Faltam-me 20 páginas para terminar este livro, mas vou arrumá-lo e já não lhe toco mais.
Por esta frase:
"Sob vários aspectos um livro chocante, mórbido, cheio de imagens repugnantes mas... irresistivelmente interessante." (New York Review of Books),
e pelas 134 páginas que já li, prevejo(-me) um "triste" fim. E não estou para isso...

O narrador é um adolescente (sempre com a mão dentro das cuecas) que vive com os pais, um irmão e duas irmãs (com as quais brinca aos médicos).
Quando o pai cai morto, em cima do cimento acabado de espalhar no jardim, o puto alisa a marca...
Quando a mãe morre ele e uma das irmãs preparam uns baldes de cimento. Depois... é uma festa...e eu nem fiquei para o "fogo de artifício"...

Yeah.... that's a hard no from me. That was so disturbing and disgusting, I am not even going to go into it. Now excuse me while I go perform a wellness-check on the person that recommended this to me.

This book is messed up, there is no other way around it. God, after my experiences with Enduring Love I really wanted to give McEwan a second chance but he really had to jump the sister-effing shark on this one.

I'll start with the positive:
In E.L, I had no problem with his style of unreliable narration. I found it stuck-up and bland, but hey, he was writing from the perspective of a stuck-up and bland science journalist.
In Cement Garden, it's much the same. A dirty, pubescent 15 year-old needs a dirty, pubescent narration style. I'm all for it, in fact McEwan nails it to such a perfectly horrific degree that I am in both parts concerned and curious as to what his internet history looks like. (yes I am aware this was written in 1978)
His descriptive style is apocalyptic and in no way possible can I describe it as ineffectual. He did a great job at making me feel as grease-ridden and cement caked as his main character. Kudos to you, McEwan, you sick fuck.

The cons:
Don't get me wrong, a book doesn't necessarily have to make a person feel "good" or "satisfied". In fact, I am all for novels which make you feel uncomfortable or disgusted. However, if you are doing it solely for the sake of creating that feeling in your readers and using it for no other utility, then you are a depraved sadist. To my knowledge, I could not see any reason as to why this story was written. I'll happily hold my hands up in admittance if someone can point out to me what I should have found the 138 pages of what felt like an anthrax-encrusted snuff film. What was McEwan's message? What was his reason? If there is one, I'll happily take back all the things I've just said.

But if there was no message to be taken from Cement Garden, that it was just a messed up story of incest and decomposition that a man wrote, edited, re-edited, sent off for publication and subsequently got paid for, then I am not reading another McEwan novel ever again.
I feel like the frog Jack stepped on, the problem is that Jack didn't finish the job...

2,5

No fue una historia para mi.
Toca muchos temas muy interesantes, crecimiento, identidad, sociedad, soledad, curiosidad, etc., y también el incesto, es un escenario muy crudo y lo encontré casi sin propósito, te pone dentro de una "realidad" y nos cuenta lo que pasa en un momento x de la vida de unos hermanos y ya.

Aunque no me gustó la historia, me gustó el cómo está narrada, así que espero leer nuevamente al autor.

" I did not kill my father, although, sometimes I think I gave a helping hand, in this regard ".

This is how " The Cement Garden" begins.
With a single phrase, it catches you in its clutches, and doesn't release you until the end.
After this, you can't expect something solar, or sappy, but you are not ready for it either what will folow.. Although the novel's tension is fascinating , although returning to some pages, - I found signs that I could have considered for final, - I didn't see it coming..

Back at the beginning.
In a space from anywhere, nowhere, ( no clear indicators of the area) , - an old house, inhabited by a family of six members , father, mother and four children, - is placed.
A house that has under construction a cemented garden .
The narrator is Jack, the second child in the family, who begins his story at fourteen, and ends it at fifteen. Soon, the four children will remain orphans, and they think that, in order to stay together, they must hide from others - the disappearance of their parents .

Jack and Julie resort to the first gesture that shocks us : They buried their mother in a trunk, covering it with the cement left by their father's unfinished garden .
The scene is grim, constructed of short phrases, incredibly truthful.
The first part of the novel end with this scene. The shock, however, is just beginning...

The second one, starts with a sequence from the past, when the children have experimented, for first, - the feeling of " freedom", with the certainty of returning to normal .
What does McEwan do, with four children, orphaned teenagers, who have to take care of themselves ? It returns to its primary instincts, which suggest, without wanting it, a " King of flies" ( Golding) - in a limited version.

Well, from here on, things take a masterful turn, not necessarily through the subject, ( incest is not a new theme) - but through content, form, gradation, tension, through a sequence of a sexual act commited between a brother and a sister, so powerful a psychological passage, that you feel it physically.
Everything wrapped without pointing a finger, without emmiting a moral, without judging.

Finally, there remains a very good mini- novel , which is, however, for those with a strong stomach, and last, but not least, for those with a style obsession.
I think not many readers will digest the incest scene, but, in my point of view, it's just here McEwan hit the nail on the head.

Livro 4°/Out//51°/2016

Título: O jardim de cimento
Título original: The cement garden
Primeira edição: 1978
Autor: Ian McEwan (Inglaterra)
Editora: Cia das Letras
Páginas: 136
Minha classificação: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

__________________________________________________
O livro O jardim de cimento, do britânico Ian McEwan, segue a mesma linha de outros livros do autor: a quebra de costumes, de valores e ações, exteriorizados na forma de incestos, abusos e obsessões.
Neste pequeno romance quatro irmãos se veem a sós num verão pós-guerra londrino depois que seus pais morrem. Sem supervisão, a vida deles é levada sem os limites próprios dos valores familiares, em cenas muitas vezes desconcertantes e sem explicação alguma.
A falta de lógica, a ausência de moralidade, a gradação da narrativa, curta, direta e contundente, muitas vezes deixa o leitor absorto com o ambiente hermético criado por cada um dos irmãos, e em dados momentos sendo misturados com as lembranças da mãe enterrada no porão da casa onde vivem. Entremeados nesse ambiente ácido, as lembranças de quando crianças revelam o grotesco se comparadas aos prazeres obscenos a que se vão entregando.
Do McEwan ja tinha lido "Amor sem fim" e "Reparação" (desse gostei muito!), mas O jardim de cimento, embora pequeno -- e uma das primeiras obras do autor -- é uma ótima maneira de adentrar nesse universo nada casual.

IM FREE!!! WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY FUCKING LIFE!!

n  Concrete Civilisationsn

Ian McEwan’s Cement Garden left me with the same disquieting feelings I had after reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In fact, I became aware of their resemblance right from the beginning, not in the sense of an imitation, of course, far from it, but in the choice of the theme and the way to develop it.

Both books argue about the famous nature versus nurture, revealing how thin the shell of civilization is, how easy social conventions are forgotten when the link with society is broken. And the childhood is the most ill-equipped period of life to prevent this involution, since childhood is no secret garden, the authors warn us, but a dangerous hunting ground, be it an island or a shabby house, haunted by invisible monsters born of nightmares, transforming a sow’s head eaten by flies in a powerful Lord and a cement-filled trunk full of indiscrete cracks in a eerie garden. In the absence of the adults to sanction their moves and beliefs, children easily regress to primitive beings, barely human despite their efforts to imitate adulthood.

However, if Golding analysed mainly the gregarious psychology and the penchant for cruelty versus assertion of individuality and compassion, McEwan is interested in the crumble of the family values in all Freudian ways possible – parricide, incest, sex confusion, regression to infancy, as results of parental abuse and isolation, as it is suggested right from the beginning by the fifteen-year-old narrator:

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.

The story of the four siblings taking care of themselves after their parents’ death is, symbolically, the story of the world after the apocalypse, when none of the old constraints and values is applicable. The cement garden gains thus a triple significance: it refers either to the monstrous garden built by an obsessive, abusive and tasteless father, and to the ad-hoc grave of a submissive, without authority and ignorant mother and to the barren, catastrophic childhood of the protagonists left alone to discover that beings are interchangeable and rules are confusing and altogether futile in a world that gained the attributes of a perpetual, out of time nightmare:

'It's funny,' Julie said, 'I've lost all sense of time. It feels like it's always been like this. I can't really remember how it used to be when Mum was alive and I can't really imagine anything changing. Everything seems still and fixed and it makes me feel that I'm not frightened of anything.'
I said, 'Except for the times I go down into the cellar I feel like I'm asleep. Whole weeks go by without me noticing, and if you asked me what happened three days ago I wouldn't be able to tell you.'

In the end, however, again like in Lord of the Flies, the adults come back and the order is restored. Or is it? For the return to a society that will surely discipline them into the image of their awful parents is no happy ending in the dismally fascinating worlds, so different and so alike, these two great writers have created.

Bir novella ve birkaç kısa öyküden oluşuyor kitap, Beton Bahçe tek başına basılmış önceden, burada neden öykülerle birleştirilmiş anlamadım. Genel hatlarıyla aile, kardeşlik, ensest üzerine hikayeler.
Evet rahatsız edici hikayeler, ancak dili çok akışkan çok sade çok hoşuma gitti.

5 stars

What an ending. This story won't leave my mind, ever.

Lako je ne voleti ovu knjigu.

Mekjuan je maljem zveknuo betonski blok udobnosti. Iz nastalih pukotina šiknuli su tabui – od smrti (uziđivanjem), dečje seksualnosti do incesta. I taman kad pomislite da je sa navalom završeno, još nešto se pojavi, kao umiruća žaba čiji mehurić i dalje pulsira, pa je Džek dodatno gnječi. A mlađi Džekov brat, šestogodišnji Tom, želeo bi da bude devojčica. (Ili da (samo) bude obučen kao devojčica?) Dodatna neobičnost je što gotovo da nema identifikacije sa likovima, ne navijamo za njih, a ponekad se čini kao da se ni ne potresaju što se svet oko njih doslovno raspada i što aktivno deluju u tom raspadanju.

Ovde deca ne žive pod staklenim zvonom, već pod betonskom humkom.
A ako mene pitate, beton je materijal koji je najviše nem. Zato je i nemilosrdan.
Drvo, staklo, kamen druga su priča. (A i (za) drugi roman.)

Lako je ne voleti ovu knjigu, ali ju je teško odbaciti, jer Mekjuan, prosto, odlično piše.

Esta história é tão perturbante quanto eu esperava e está realmente bem escrita.
Nem todos os livros de Ian McEwan resultam comigo, mas fascinam-me as situações extremas em que ele muitas vezes coloca as suas personagens, e neste caso era mesmo um beco sem saída.