Espiazione (original 2001; edition 2005)

What a beautiful book! Listened to this one in audio - great narration by Jill Tanner. Just loved the way it was written from Robbie's and Briony's viewpoint. If only we all could write a story to atone for our mistakes.... ( )

This book was a heart wrenching read. You know what "Atonement" means and so you think you know what's going to happen, but you really don't. When it happens, your heart sinks down into the ground. It was so well written and leads the reader right where the writer wants you to do. I also think the movie did an excellent job with this book, which is hard to imagine when you read it. I always try to read a book before I see the film, if possible. In this case, I was immensely satisfied with both. ( )

I love Ian McEwan. He takes the most trivial of events--a girl changing clothes, the too-loud sound of steps in a tiled hallway--and places them inside the most wrenching of events--an arrest, triage in wartime--knotting them like a lacemaker. Each time I had to stop reading I pulled myself away in shreds. The entire book is an act of atonement, but absolution is impossible. This is the finest McEwan book I've ever read. It deserves to be a classic. ( )

Top 10. Read it slowly, because once you know the device of the book it will never be the same again. The highest of craft. There is one part in it when they are retreating to Dunkirk - I was actually dodging the bullets, how brilliant is that? ( )

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT.

This is probably the worst book I have ever read.

I've read some fairly bad books - I've read Twilight - but this was something else. This was awful. Everything about it, from beginning to end, was just very, very, inexcusably bad.

Let's take the first part - the part where all the action happens. Sort of. Except for the fact that nothing happens for seven chapters, aside from McEwan's (OR IS IT?) endless descriptions of every minute detail of everything in the house or adjacent to the house or that once rubbed shoulders with something twice-removed from the house. His prose is horrible, cloying, droning, and ultimately, boring. I love wordy books, I love the scenery that words can construct. This didn't work for me. Also, was it hot day? Did he ever mention it was a hot day? I THINK HE MIGHT JUST HAVE.

Then, there's the characters. God how I hate every single one of them. They're either directly, obviously hateful (Lola, Briony, Paul Marshall and his rapist's moustache (WHY DIDN'T ANYONE SEE IT COMING?), Emily) or they're just stupid (Cecelia and Robbie, mainly). Each and every single one of them is a cliche, and by the point it came to the big, terrible, awful thing which was to happen to them, I had simply ceased to care. Okay, so we know Robbie's not a rapist. Big deal. The whole thing feels horribly contrived taken at face value - taken in the context of what is learned later in the book, I didn't find any greater meaning behind this.

The pacing is all off, too. I think the idea was to create suspense. This did not happen. By about Chapter Ten I was seriously considering chucking the whole thing, but I pressed on.

Part Two is, if possible, worse than Part One. Here is where Ian McEwan regurgitates everything he ever possibly knew about WWII. Firstly, it's all over the place, jumping from time period to time period in a completely unclear manner. Secondly, again, it's boring. Part Three is just cringeworthy. BRIONY BECOMES A NURSE MAYBE THIS MAKES HER A GOOD PERSON GUYS. I just don't see what we're supposed to care about, here... so I'm just going to skip to the end.

So, what WAS the point? Briony? Briony who turns out in the last part to have been narrating the whole thing? Is this in fact part of her journey? What flaming journey? She's gone from being a terrible author with issues telling the difference between fantasy and reality to... what? She's still a terrible author! She's still got horrible issues! Who the hell cares by this point? McEwan's grasp of characterisation is tenuous at best. The characters, as seen through the eyes of Briony, are one-note caricatures. It doesn't matter if this is, in fact, the point - it doesn't make it a good device. I can get a picture of them as people, the problem is that they're not interesting people and they're certainly impossible to care about. I read this directly after reading Herzog, and perhaps, given the richness of the characterisation in that, I am being too harsh on this book. Can't all be astronauts! However, the idea that somehow it's excusable that the writing in this book is so bad because it's being seen through the eyes of this unreliable, thirteen-year old narrator, is ridiculous. If that is supposed to be the point, it was very badly executed. Surely if the point is supposed to be that Briony has grown up an accepted what she's done, then she would be able to see the whole situation more clearly, and write a better book? And if she hasn't, then, as I said before, she hasn't really gone on a journey in the book, and all anyone learns from the book is that there are horrible, twisted people in the world - HEY GUYS, I THINK WE GOT THAT MEMO.

This has turned into a ramble. I do HAVE coherent thoughts on this book, but every time I start typing I get lost in a sea of completely anger that this utter inanity ever, ever became successful. It's very, very rare that I dislike a book this much. I can usually find positives to say about almost anything. I can't with this - it had no redeeming features at all.

Oh no, wait, it had one. "I WANT TO THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY LIFE. I WILL BE ETERNALLY GRATEFUL TO YOU."

AHAHAHAHA.

Ian McEwan clearly owes Toy Story a debt (btw, those films? WAY BETTER WRITING.) ( )

This book has been highly overrated. I felt the story was trite and the characters were not very likable. I slogged through this.
( )

Memorable. Good writing. The best description of a migraine in print... ( )

I'm afraid me and Ian McEwan just don't get on. Something about his prose just falls completely flat for me, even when his story is compelling -- and I didn't find the opening of Atonement particularly compelling, unlike Enduring Love, so there wasn't that to propel me onwards with it. It just took too long to get anywhere that interested me, and while characterisation and setting felt right, felt real, it was just... boring, for me.

I did, in the end, enjoy the ending: I thought that was clever, and it rang true. But it was too much of a struggle to get there. For this stage in my life, at least, this is my last attempt at reading Ian McEwan's work. ( )

I expected this book to be very dark and dismal, but I found it to be poetic, romantic, real, and enthralling. It is a mesmerizing story that makes you wish it won't ever end. (I did like the first half better than the second half, though.) ( )

I thought this book was beautifully written, but some might find the language too much. It's good to get a dramatically romantic story in every once in a while. ( )

Beautifully written, and quite moving, but I felt the whole thing was a bit of a trick, deceitful on the author's part. I'm hard put to explain what upset me so, but let's just say I could see the conclusion long before reaching the final pages of the novel and I was resentful of McEwan's decision to do it the way he wrote it. ( )

I really wish I would've known about the book before seeing the movie, because of course I would've read the novel first. Because I saw the movie first, the book seemed a bit drawn out, overly descriptive and tedious. I felt like I could skip a few paragraphs, or even pages, and still not have missed out on the overall plot. This is a great reason I don't like watching the movies before reading the book. That said, I did absolutely love the original story line and overall plot. The exploitation of a child's innocence was taken in a grim view of over-fantasized dramatic life sequences that played off of that child's objection to reality, and later, guilt. This novel is quite the page turner. ( )

Review pending.

I still can't decide what I think of this. I liked it, but I don't know if it was a 4 or 5. ( )

Having watched a bit of the beginning of the film, I expected to find Briony thoroughly unlikeable. She seemed a horrid little judgemental prig without the benefit of the interior monologue revealed in the novel. In the book we are able to understand the conflicts within that lead her to her terrible action - an action for which she would spend her life attempting to atone.

A charming, although dreadful (in the sense of full of dread/foreboding) book, with brilliant imagery and characters brought to life so effectively that I felt I knew them all very well, and cared about them immensely. The ending provoked tears at bedtime, I'll tell you, and for many conflicting reasons.

Life in all its glorious imperfection. ( )

The book was quite well-written and brought up a lot of interesting questions. I read it for a book discussion group at church so we talked about some of the moral questions involved. I can't decide whether or not I wish to see the film; often I do better seeing the movie first and then reading the book, it's too late for that in this case. ( )

i loved it, but it's been years since i've read it (though i did run through a bunch of other mcewan stuff this summer, inspired by 'on chesil beach') so i'm re-reading it now in order, admittedly, to prepare for the movie... ( )

The sister is a bitch. End of story. Screw her and her sorry life.

However, I really hated that girl, so the writing was great and the story held my attention!

Still, that chick is/was/will always be a giant bitch. I think she's on my top 10 literary villain list.

Bitch. Seriously. A big one. ( )

This was definitely better than Saturday, but I am pretty sure I will not be reading any more of his books. The story here could be (should be?) condensed into a few powerful pages, but instead he dilutes it endlessly, and, in my opinion, his writing isn't beautiful enough to sustain it. Also - and this almost never happens - I guessed part of the plot, and then had to wait 200 pages or so for my guess to be confirmed. And I'm not sure how I feel about the "play within a play" device, although I suppose you can't very well feel betrayed when you discover that the novel you're reading turns out to be fiction. ( )

Beautifully written and insightful. I refused to see the movie until I had read the book and I finally got around to both. I loved the book. McEwan has a flair for capturing both historical time and the points of view of the different characters. There are some deliciously constructed phrases that I absolutely relished. The story is also captivating and the characters are compelling. ( )

McEwan's Sweet Tooth sounds really interesting to me (meta!) but Jennifer dislikes it, so the plan is to read this (a must on my list at some point) first and then see how I feel.

loved it. why did i wait so long?? ( )

A few years ago, I was reading an issue of Granta, and found myself immersed in a short story by Ian McEwan. It was one of the best stories I'd ever read, and when I finished reading it, it was one of the few times I've ever thought, God, I wish I could have written that. I wanted that control of language, that mastery of the narrative, and I was in awe of the skill it took to create that piece.

Eventually, I recycled that issue of Granta -- it's a thick journal, as literary journals go, about 250 pages in each issue -- but before doing so, I was careful to cut out the pages the McEwan story was on, and clip them together with a binder clip. I'm sure that story is still somewhere in my childhood home; I could never bring myself to get rid of it, in any of my periodic cleaning sweeps.

Imagine my shock, when today, trying to distract myself from the pain in my foot, I tugged down Ian McEwan's Atonement, and found that short story again. The retreat from Dunkirk is about 190 pages into my copy of the novel (yes, I read it all today, I'm a really fast reader and I was concentrating because my foot hurt like a -- well), and re-reading it, with the preceding chapters still fresh in my mind, settled the matter for me. I was right to cut out those pages, and I'm still in awe of the skill McEwan wields.

I'd been plunged into a very different world for almost two hundred pages, caught up by the lush language and the intimacy of the family setting, and then suddenly to be confronted with the violence of the retreat from Dunkirk, still cloaked in McEwan's incredible way of writing, was just amazing. And the plot, which begins slowly, is ultimately very satisfying; it's never resolved traditionally, we're never sure of what happened, but it's tied up so neatly, with the stunning twist at the end of the part of the novel written in third-person, which is so tiny you might not notice, that it becomes something far more than we expected.

Everyone, I suspect, knows my love for unreliable narrators and epistolary fiction narrative-within-narrative, and this satisfies those kinks in the most subtle way I've ever come across. Add the fantastic use of language, the complexity and completeness of the universe (the throwaways are just amazing in their richness), and the excellent characterization, and there is no way I wasn't going to love this. The fact that McEwan writes rape -- and adolescent rape at that -- wasn't enough to put me off, although I wish we followed Lola as well; watching how the rape played out for the convicted Robbie and the accuser Briony (and it's a nice touch separating the victim from the accuser) as well as Cecelia, who's torn between her family and her lover (and possibly I really fell for her when she deliberately turned her back on her family -- I didn't like her much through the first part, but when she chooses Robbie and sticks by him, and when she doesn't give in when Briony visits, I was enchanted), but I had no real sense of what happened to Lola internally, right after the rape. The marriage is a fascinating thing, but...I'd have liked a scene in which she suggests, a little, a very little, that maybe it wasn't Robbie and Briony insists, "I know it was him, I saw him, I know it was him," and she gives way under the considerable force of Briony's personality.

But as I say, I'm not rational about this. This is a story I love, and will be rereading, not just for the pleasure of the novel, but in order to learn from it.

( )

I really liked the first roughly half of this book a lot. The story is told from several different viewpoints showing how the characters appear to themselves and then to others through a number of different situations. That was done very well. The second part was good but the writing style kind of fell apart for me. Still liked the book and I'm glad I finally read it. ( )

Still ahead on schedule. This book was planned for July this year, but starting it now. Let's see what I make of it. (Haven't seen the movie yet.)

I must say, that I did not get through the first 100 pages. This goes to the abandoned book graveyard. I hope the new owner likes it better than I did.

[b:Atonement|6867|Atonement|Ian McEwan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320449708s/6867.jpg|2307233] was an interesting book but not exactly entertaining. I liked the first part though found it very slow. The rest really dragged though! I thought Briony was a very well developed character and certainly seemed real and vivid but beyond that, I didn't enjoy this much. [a:Ian McEwan|2408|Ian McEwan|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1206590269p2/2408.jpg] can certainly write and the writing in this book is gorgeous which made it more pleasurable to read, even if I was losing interest in the main subject of the book. I don't think the plot moved along fast enough. I think too much time was spent describing mundane things and it was hard to keep concentrating on it. I just think it went on for too long and would have much better had it been condensed at least a little bit. ( )