Una storia profondamente malata, che mi ha ricordato molto Abbiamo sempre vissuto nel castello per l’atmosfera macabra, ma senza la forza del libro di Shirley Jackson. A pochi mesi di distanza dalla morte improvvisa del padre, quattro fratelli - Jack, Julie, Susan e il piccolo Tom - si ritrovano a dover far fronte anche alla malattia e alla scomparsa della madre. Per non venire separati e allontanati dai servizi sociali, i ragazzi decidono di non denunciare il decesso e seppellire la madre in un baule in cantina, per continuare poi la loro vita “normale”. Da quel momento, però, si innescano delle dinamiche perverse nei rapporti tra loro, mentre in casa regnano sporcizia, abbandono e puzza di cadavere. Morboso, inquietante, malato, marcio. Se ancora non conoscete McEwan, evitate questo libro e leggete piuttosto Espiazione o La ballata di Adam Henry.

CW: Detailed sex scenes, incest.

What an unsettling little book. I read this about 5 years ago and I can still remember with clarity some of the more disturbing scenes. I don't think I liked it at the time and probably would have given it 1 star immediately after. To be honest I don't think it is a book anyone can 'like', but we can appreciate how the author created tension and a feeling of unease throughout the entire novel. Quality writing of an unpleasant book.

It's a shame, because it had such potential to be a great read but it was a disappointment. It was like I was reading an essay written by a 15 year old with not much talent. Superficial and boring.
The book starts and finishes with an incest scene, that offers nothing to the plot. I would assume that these scenes were included in an effort to provoke and make us forget how poorly this book was written.
It was a complete waste of (my) time..

My first impulse was to go straight to Goodreads and read the reviews of all my Goodreads friends who have read it and deemed it important enough to write something about it. And that's a lot of them. I knew about the author and I'd always assumed that he was indeed a good writer, even an important one, that I'd get to read eventually, like Proust or Dostoievski (I promise I will read them. Eventually…).

My second impulse now is to write something of my own before reading other opinions. Make my own g*d-d***ed mind about this book. I have a brain, I've read all kinds of literature and nonfiction. I should be able to articulate something here. I can be funny when needed and I can shower a book with praise when I feel that it's earned it. And I should make this review about the book, not about me.

Am I really one who would give praise to a book for its readability? Is this two day span a measure upon which to base my score? I proudly awarded two stars to books from the first Red Rising trilogy. And they were a lot bigger and went by a lot faster. So I guess that I need to find another dimension to score. Shock value should be a good one, since I've given away five stars in the past just because of a clever and daring choice of subject matter. Let's keep that in working memory for a bit. There's also the issue of relatedness. How much I identify with different aspects of a book. Does the book tickle the right parts of that 1.5 kg convoluted mass of neurons and supporting tissue that make me who I am? You bet it does.

And I felt the tickling from the first sentence to the last one. It was something new, it was daring, it was fresh (until the body started to bloat, at least). It was a Lord of the Flies scenario without the need to survive a hostile environment. It turned into a meltdown of societal values in a manner and to an extent that spoke to me from an epistemological perspective. What does it mean to lose your compass? What is the possible extent of the slippage in a 20th century European setting? Does this say something about how compatible human nature is with the current state of western civilization? Are the drives that we feel now compatible with our survival as a species or have they been perverted by everything, from the nuclear family to our modern living standards? Could these slippages from the norm and their concentration be the product of civilization or just random variations in the spectrum of human personality?

And that's just scratching the surface here. In light of the right kind of tickles and the daring subject matter, aided by an airy prose style, I award this work all the five stars that I have to give. Now let's go over to the friends review section for an in depth analysis.

I'm not surprised that Goodreads recommends J.M. Coetzee to readers who enjoyed this, because my experience of J.M. Coetzee was similar to my experience with this book, which was "Yes, a very good writer but ewwwwwwww!"

I have not read Ian McEwan before, and if all his books are like this, I'm unlikely to try him again. I don't mind a disturbing book with unlikable characters who do disgusting things, but you have to give some reason to want to keep reading besides just admiring how skillfully the writer describes these sick, damaged people, and all I thought about as I read The Cement Garden was that I was glad it was short because I wanted to get through it and be done with it.

The plot is very simple: four children live alone in an old house after both their parents died. They've managed to keep secret the fact that they're orphans, so rather than be put "in care" as the Brits say, they now have the house all to themselves, thanks to regular payments from some account their mother set up before she died which the oldest girl, Julie, collects from the post office.

Being a family that was already dysfunctional before their parents died (the older three were already playing incestuous "doctor" games), they pretty much turn feral once they no longer have adult supervision. The two girls, Julie and Sue, are relatively "normal" in the sense that they can present themselves as ordinary functional human beings; Julie is very pretty, is the only one who goes out, and soon she has a "bloke," an older man who is bound to bring complications into this tidy arrangement. Sue, the second-youngest, spends all her time scribing grim thoughts in her journal.

Meanwhile, Jack, the first person narrator, stops bathing or changing his clothes, and much of the book is spent dwelling on the details of the filth beneath his fingernails, his acne, and his masturbatory habits, this being pretty much his sole pastime aside from slouching around the house inflicting his stench and his bad attitude on his siblings. Tom, the youngest boy, bullied at school, first decides he wants to be a girl, because girls don't get hit (his sisters try to disabuse him of this notion, to no avail, but then encourage him in his cross-dressing), and then decides he wants to be a baby again, which Julie cheerfully facilitates.

Meanwhile, Jack is clearly obsessed with older sister Julie in a non-fraternal way, and while Julie seems normal, even motherly, on the surface, being what passes for the voice of reason and authority in this broken household with dishes moldering in the kitchen, she clearly enjoys the power she has over her brother and is learning how to subtly push those buttons.

It is hard to imagine any of these creatures growing up psychologically healthy.

Their dystopian Never Never Land might go on indefinitely, except that there is a little secret in their cellar, hinted at by the title, and since none of the kids are big on smarts or planning, it is bound to end badly.

By the end of the book I was about as grossed out as I have ever been by a book not written by Robert Heinlein or Piers Anthony.

My problem, and the reason I am giving The Cement Garden 2 stars despite being written by a Man Booker Prize winner, is that I failed to see the point and utterly failed to enjoy anything about it. It's a macabre, almost gothic tale set in that grim, stark English urban landscape that Pink Floyd was singing about back about the same time McEwan wrote this. It's skillful and unsettling and maybe that's all McEwan intended, and surely there are people who like books that exist only to twist all their revulsion dials. But I wanted to drink bleach after reading this, and I'm only giving it 2 stars rather than 1 because I cannot deny it's very well-written and very effective at impacting the reader.

No

I had found throughout my professional life, that little remained to surprise me. I had observed much suffering, violence, severe maiming injuries, rape, incest and certainly death, etc. So, when I state that this novel was disturbing, it is because of the unsettling events that occur and the manner in which McEwan has written it. Certainly, his books contain harsh, difficult topics. The aura surrounding this tale is dark, indeed.

The focus is on four children and how they coped following their parents' deaths. McEwan did manage to convey the atmosphere of gloom and helplessness. He was able to identify adolescent behaviors astutely. Yet, this was an unpleasant reading experience for me. Despite the tension which became increasingly prevalent, it was not difficult to conjecture how this would conclude.

I could say that perhaps since this was one of McEwan's much earlier efforts it was not his best, but he followed this book with many successful offerings. Although many compare this style to Enduring Love and Atonement , both of which captivated me, I have been unable to place this novel in the same class.

- Macabre. Dark. Depraved. Evocative. Complex. Weird. Bizarre.

At 138 pages, this novella packs a punch. It follows four traumatized siblings (Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom) who retreat into their own world following the death of their father, and then sometime later, their mother. The narrator is Jack, a teenage boy, who recounts the events that happened to him and his siblings in a deceptively emotionless monotone.

Fearful of being separated by social services, the children decide to bury their mother’s body in a trunk they seal in wet cement, in the basement. From there on, the children live by their own rules.

Without any parent or caregiver, Jack and Julie’s relationship becomes progressively sexualized, Sue withdraws to her room and writes to her mother in her diary, and Tom regresses into his infantile world and cries and screams to be mothered.

A difficult read in parts,  The Cement Garden possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies.

Ian McEwan is known to skirt the fringes of society with his writing, to test the limits of what we can handle when his characters cling to desires that are beyond the spectrum of socially acceptable.

Glad I read it. Relieved I've finished.

از شخصیت دِرِک متنفر بودم
میدونم که این آرزویی غیرممکن هست ولی خدا هیچ خونه و هیچ کودک خردسالی رو بدون پدر و مادر نکنه....

The Cement Garden is a very dark coming of age tale - what adolescents have to do when they're left on their own? The novel is the sort of a disturbing answer to this not so simple question.
“Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do – here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.”
Isolation ruins the ordinary human values and it sets its own moral laws.

A great first book of 2018 with a gripping story told in Ian McEwan’s unique style. Spent an interesting evening on my couch with ‘The Cement Garden’ and love that I’ve read one more book by one of my most favourite authors. After being so disappointed by ‘Nutshell’, the latest McEwan I’ve read, ‘The Cement Garden’ was once again perfect for me. The creepy story mixed with weird characters is exactly what I’m looking for in a book. Considering the fact that this is the story of four children, all deeply influenced by their parent’s death, the story focused too much on Jack and Julie whilst you learn hardly anything about Sue’s and Tom’s feelings.

This was McEwan’s very first novel, which earned him the fame and the nickname Ian Macabre. It was narrated by a 15-year-old boy on his life with his three young siblings in a secluded big house shortly after the death of both parents. They grew up in an isolated and dysfunctional family. The lack of adult supervision and sexual experiences, and the yearning for kinship while desiring individual space, led them to explorations and experiments that beyond inexplicable.
It was haunting and disturbing to say the least. Comparing to his later works I’ve read, it was simpler, more straightforward storytelling, but similarly atmospheric, with equally skilled character craftsmanship. I felt his prose was smooth, but not quite as dazzling as in his more recent books.