Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Amsterdam
by Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese, 1999
193 pages
source: my shelves

Publisher's summary:

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer; Vernon is editor of the quality broadsheet "The Judge." Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life.A contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty, this short novel is perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious shock in a novel brimming with surprises.


My thoughts:

Ian McEwan's novels, though relatively short, are not quick reads. Between his often controversial or uncomfortable subject matter, perfectly constructed sentences that beg to be reread, and the contemplative mood his stories tend to induce, it took me over a week to finish Amsterdam, a novel of under 200 pages.

Unfortunately, Amsterdam did not turn out to be a satisfying read. I didn't care for the story and positively hated the ending. I did not find it to be the "delicious shock" promised in the summary.

That's not to say there was nothing to enjoy in this novel. Clive's meditations on music and composition were fascinating, and I enjoyed reading about his ramble through Lake District. The description of the trail and the countryside made me long for a similar day of hiking.

McEwan's prose is beautiful, as always. In fact, it was the writing that kept me reading. Here are a couple of passages I highlighted:

We knew so little about each other. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves...  

But Clive stared ahead at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and colouring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. 

(I smiled when I noticed the second quote appeared in Brona's post, too.)

I now understand why some readers describe McEwan's work as uneven. After enjoying Atonement, In the Company of Strangers, On Chesil Beach, and The Children Act, I was somewhat disappointed by Amsterdam. It is, by far, my least favorite McEwan novel. However, this experience will not deter me from reading the rest of the author's work.

My rating:

Thank you Care and Brona for reading with me.

TSS: A Sunday Ramble

Good morning, and welcome to a rambling edition of The Sunday Salon. After missing the last couple of weeks, it seems like there's a lot to talk about. The lack of winter weather gets top billing around here. In contrast to last year's punishing snow and cold, it appears this will go down as "the winter that wasn't". We have had around 40 inches of snow this season, the least ever by mid-February. We have had a few inches over the past couple of days - just enough to make everything look pretty, but no driving woes or snow shovels for us this weekend!

On the reading front, Venice in February continues. I posted a review for The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan. The audio was well done, but it's not a book you can really claim to enjoy. I also finished Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers and will be trying out a new (to me) mini review style.

I finally started reading The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki. The Japanese names confused me for the first chapter or two, but I made myself a cheat sheet and fell right into the story. This sentence from the back cover says it all:
As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity.
I purchased this book a year or two ago for The Japanese Literature Challenge and, even though the challenge is over, the time seems right to read it now.

After a long gap, the next letter in our Group Read of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson is dated tomorrow. It's been nearly a month and I'm looking forward to reading more. I wonder what happened during Clarissa's visit to Miss Howe - did she see Lovelace? There are only a few letters this month and I will collect links to all February posts on the 29th. It's still not too late to join in. We will have read only eleven letters (roughly 73 pages) by then. The frequency increases in March, so I'm going to need to budget more reading time next month.

Have you noticed Blogger changed word verification to TWO words? Not only that, it is much harder to decipher the words. It's frustrating when the verification process takes more time than the actual comment. Several months ago, I removed word verification, disallowed anonymous comments, and began moderating comments over five days old. So far there hasn't been a spam problem.

We're now only hours away from tonight's Downton Abbey season finale and I'm already worried about the impending Downton Withdrawal Syndrome (DWS). {If you don't watch the show, I know you think I'm crazy, but do yourself a favor and watch the beginning of season 1. All it takes is one episode and you'll be hooked.} Coping strategies are in the planning stage, but include watching the entire season again (possibly multiple times), trying Upstairs, Downstairs and other series, and reading Downton-themed books. Do you have any suggestions? Are you worried about DWS?

We have a busy day ahead, so I'll wrap this ramble up now. The Syracuse University basketball game is at 1:00 (what a great season!), then dinner with my family, and finally the two hour Downton Abbey finale. Are you on twitter? There's a live party beginning at 9 PM using #DowntonPBS. It's fun to follow the stream even if you don't tweet. I'll see you there!

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan (audio)

It's not unusual to feel slightly off kilter while traveling, especially in a foreign country. We eat more, we drink more, sleep patterns are altered, there may be a language barrier, and it's easy to get lost.

Such is the case for Colin and Mary. Wandering around an unnamed city late at night in search of an open restaurant, they are befriended by Robert, a stranger who takes them to an out-of-the-way bar. Initially they're happy to meet a native and visit an establishment frequented by locals, but a feeling of unease gradually grows. After a chance meeting the next morning (the couple got lost and never made it back to their hotel), Colin and Mary end up at Robert's home. Here the story becomes uncomfortable. The plot takes a turn toward the twisted and odd. I won't elaborate further, but be aware this psychological thriller is rife with sexual overtones. The cover illustration hints at a voyeuristic component to the relationship. Indeed, at times, I felt like an voyeur by simply listening.

Alex Jennings' narration is flawless. Although listening was not my first choice, I'm glad now there were no print copies available in the library system. A pervasive feeling of unease is, perhaps, even more palpable on audio.

I initially wondered at McEwan's failure to name the city, ostensibly Venice, but later decided it enhanced the mood. Leaving it unnamed accentuated the sense of disorientation.

The Comfort of Strangers (1981) was a gripping, yet disturbing book. Listening seemed to make it even more compelling. I was forewarned, but chose to proceed anyway. While not exactly a likable book,  it was very good.

My rating:

Chivers Audiobooks, 2001
3 hours 49 minutes

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
166 pages
2008, Vintage Books

Summary (from Publishers Weekly):
Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively; the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. At the book's midpoint, McEwan (Atonement, etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naïve and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is.

My thoughts:
On Chesil Beach is a hauntingly sad novel... quite unlike anything I've read. Edward and Florence obviously love each other, but the reader realizes early on that their wedding night will end badly. An omniscient narrator relays the story and its aftermath, and provides just the right amount of background information to aid our understanding of the characters.

McEwan's writing, however, is the main attraction - beautiful, compassionate, and simply a pleasure to read. This devastating novel is sure to leave a lasting impression.

Favorite passages:

"For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That had always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else." p. 87-88 

"Whatever new frontier she crossed, there was always another waiting for her. Every concession she made increased the demand, and then disappointment. Even in their happiest moments, there was always the accusing shadow, the barely hidden gloom of his unfulfilment, looming like an alp, a form of perpetual sorrow which had been accepted by them both as her responsibility. She wanted to be in love and be herself. But to be herself, she had to say no all the time." p. 146

My rating:

Bottom line:
On Chesil Beach will be one of my favorite novels this year.

Two-for-One Tuesday Intros

I don't usually do this. One book at a time is my rule - physical book, that is. Audiobooks are different. I have no problem with two audios on the go, since each has its own place - one in the car and another on my iPod. Over the years I've experimented with reading two and three books at once. Selections typically included one fiction and one nonfiction title, plus a classic or long-term read. The trouble began when one book really captured my attention and I read it exclusively. In my mind it became the 'winner', and the 'losers' were left to languish on my nightstand. Clearly the other books weren't exactly losers, but I had a hard time getting back to the growing pile on the nightstand. Reading monogamy seemed to be the answer.

Fast forward two years....

"They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. They had just sat down to supper in a tiny sitting room on the first floor of a Georgian inn. In the next room, visible through the open door, was a four-poster bed, rather narrow, whose bedcover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand. Edward did not mention that he had never stayed in a hotel before, whereas Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand. Superficially, they were in fine spirits. Their wedding, at St. Mary's, Oxford, had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from school and college friends raucous and uplifting. Her parents had not condescended to his, as they had feared, and his mother had not significantly misbehaved, or completely forgotten the purpose of the occasion. The couple had driven away in a small car belonging to Florence's mother and arrived in the early evening at their hotel on the Dorset coast in weather that was not perfect for mid-July or the circumstances, but entirely adequate: it was not raining, but nor was it quite warm enough, according to Florence, to eat outside on the terrace as they had hoped. Edward thought it was, but, polite to a fault, he would not think of contradicting her on such an evening."

On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan

I started On Chesil Beach a few days ago. After fifty pages of beautiful writing and engaging characters, my mind began to wander. Last night, I allowed myself to start Her Fearful Symmetry too. Halloween week seems like the perfect time to read it!

"Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup. Later he would remember walking down the hospital corridor with the cup of horrible tea in his hand, alone under the fluorescent lights, retracing his steps to the room where Elspeth lay surrounded by machines. She had turned her head toward the door and her eyes were open; at first Robert thought she was conscious. 

In the seconds before she died, Elspeth remembered a day last spring when she and Robert had walked along a muddy path by the Thames in Kew Gardens. There was a smell of rotted leaves; it had been raining. Robert said, "We should have had kids," and Elspeth replied, "Don't be silly, sweet." She said it out loud, in the hospital room, but Robert wasn't there to hear."

Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger

Do either of these first paragraphs appeal to you? I'm also wondering, if you read more than one book at a time, how you keep one title from 'winning'?
Tuesday Intros is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.

Author Birthday: Ian McEwan

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of novelist Ian McEwan (books by this author), born in Aldershot, England (1948). His father served in the army, so the boy grew up all over the world, including Singapore, Germany, and Libya. His father was a working-class Scot who had worked his way up to an officer's rank in the army. He drank too much, and Ian and his mother were both frightened of him. His mother was constantly anxious about trying to fit in with the other officers' wives, who spoke polished English with upper-class accents. McEwan said: "I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got."


When McEwan was 11 years old, living in Libya, his parents sent him off to boarding school in England, where he eventually learned to correct his grammar and write polished sentences. But he kept the tendency to approach language with caution, and he is a notoriously slow and careful writer. He spent more than a year brainstorming before he began Atonement —he said, "I had a number of good descriptions of novels, as if they had already been written," but no actual writing to speak of. Then he took his sons away to a weekend resort and he had a vision of a young woman arranging flowers and thinking about the gardener outside her window. He managed to write a paragraph and a half, and that became the beginning of his second chapter of Atonement (2001). He wrote: "Partly because of her youth and the glory of the day, partly because of her blossoming need for a cigarette, Cecilia Tallis half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river, by the old diving pool with its mossy brick wall, before curving away through the oak woods. The accumulated inactivity of the summer weeks since finals also hurried her along; since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate."

Ian McEwan's other novels include Amsterdam (1998), Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), and Solar (2010). His novels have sold more than 15 million copies.

He said, "My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel."

*photo credit