**WARNING: Don't read this if you don't want the ending spoiled!**

This book...I hate it! It's beautiful, every word of it is gorgeous, but it's as if the author spends all this time painstakingly crafting a really detailed, intricate vessel for you (I'm thinking of a boat :))and then just before your journey's over he snatches it out from under you & you sink. Why go to such lengths describing the lovers, and the war, and Briony & the nursing when in the end none of it even matters? The problem with Atonement is that there is no atonement, which, of course, is the point. This book was described to me as 'haunting' and it definitely is- haunting & depressing. A story doesn't have to have a happy ending to be good, I mean, this is a great book, really, but I felt really empty & hollow when it was over. The part at the end when the author says that the story is the only part that matters b/c no one will ever remember the real people or the actual events anyway was crushing! It's true, I know, and I don't really have a problem w/ realism...but I have a big problem with death. It freaks me out. I have a really unhealthy fear of it. Especially unjust death. It just pisses me off more than I can explain. Maybe I've just been feeling too poetic lately, listening to too much sensitive-artist music, but I can't stand that Briony kills 2 people and then just conjures them back up from the dead as if it never happened and no one else even mentions it. It makes me think too much about actual events, politics, & things. I don't want to run out of time, I have things I want to do here, and I don't want to be reminded that the truth is it doesn't matter whether I run out of time or not because eventually there isn't going to be anyone left who ever knew me, or my family, or anyone we ever knew. Ugh. I'm making myself sick w/ this. I'm told the movie is really good b/c it's beautiful w/out being quite as harsh at the end. I think I need to see it so I can stop thinking about the book. It's waking me up at night, or rather it's waking me up in the morning realizing that I've been thinking about it all night. I hate it, but it really is good.

There are fantastic stories and there are fantastic writers. I think not every book is made of either of these components. And presumably it doesn't need to, because some plots are so great that they speak for themselves. Again, other works shine with a precise and grandiose use of language, so the actual story doesn't have to be so extraordinary to sweep the reader along.

For me, Ian McEwan's Atonement is one of the novels that can do both.

I could write you down a brief summary here, tell you about the tragic love between Cecilia and Robbie, of Briony, whose young age and unbridled imagination affects the course of so many stories before and during World War II.
But for me, Atonement is a novel that shows me the high quality and linguistic intricacies with which a novel can be written. Not for nothing was the novel described by the #TIME as a "deep psychological masterpiece," because the images that ran through my head while reading, in black and white, befitting the grim current events, didn't make me let go of the book even once.

The introspective approach of an emerging writer such as Briony made me fall in love with the process of becoming a writer. Questioning one's actions is one of the messages I took from this book. Just as the motivation and inspiration to continue to improve my own writing skills. I could never write at a McEwan level today, but who knows... maybe in some 40 years perhaps.

Aunque me ha dejado emocionalmente devastada (y eso que ya iba advertida, pues la película de 2007 protagonizada por Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan y James McAvoy me fascina), esta novela me ha MARAVILLADO.
La magnífica prosa de Ian McEwan, tan preciosista, llena de lirismo, la estructura narrativa de la novela, la habilidad en el cambio de perspectivas y, sobre todo, la magnífica construcción de los personajes han hecho que la lectura de cada página haya sido una auténtica delicia para mí.
Es una novela que he degustado lentamente, me he recreado en ella, me he dejado llevar por la propuesta de McEwan... y me ha conquistado. Hasta tal punto, en que tenía que interrumpir a veces la lectura, porque empatizaba tanto con Cecilia y Robbie, que sufría mucho (porque sabía lo que se avecinaba, he ahí el principal handicap de conocer la trama a la perfección), y necesitaba parar.
Me quito también el sombrero ante la construcción y evolución del personaje de Briony (a la que yo tengo bautizada desde la película como "la p*** niña de Expiación"), a la que seguiré odiando sin reservas, pero no por ello dejaré de reconocer que es un grandísimo personaje.
Y Lola y Marshall al infierno de cabeza, por favor.
Y ya, por último, la última gran genialidad de Ian McEwan con el giro final de la breve cuarta parte (o epílogo), que no por menos sabido por mí me ha resultado menos devastador, sorprendente y bien hilado.
Desde el punto de vista emocional, la romántica empedernida que hay en mí) hubiera preferido que acabara en la página 410 (de mi edición... es decir, el final de la tercera parte), pero literariamente reconozco que las siguientes 25 páginas la convierten en una novela perfecta, redonda; muy especialmente la última página que es donde "te estalla la cabeza" (y se pone en marcha el grifo lacrimógeno... sniff).
Ese título... qué bien puesto está ese título, con ese doble encaje perfecto: tanto con el "final" de la tercera parte, donde crees, inocente de ti, que ya entiendes por qué se titula así, como con el final "definitivo", donde la dimensión de sus matices es, sencillamente, perfecta.
Puedo entender que a otras personas no les despierte tanta pasión, pero desde luego a mí esta novela no podría gustarme más

Atonement is a magnificent masterpiece that showcases Ian McEwan’s ability to tell a shattering and sublime story. I re-read this novel when I was casting about for a literary work to satisfying my longing for impeccable prose and a strong storyline. I was amazed at how fresh this story read after a lapse of almost a decade and its ability to hold my interest even though I already knew the story. What is perhaps more gratifying is picking up nuances I had missed in my previous reading. One of the salient discoveries is the potential of the written word or stories for great evil.

Sadly, Atonement is a devastating story about a wrongdoing for which there is no atonement. It is shattering and horrifying because the crime is committed by a 13-year-old girl who is barely out of childhood and ignorant of adult rites and conventions of behavior. She spends an entire lifetime doing penance, seeking forgiveness and trying to atone for her misdeeds.

Briony Tallis, the young protagonist, keeps her drawers neat and locks her diaries; she is a champion of an orderly world, ‘one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so.’ What works ironically to Briony’s detriment is her precocious writing talent that is matched only by her fertile imagination. On a hot summer’s day, Briony observes from a distance a flirtatious interaction between Cecilia, her 23-year-old sister, and her Cambridge schoolmate Robbie Turner, their close family friend and son of their charlady. Robbie appears to have put her sister in a compromising position, an observation that upsets Briony’s sense of an orderly world and certainly her expectations of her sister. Two other events, including Robbie’s crude but unintended note to Cecilia that Briony makes it her business to read, are similarly misconstrued. Worse yet, they become material for a new story she is composing in her mind. That summer marks a watershed for Briony who sees herself as stepping away from the world of princesses and castles and being initiated into the strange world of adults, which calls for a new narrative. Subsequently, Briony’s innocent but wrongful appraisal of a social situation leads to a guileless and promising young man being imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The false charges also cause a prolonged estrangement within the prominent Tallis family. Briony struggles with the certainty of her incriminating testimony, but her youth and urgency to grow up compel her to stick to her version of the truth: ‘It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.’And ‘As far as she was concerned, everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past.’ Briony has been unable to distinguish real life from the stories she is writing in her head. The damage, however, is irreparable.

Beyond a personal tragedy, Atonement captures the hypocrisy of life among the upper classes of British society in the 1930s. It also recounts with searing force the carnage of the years leading to World War II. Parts Two and Three which centered on the life of worn out soldiers trudging through the depleted countryside mortally in need of water and food, and of nurses working round the clock to provide care for the wounded are excruciatingly painful to read. McEwan highlights how in such dire circumstances where life seems untenable, humans make resolutions to live differently, aspire to find comfort in the simple and ordinary, and cling onto every shred of hope that provides a reason to live.

As I expected, McEwan provided a reading experience that is totally engrossing and luxurious. His incisive prose lays bare the subtle undercurrents of emotions that are guarded secrets of the characters’ interior life. There are also pages and pages of precise prose that capture a sense of place and time whether it be the gorgeous precincts of the Tallis home in the country, the hostility of beleaguered towns ravaged by war, or a cringe-worthy hospital scene where a blood-soaked bandage is being unraveled. Indisputably, it is writing at its finest. Thank you, Mr. McEwan.

1,5/5

Czułam, że to nie będzie książka dla mnie. Nie ze względu na fabułę, ale styl autora, który dla mnie jest niepotrzebnie dokładny i momentami chaotyczny.
Kilka minusów:
Beznamiętnie określenie relacji bohaterów i rozwinięcie osobowości tylko kilku z nich.
Niepotrzebne zabiegi cliffhangerowe, przez które nawet sama nie wiedziałam czy powinnam się domyślać tego co jest oczywiste, czy nie.
Nagły obrót sytuacji i przeniesienie nas w wojenny dokument, pełen opisów ran i zapachów tychże ran. Mam wrażenie, że to nie rozwinęło żadnej ścieżki i było po prostu wciśnięte na siłę
Najgorsze z tego wszystkiego było zakończenie, które dla mnie było pozbawione emocji. Aż się cieszyłam, że to był już koniec tego (krótkiego) audiobooka.
Styl autora nie dla mnie, bo pewnie gdybym poznała tę historię w inny sposób (chociażby oglądając wcześniej film) to podobałaby mi się nieco bardziej.
Przepraszam!

**NOTE: Spoilers included: I like the experience of reading a book and then seeing the movie, which is why I read this book. Both the book and the movie are highly acclaimed, so what could be a better choice?

I haven’t yet seen the movie since I just finished the book today, but perhaps I should have read "No Country For Old Men" instead.

100 pages into this book, I wanted to just give up. It felt like something that would have been forced on me by high school English teachers, with all the descriptive, flowery language about British aristocratic characters, scenery, and architecture in 1935 that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about. Were it not for the knowledge that Briony was going to commit a crime (based on the back of the book), I would have definitely put it down. Even so, I thought the crime would have been something worse than perjury – taking approximately 170+ pages to build up to the crime better damn well be murder! (joking) – but nonetheless, her crime tore her family apart, which was bad. But still, taking up 170+ pages to describe one afternoon (as many people on this site have noted) was unnecessary. And even though the writing style was beautiful, elegant, etc., it seemed like nothing really *happened;* it was mostly thoughts, memories, and physical descriptions, much of which were irrelevant to the actual plot. Maybe that’s just my preference for reading books in which the characters actually DO something and TALK to each other. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a little description is ok and necessary, but this just took it to the extreme. I know McEwan was just trying to show the depth of the characters at play, thus getting the reader to care more about them and make the impact of what was about to happen more forceful, but he overdid it to the point of making me not care at all. I didn’t think the plot of this book really needed such in-depth description.

However, Parts 2 & 3 changed gears and definitely picked up; it was like reading a completely different book! I enjoyed reading about Robbie’s traumatic escape from France during the Battle of Dunkirk, and Briony’s experience as a nurse tending to the wounded/dead of World War II. Both sections were a refreshing contrast to the superficial, snobbish feel of the first section of the book (not that war is refreshing).

One thing I thought the book was missing and should have elaborated on more rather than the tedious Part 1 was the immediate aftermath of Briony’s crime. After the crime occurs, the plot immediately jumps to Robbie in France during the war, and we are told very little of what happened in the 3 year period of time between the crime itself, Robbie’s prison sentence, and his eventual deployment. We know that Robbie had aspired to go to medical school, but was the outcome of the novel a result of Briony’s crime or World War II? Even if Briony committed no crime, wasn’t Robbie’s being drafted to the war and eventual separation from Cecilia inevitable?

Despite being unsure if the novel’s outcome was the result of war or a childhood crime, unlike what some posters on this site have written, I actually liked the ending. I liked the revelation that the story was a novel within a novel, and an attempt at atonement that never happens in (Briony’s fictional) reality. If Briony had went on to talk to her family, lawyers, and legally retracted her false statement, and then Cecilia and Robbie lived happily ever after and forgave Briony, the novel would have been merely a glorified version of Briony’s juvenile The Trials of Arabella. Maybe it’s just me, but happy, neat endings in movies, books, etc. sometimes just get old. Life is just not that perfect, and the fact is, seemingly innocuous actions in the present may lead to consequences that can never be redeemed.

Overall, the length and weightiness of the first part of the book is why I only gave it 2 stars, but if that section had been condensed into, say, 50 pages or less, I would have given it 5 stars.

Wow.

Virginia Woolf.
La guerra.
L’infermiera.
L’Espiazione.

Quattro voci, quattro toni, quattro storie, che si fondono in un’unica massa di emozioni potentissime.

Non sarò mai capace di condensare ciò che il libro mi ha trasmesso. L’ho iniziato ad amare dalle primissime pagine, da quando ho capito che lo stile narrativo era vicinissimo a quello della Woolf. Il libro di è incanalato nei miei pensieri, mi ha fatto amare i personaggi e me li ha fatti rivalutare continuamente, travolgendo la prima impressione che avevo avuto. Se non è maestria questa... Un McEwan magistrale. Davvero.

Un piccolo cosmo di emozioni e sensazioni che si aprono agli occhi del lettore. Ero una lettrice ignara (del libro) prima di fiondarsi nelle sue pagine: è stato un bene, ho bevuto ogni parola ed ogni frase. Magnifico.

Considering this entire novel is forged out of an implausible and highly insensitively described incident it's incredibly successful in its artistry and reach. The incident in question is a sexual assault. The victim has already been described as a drama queen who loves nothing better than to be the centre of attention. There's then nothing in the text to suggest she has undergone anything as serious as rape. Initially, I assumed it was a bit of hanky panky because she wasn't depicted as being overly traumatised. It was a shock to later hear she had been raped. Then she protects the rapist by agreeing to accuse someone completely innocent of the assault. McEwan conveniently skips the trial when the wrong man is convicted of the crime. This belittling of rape becomes more uncomfortable later when we discover the victim marries her rapist. So, there's some clumsy plotting and some highly dodgy sexual politics (McEwan perhaps showing his age) but I'm going to judge the book on its literary qualities, not its sexual politics, and for that reason definitely a five star read. I especially enjoyed the descriptive writing of the retreat of Robbie as part of the British expeditionary forces to Dunkirk.

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? If the answer was yes then the world was unbearably complicated, with over two billion voices, everyone's thoughts of equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. Though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this in an arid way but didn't feel it.”

“The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. She no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write about characters and plots than a modern composer could write a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time. She had read Virginia Woolf and thought that a great transformation was being was being worked in human nature itself, and that only a new kind of fiction could capture the essence of the change.”

************
‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker and James Tait Prizes. McEwan had previously won the 1998 Booker for ‘Amsterdam’ and was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011. It is set during three time periods, pre-WWII, WWII and post-WWII, during the time it was written. Made into a movie, it was nominated for seven American Academy Awards and fourteen British Academy Awards where it won Best Picture. It’s a coming of age story of a girl into a woman. The author can’t convincingly write from a female perspective so he uses a third person narrative with universal themes.

Briony Tallis is a precocious though not fully mature girl of thirteen, and a writer dotingly encouraged by her mother Emily. She has a much older brother Leon who lives in London. Her older sister Cecilia graduated from Cambridge and is training to be a nurse in a London hospital. She is effectively an only child who grows up in the 1935 English countryside, ensconced within a world of carefully curated fantasy, commanding the undivided attention of her mother while she weaves her narrative spell. Her cousins closer in age to her are coming to visit, asked to act in a play she is staging for the library.

The nine year old twins Pierrot and Jackson and their fifteen year old sister Lola arrive after a two hundred mile journey from the north. Briony is oblivious that they have been sent to escape the divorce of their parents, may stay indefinitely and aren’t in the least bit interested in acting. They agree to perform but demand to pick their own roles. Lola chooses Arabella, the melancholy beauty that Briony had created for herself. Deflated she retires to her room to sulk in self pity. Lola takes over directing and Briona realizes that she has never before been confronted with adversity during the course of her life.

Briony spies Cecilia from the windows of the estate with the half-adopted caretaker Robbie, and she imagines he is proposing to her. She thinks it her duty to end the affair, as she felt compelled to save Leon from a string of unworthy girfriends. She observes Cecilia removing her clothes, not realizing it is to retrieve a vase that Robbie carelessly broke in the fountain. Leon arrives from the city with his friend Paul as Cecilia wonders if he could be the man she marries. Suddenly in love Robbie writes a salacious letter of apology and sends it to her by mistake. He is attending dinner with the family later that night.

Asked to deliver the letter Briony opens it and is convinced that she needs to rescue her older sister from Robbie, while Cecilia is more offended by her invasion of privacy than its contents. The story is told from various points of view. What seemed to be a sexual assault to Briony was a consensual act. Its consummation resembles the soft core erotica found in romance novels, sprawling across pages before interrupted by Briony. The twins run away and during the search Briony sees Lola being raped and blames Robbie. In the dark they weren’t able to see who the antagonist was but he’s arrested and tried on her accusation.

Part II opens during wartime in 1940 with Robbie leading soldiers across the French countryside on his way to Dunkirk and across the Channel to Cecilia. She had studied nursing in London while he spent five years in prison and army basic training. The pace picks up halfway through the book during the action, with its Messerschmitt fighters and machine gun nests. Robbie has hopes of returning to England, clearing his name and marrying Cecilia, but hasn’t forgiven Briony who is now willing to retract her testimony. He muses that it was done out of jealousy for Cecilia as screaming Stuka bombers attack the roadside.

On the beach twenty thousand wounded and exhausted men await evacuation. An RAF man is lynched by infantry troops over lack of air support against the Luftwaffe. During the brutality of war Robbie begins to doubt his and Cecilia’s love, haunted by memories of what he’s seen, as the boats arrive from England. In Part III Briony is working at the hospital where Cecilia had served. Training as a nurse, her childhood pretensions challenged in the military environment and her intentions to follow Cecilia’s study of literature at Cambridge vanish with dreams of becoming a writer. She is rejected by publishers and her sister.

The publishers critique reflects McEwan’s personal criticism of ‘Atonement’. Briony treats the wounded arriving from France and she hopes to find forgiveness from Robbie and Cecilia. She has an urge to speak out at Lola’s wedding to Paul, the only two others who know the secret of the assault. Visiting Cecilia after years of their estrangement, there is a tense encounter with Robbie which ends unresolved. The story continues in 1999 London with Briony as an aging writer losing her memory still at work on her memoirs, the basis of the novel that the reader is reading, suggesting a confluence of fact and fiction.

The book isn’t based on McEwan’s own experiences, its main characters animated inventions divided into three parts of exposition, conflict and resolution. As it is written in his exquisite but laborious prose enthusiasts of McEwan may admire the passages of meta-fictional musings, dwelling upon Briony’s literary vision and creative process, likely those of McEwan himself. The first hundred pages of this book are painfully drawn out but afterwards the action mounts considerably. The passage of time alters people’s perceptions and McEwan employs stream of consciousness writing to reveal their thoughts.

This was the favourite novel of a friend of mine who died suddenly a few years ago. She loved it so much that she refused to see the film adaptation because, she said, it couldn't possibly be as good as the novel. I, on the other hand, saw the film without having read the book because when the film was released I was still in the won't-read-McEwan stage of my life that lasted from 1988 or 1989 until two or three years ago.

Anyway, I quite liked the film, or at least it made an impression on me at the time. Although I've only seen it once, I can still see images: Cecilia's green dress and the beach at Dunkirk particularly come to mind. I also remembered the plot, and therefore its twist. So when I read the novel, there were no suprises. Knowing what was going to happen, I paid attention to see if I could pick up the clues and yes, they were there in the text. Not that I think a reader who didn't know the plot could work it all out just on the basis of the clues, but at least McEwan wasn't cheating.

Anyway, while I don't think McEwan is ever going to be my favourite novelist. There's a brittleness to him (or something, I'm not quite sure what it is) that I find unappealing. However, in this novel he poses important questions about love, guilt, redemption, truth and the nature and purpose of fiction. McEwan writes excellent prose and he does the meta-fiction thing extremely well. I doubt I'll be reading this again, but I'm glad that I've read it once. Now I understand why my friend loved it so much. I just wish she was still here so we could talk about it.

4,5. Estamos en 1935 y la casa de campo de la familia Tallis está llena de expectación, pues el hijo mayor del matrimonio regresa a casa desde la universidad junto a su buen amigo Marshall. Emily, su madre, con sus terribles achaques, la pequeña e imaginativa Brionny, y Cecilia, la hermana mediana, están deseosas de reencontrarse con Leon. Robbie, el hijo de la limpiadora o los deprimidos primos de los Tallis serán otros personajes que se sumarán a esta reunión. Lo que empieza como una inocente y dulce pasión, provocará un desastre que afectará a la vida de todos los presentes.

"Expiación" tiene un algo que engancha desde las primeras hojas, esa sensación de que algo va a ocurrir, de que algo está a punto de desatarse, crea la adicción propia de un una novela de suspense. La ambientación es uno de sus puntos fuertes, esa casa de campo que se describe como poco atractiva, pero que constantemente es protagonista de la historia, ayuda a crear ese aura tensa, donde estás constantemente esperando que ocurra el "incidente" que la narración promete. Me flipan esos libros donde parece que no pasa mucho, pero pasa de todo.

Una cosa que me ha pasado con esta novela es que los personajes van evolucionando continuamente en cuanto a lo que me inspiraban. Los ejemplos más claros son Robbie y Cecilia, que pasan de resultarme interesantes pero sin más, a hacerme empatizar de una forma increíble hasta el punto de emocionarme, o Brionny, personaje al que amé mucho en la primera parte y que acabé no soportando. Hablaría mucho más del personaje de Brionny, porque es digno de analizar en profundidad porque sus acciones son dignas de ello, pero entraría en el spoiler con facilidad, y mejor no destripar nada y que todo el mundo se acerque a ciegas a la historia.

Quizás lo que más pesado se me ha hecho es esa segunda parte que rompe totalmente con la primera, y pasa a trasladarnos a un campo de batalla bélico, que no me esperaba en absoluto y se me hizo algo cansino y repetitivo. Por lo demás es una obra impecable, narrada de una manera absorbente y con muchas reflexiones sobre la condición humana que me han cautivado por completo. El final es simplemente magistral. Ian McEwan, ha sido un placer conocerte. La pregunta ahora es ¿con qué obra del autor continúo?

Πήγαινε για τριάρι, στην αρχή. Μια γραφή πυκνή, να σχολιάζει τα πάντα, κάθε κίνηση, κάθε υπαινιγμό και ιριδισμό των χαρακτήρων του. Δεν ήταν άσχημη, όχι. Άπαξ και την συνήθιζες, είχε κάτι το παιγνιώδες τελικά. Μακριά από τον διδακτισμό, αντιμετώπιζε τους ανθρώπους ως πλάσματα προς παρατήρηση. Σα να έχουν μπει στο μικροσκόπιο. Κανείς δεν γλύτωνε, κανείς δεν εξωραϊζόταν. Μα, τελικά, το βιβλίο αυτό ακριβώς λέει: όσο νεαρός και αν είσαι, διεκδικώντας την συμπόνοια και την αγάπη ολάκερου του κόσμου, τα σφάλματά σου και οι αδυναμίες σου είνα ικανές να κάνον μεγάλο κακό.

Ωστόσο, η γραφή αυτή απαιτεί κόπο, εξουθενώνει, και έρχεται η διάρθρωση του βιβλίου σε τρία μέρη να το σώσει. Όπου στα επόμενα δύο, η αφήση χαλαρώνει, και ο αναγνώστης ανακουφίζεται, αξιολογώντας όπως του πρέπει εκείνο το πρώτο μέρος.

Κάπως στα χνάρια του Ίβλιν Γουό, του Σόμερεστ Μομ. Αυτής της Βρεττανικής λογοτεχνίας, όπου ένα επιβλητικό σπίτι είναι το κέντρο μιας προπολεμικής/μεσοπολεμικής ιστορίας, με τους χαρακτήρες του, χρόνια μετά να επισκεπτονται το σπίτι, και ανακουφισμένοι να θυμούνται μια ιστορία.

Τελικά, ωραίο βιβλίο. Γλυκό και στιβαρό μαζί.