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Loading... Enduring Love (1997)by Ian McEwan
I read this book last year; you can find my review of Enduring Love over at my blog (contains some spoilers): http://www.rulethewaves.net/blog/?p=1587 (  ) caffeinatedlife | Apr 26, 2013 |  I'm not the world's biggest fan of Ian McEwan, thus far. I didn't particularly enjoy Saturday, and I didn't get into Atonement the first time I picked it up, and so he has to work against quite a bit of scepticism from me. Still, there is something compelling about his writing, and more so when he's not writing two pages all about the modern improvements in kettle technology, as he memorably did in Saturday. His narrators strike me as a bit pompous and over-talkative, but it usually works with their characters -- I didn't like a single character much, in this book, I have to say. I think I felt most about Jed Parry, and his hopeless obsession. I think Ian McEwan writes reasonably well about the way people approach events like the ones he writes about here, and there is a frustrated sense of suspense here. On the other hand, I found some of his tricks to prolong suspense transparent and wearing, and while he does his research well, the layers of detail also got wearing. I'm still not a convert, but I did like it more than Saturday. ( ) shanaqui | Apr 9, 2013 | It took me quite a while to start reading this book and when I finally did, I wasn't sure I'd make it to page 100. (See my status updates for the remarks.) But... I'm glad I stuck with it, because somewhere around page 60 I started to like the book. I'm not so enthousiastic about it as some other readers whose reviews I've read, but it was a nice read. It gave me the creeps. Realising that what is written might be fiction, but might easily become reality too. There's hardly any protection against something (someone) like this... No, I really don't want to think about that very much. Just hope it'll never happen around me. I don't think it was a great book, but I'm glad I read it :-) ( ) BoekenTrol71 | Mar 31, 2013 | Everything I've read from McEwan's pen had that certain way of drawing universal themes from the circumstances of the characters. Here's one about guilt and attachment to it. It's suspenseful, the prose is marvelous and if I was a little let down at the end (it's no Atonement) it's all peachy. (  ) palaverofbirds | Mar 29, 2013 | Ian McEwan has an amazing capacity to write the moment and then build moment upon moment to a storied crescendo. The main character creates a word picture that might just as well be used to describe the author's writing, "Imagine the smallest possible bit of water that can exist." And later, "Now think of billions, trillions, of them, piled on top of each other in all directions, stretching almost to infinity. And now think of the river bed as a long shallow slide, like a winding muddy chute, that’s a hundred miles long stretching to the sea ..." It takes my breath away. I was flinching for so much of the story that I didn't hope for a outcome, with which I could rest. But Enduring Love shone through for so many of the characters. I can live with that. (  ) bsiemens | Mar 16, 2013 |
 Ian McEwan's reputation as a writer of small, impeccably written fictions is secure. His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too: among the critical praise that festoons his book jackets, the word "macabre" crops up more than once. But his books are more than tales of suspense and shock; they raise issues of guilt and love and fear, essentially of what happens when the civilized and ordered splinters against chaos.
References to this work on external resources.
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