paperback-sized book in literally 177 words; and this is a major spoiler alert, by the way, because I'm not kidding, I really am about to tell you the entire storyline of On Chesil Beach from beginning to end, without skipping a single detail, in 177 words. Ready?

A young middle-class couple get married in England in 1962, and spend their wedding night on Chesil Beach. He only got married because he's horny as hell and lives in middle-class 1962 England, where getting married is the only chance you're going to have to get laid, and as a result has now become a cuckold employee of his upper-class father-in-law; she despises the very idea of sex altogether, but is too much of a coward to tell her husband, instead spending months psyching herself up into performing her upcoming "wifely duties." The wedding night arrives. He gets so excited that he has a premature ejaculation on his wife's stomach. She becomes so disgusted that she flees the room in a panic. He chases her down the beach, where they have an explosive argument based on mutual misunderstanding of each other's behavior. She leaves him that night and their marriage is annulled (presumably). And he spends the rest of his life thinking about "the relationship that was never meant to be."

No, dude, seriously, that's it; that's the entire freaking plotline of the book. Which, fine, I don't necessarily mind when it's a 10,000-word short story in a literary magazine, that I'm reading on a boring Sunday afternoon down at my neighborhood cafe; but seriously, as a standalone book for 22 damn dollars? And that the Booker committee has the gall to nominate as the best novel of the entire year? Seriously? Are you kidding me? It's hard for me to...

The greatest book about a premature ejaculation ever written--now why isn't that one of the cover blurbs? Too gushing? Or is it simply not something to be wantonly splashed across the cover of a book? Perhaps novels on the subject are just so sparse that such a blurb would hardly count as praise. Were this 1962 I might have said it was a book about a man arriving too soon, but that makes it sound as if Edward Mayhew was merely early for a party. Alternative subjects for a cover blurb and/or Goodreads review: young love, constrictive heteronormativity, the perks of premarital sex, failures in communication, objects in the rearview mirror, retro appetizers--the symbolism of the cherry--and the Art of the Novella.

I like reading Ian McEwan, but I never love his books. I don't know why. On Chesil Beach is a slim little volume you can read in an hour or two. It's about Florence and Edward's honeymoon night. They're both virgins during the pre-sexual revolution 1960s. Apparently, it's really pre-sexual revolution, because both of them know as much about sex as I know about credit default swaps.

The main thrust of the novel is an excruciating, step-by-step account of their honeymoon, which is held - coincidentally - on Chesil Beach. Tied into this story are the back stories of Edward and Florence. While McEwan does a great job of managing to fully describe and enliven two fictional lives, he does a bad job of making me care about them. These two are understood so fully, warts and all, that I actually kind of detested them.

MINOR SPOILER:

The climax of the book is a climax. Premature, to be exact. Yes, the narrative apex is premature ejaculation. Edward is ashamed. Florence is ashamed. Somehow, everything falls apart because of this. If you can believe that...well.

I suppose the point of the book is this couple's inability to communicate, and how there are times in life when we miss out on the best it has to offer because of this blindness. In this case, though, it just seems so stupid. It's ignorance compounded by willfulness, with both Ed and Flo reaping what they sowed.

“É assim, não fazendo nada, que todo o curso de uma vida pode ser alterado.”


No final de uma vida em constante mudança, em permanente interrogação, subsiste a grande questão: podia ter sido de outra maneira?
Podia, sim!

Από τα γνωστότερα έργα του Ίαν ΜακΓιούαν, ο οποίος έχει μια καλή φήμη για το έργο του. Το βιβλίο είναι μόλις 217 σελίδες με τεράστια γράμματα (!) και διαβάζεται εύκολα σε λίγες ώρες. Εξάλλου, κάτι μοναδικό στο έργο του συγγραφέα (έχω ξαναδιαβάσει βιβλίο του) είναι πως γράφει σε απλή γλώσσα και ο λόγος του ρέει πολύ εύκολα.

Ομολογώ ότι για τις περισσότερες σελίδες δεν έβρισκα για ποιο λόγο διαβάζω το βιβλίο. Το άφησα πολλές φορές στην άκρη με το μικρό μέγεθός του και την ημερομηνία επιστροφής στη βιβλιοθήκη να πλησιάζει να είναι οι δυο βασικοί παράγοντες που το τελείωσα.

Η υπόθεση απλή: δυο νεαροί έχουν μόλις παντρευτεί και βρίσκονται σε ένα ξενοδοχείο για να περάσουν την πρώτη νύχτα του γάμου τους, χωρίς να έχουν ολοκληρώσει άλλη φορά τη σχέση τους. Μέσα από τις σκέψεις και των δυο μαθαίνουμε για το background του καθένα, για τον τρόπο που γνωρίστηκαν, ερωτεύτηκαν, παντρεύτηκαν, καθώς και τα διαφορετικά άγχη που αντιμετωπίζουν τη σημερινή μέρα (για την ολοκλήρωση του γάμου, να το πω σεμνά).

Τα πράγματα πάνε λίγο περίεργα κατά τρόπο που θα μπορούσε να αποτελεί άρθρο του Vice και το ζευγάρι ακολουθεί μια πορεία λίγο διαφορετική από αυτή που θα ανέμενε. Οι τελευταίες πέντε σελίδες είναι πραγματικά συγκλονιστικές και αποτελούν την ουσία όλου του βιβλίου (το ανέβασα τουλάχιστον ένα αστεράκι στη βαθμολογία) και εκεί αναδεικνύεται η σπιρτάδα του συγγραφέα. Τα πάντα δένουν στο τέλος, αποκτούν νόημα και δείχνουν πώς τα πράγματα που ειπώθηκαν, καθώς και αυτά που δεν ειπώθηκαν, οδηγούν τη ζωή ενός ανθρώπου σε εντελώς διαφορετικά μονοπάτια. Μια μόνο λέξη θα μπορούσε να είναι σαν το φαινόμενο της πεταλούδας: ένας άνθρωπος θα έπαιρνε μια διαφορετική απόφαση και η ζωή του θα ήταν εντελώς διαφορετική. Εξάλλου, δεν είμαστε παρά οι αποφάσεις που παίρνουμε κάθε στιγμή!