Pausa de umas horas, na leitura actual, para revisitar um dos meus autores preferidos, numa obra escrita em 1978...

Uma narrativa na primeira pessoa, contada pelo filho mais velho, de uma família de quatro filhos. Basicamente descreve o que os filhos fazem de si mesmos quando os pais morrem relativamente próximos um ao outro. De si, as crianças já são isoladas e estranhas, e vemos como lidam com o cuidado de si mesmas. Vemos, também, como os seus papéis e interacções mudam depois que o segundo progenitor falece...

O Jardim do Cimento, de Ian McEwan, claramente não é para todos. Há vários incidentes extremamente perturbadores ao longo do livro, que podem fazer alguns leitores se perguntarem por que o compraram e onde fica a livraria mais próxima para devolvê-lo... Existem outros grupos, de natureza religiosa/fascista (os dois nem sempre são mutuamente exclusivos) que podem tê-lo incluído na sua lista de "coisas para queimar".

Nas mãos de um escritor inferior, grande parte deste livro pareceria vulgar. No entanto, nas mãos capazes e brilhantes de McEwan, o livro é perturbadoramente bonito. O livro é muito curto e dizer mais qualquer coisa sobre ele revela tudo. Basta dizer que O Jardim do Cimento é uma leitura brilhante e envolvente, que parece ter acabado antes de começar.

Gosto quando um livro me faz pensar e me enerva. Este, claramente, fez o seu trabalho...

Will ever these tales of incest cease? Well, my true guess is no, for they sure do captivate (lookin' atchu V.C. Andrews [...R.I.P., girl]!). Another case in point: this early novel from major Nobel contender (I'm certain of this, right?) Ian McEwan. "The Cement Garden" is considered by critics to be "Lord of the Flies"-like in its plot structure and because it contains young protagonists. But I must venture to say that it mostly resembles an early version of Bertolucci's "Dreamers" (of course by that I mean its novel predecessor)-- this is similarly an enchanted but truly megagrueling experience. After "Atonement", "Cement Garden" takes second place in the Maestro of English Prose's impressive (though... inconsistent) repertoire.

“I’ve lost all sense of time. It feels like it’s always been like this” (149).

Read and finished in 2008.

This was the second novel by Ian McEwan I’ve read. It was a haunting, kinky novel that is also a perverse fairy tale meets “The Lord of the Flies”.

Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom have lost their parents. Father dies first as does Mother. Then Julie seemingly begins a perverse affair with the older mature Derek.

Julie and Jack become the parental figures, taking on the responsibilities of raising Sue and Tom. Then Jack and Julie develop an incestuous bond where it climaxes in a sexual encounter where their love is solidified, but complicated that they live in a gothic house where everything is in shambles, and there are no rules. A game of dominance begins to happen between Jack and Julie of which can be seen as a haunting end.

Read this in about two hours, total. It was a bit mixed but I've marked it high for reasons I'll try to explain. The main character is a self-centered brute, but they're all pretty screwed up and emotionally damaged. The big taboos it deals with stick out eagerly begging to be broken. Feels like this was written by someone trying very hard to shock, and it does this with varying effect. It's still a very odd story, don't get me wrong, but it's also desperately sad. Beautiful writing raises this up from outright pulp, which I guess is the point - it's occasionally graphic, shameless with grimy detail of frustrated, callous adolescence. I think that above all, this gave me a sense of wish-fulfilment for the protagonist, Jack. Like it's a fantasy he came up with on a hot boring summer (and I did wonder where their telly was, though it is set in the 1970s..). As a piece of 'literature' it hits all the marks of borderline nihilism and gleefully askew actions, and SPOILER


although the sledgehammer didn't quite get used how i expected, it was probably the fastest way to round things off...

Did you guys knew that Ian McEwan started out as a horror novelist? The Cement Garden is his first novel - it's creepy and disturbing, though much of these aspects has dimmed with time. It was published in 1978, when a lot of creepy fiction got printed (Flowers in The Attic anyone?) and was billed as "shocking, morbid, full of repellent imagery". It's an extremely quick read - only 120 pages long - and written in clear, concise style - in truth it's more of a short story, but at 120 pages it never feels bloated. I don't think it's particularly memorable, but everyone has to start somewhere.

I came to this book via the excellent 1993 movie version that starred Charlotte Gainsbourg, the gamine, androgynous French actress whose odd beauty -- inherited from her eccentric composer father, Serge, and her svelte model mother Jane Birkin -- I admit an attraction to. As usual she dropped trou in the movie, so I was not disappointed.

Gainsbourg was about 21 when she made the film, but was portraying a 16 or 17-year-old adolescent or thereabouts, and looked the part; her character, Julie, seemed to be the focal point of the movie.

In the book Julie is certainly a strong and powerful presence (aging from 15 to 17 as the story progresses) as the nominal head of a family of English orphaned adolescents -- Sue (12), Jack (14) and their very young brother, Tom. But Julie is not the protagonist, Jack is. The book is told entirely from his point of view.

In the film, Jack seems an aloof and less important character, mainly a reactive one to Julie, and, indeed in the book as well, he is a distant, shiftless, unhygienic, zit-faced angry adolescent slug. When pressed for something to do, he masturbates, often fantasizing about the body of his older sister. At first, reading this book, I was wishing the story had been told from Julie's point of view, but as I read on and thought about it, I started to appreciate Ian McEwan's strategy and decision to tell his story via a fairly weak protagonist. It's a bold and risky choice to have a story told from the perspective of perhaps the least interesting character in the book. The result is a certain clinical precision, a simplicity of language; and Jack's cluelessness and amorality about what goes on around him allows the reader to appreciate the ironies and overlay whatever moral judgments he or she may desire. The unreliability of Jack as a narrator also comes into question at times when he and Julie disagree on the content of past events.

The Cement Garden is a macabre, claustrophobic tale of ennui and gothic horror, but not in the usual sense. There are no murderers or vampires or ghosts afoot. There are only the grotesqueries of time and decay and ignorance and secrets. The cement garden in the story has at least two meanings, and both refer to death.

Spoilers won't be given here. But it must be said that the symbolic spectres of dead parents hover over the orphaned children in the book as they inhabit their decaying monolithic house, making up the rules as they go along and fearful of the intrusion of the outside world, a world that might take them away and split them apart at any moment. As they play their bizarre games and accumulate their rank detritus, the smell of death triggers memories of life.

Cement is constantly breaking down in the novel, a symbol of the impermanence of human structures and the eventual and inevitable conquest by nature. Tombs and buildings are merely temporal monuments of human hubris. There's a lovely section in the book where Jack, lolling about in demolished prefab houses, ruminates about the temporary nature of buildings; the idea that people once took comfort in spaces that are now open to the merciless sky.

The book is very English, a new twist on the old Cold Comfort Farm story with a touch of the Village of the Damned. One very astute review here on GR compared it to Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. Frequent comparisons made to Lord of the Flies are also apt, but the changes among the children in The Cement Garden are less dramatic, if indeed there are really any at all.

The book explores topics such as masturbation, incest, androgyny, gender roles, socialization in isolation, tribalism, death, memory and more.

There is no resolution, no redemption, no easy out in this book. I very much enjoyed this odd, meandering story. I could not put it down, in fact.

An unusual book, well-written but with some distasteful subject matter and an unlikeable protagonist - a sullen 14yo adolescent who is sexually obsessed with his older sister. What happens to the 4 kids after both parents die and they choose to keep this to themselves is the premise of this book. An early work by McEwan, not really recommended

Sin palabras. Me gusto muchísimo. También tengo que decir que por momentos me ha parecido sumamente perturbador. Todo el relato transcurre en primera persona eso me gusta mucho. Es un relato que incomoda ya que toca temas tabues como la muerte y el incesto. Todo esto relatado por un adolescente que no tiene limites de mayores ni de sus pares. Impresionante.

Tulburătoare. Am citit-o dintr-o suflare.

Morboso il tema, come sempre elegante, senza per questo smettere di turbare, la ricostruzione di McEwan. Una famiglia su cui la presenza della morte grava così tanto da trasformare i legami tra i suoi componenti in qualcosa di ambiguo, surreale e feroce. Finale un po' troppo sensazionalistico ma il valore di questa narrazione sta nella descrizione lucidissima dei corpi, delle loro trasformazioni, di come la cultura si intrecci con gli istinti e provochi desideri e repulsioni, anche proibiti. L'adolescenza è proprio l'età benedetta da McEwan che la racconta con un lucore spesso abbagliante.

Teenagehood psychological problems and desires, lonliness, frustration, perplexed mind and isolation. Mix them all with the movie Dreamers made by Bertolucci, entombment case in the Cask of Amontillado by Allen Poe and you'll get this novel.

One suggestion though, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT under any circumstances read it while you are eating sth! LOL

Four orphans-very independent, self-starting, and well, wierd.

The story details the lengths that a family will go to to stay together and avoid social services.

3 stars

Note that the description practically gives the whole book away, so if you want to be surprised, don't read it.