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Loading... Amsterdamby Ian McEwan
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. The story opens at woman's funeral where two of her past lovers are discussing her death and loss. The two men have has a long frinedship; one is a publisher and the other a famous composer. They each agree to protect the other from a lingering painful death. Subsequently they are both morally challenged, and each disapproves of the other's decision. The conclusion is quite unbelievable, and I don't think this was worthy of the Booker McEwan is brilliant. If you've gone in expecting to read ATONEMENT again, think again. If, however, you've read IN BETWEEN THE SHEETS or THE CEMENT GARDEN, then you've come to the right place. McEwan's prose is ripe and delicious, yet gritty and, probably, tinged with a little bit of poison. This is my first McEwan book. I loved the story and pace...until the end. Too much, too quickly, too improbable...left me feeling rushed and unsatisfied. Surprising to me that it won the Booker Prize. I have a feeling I will generally enjoy his work even though my expectations were not met by this particular story (ending). Brilliantly crafted story of friendship gone awry, of losing sight of what is important. Great characters. Only drawback is that the story lacks proper warmth. However, Amsterdam is a page turner, raising important issues along the way
Amsterdam is an intricate satirical jeu d'esprit and topical to the point of Tom Wolfeishness. It is also funnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0385494246, Paperback)When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the upmarket newspaper the Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them be stricken with such an illness, the other will bring about his death. From this point onward we are in little doubt as to Amsterdam's outcome--it's only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumors circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavory Garmony comes out on top. Ian McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst the twists and turns of plot. --Lisa Jardine(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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On the back cover, this is described as “a sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel”, and I can’t say it better than that. The comedy to me appears to come from how ridiculous these men are, how they are so wrapped up in themselves that they can’t hear and don’t care about the outside world at all. By the end of the novel, they have each truly become like Molly, lost to the world without realizing what has happened to them. They’ve been overtaken by an illness, and that illness is, according to Ian McEwan, the ills of public society and the selfishness that it takes to ignore the needs and wellbeing of fellow humans while taking care of number one. The disturbing thing is that neither of them realize it; what they’re doing is so normal to them that they don’t understand what’s wrong. They think they’re adding to society when really they’re just adding to the problem.
Anyway, in that way, this novel is so deep in so few pages that it’s hard to say whether or not I liked it. This is one of those books that I want a class on. There’s a lot here to pick at and just writing that paragraph above has helped me clarify it in my mind. I think I could write a paper on it. It’s less than two hundred pages long, so it didn’t take me very long to read, but it packs in so much thought-provoking material in with the ridiculousness of the situation. The worst part is that, when dissected, the behavior of neither of the characters is ridiculous. They’re doing what has been done countless times before and that is eerie and worrying, especially given the extreme dislike I felt for both of them by the end of the novel. Really the problem with the novel is that it isn’t a very good story. The story and the characters exist only to prove McEwan’s point, which is a strong one, but it doesn’t work very well at a surface level.
In conclusion, there is a very good reason that Amsterdam won the Booker Prize. It’s a truly haunting commentary on society that still manages to be slightly ridiculous enough to make it interesting. I haven’t even touched on all the issues here, but I can tell I’m going to continue thinking about this for some time to come. It isn’t as good as a book as Atonement is, in my humble opinion, particularly because it is shallow in everything but its overall meaning. I still think it’s worth a read. (