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Solar (2010)

by Ian McEwan

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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3,6411493,430 (3.28)200
When Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard's personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.… (more)
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» See also 200 mentions

English (123)  French (6)  Dutch (6)  German (3)  Danish (2)  Portuguese (Brazil) (2)  Italian (2)  Hebrew (1)  Spanish (1)  Finnish (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (148)
Showing 1-5 of 123 (next | show all)
Human Spirit
  BooksInMirror | Feb 19, 2024 |
While I have enjoyed many of his books, I have never thought of Ian McEwan as a particularly humorous writer. One of my favourites among his novels is Sweet Tooth, which shows him in relatively light-hearted mode, but even it does not leave the reader convulsed with laughter. I was, therefore, surprised that this novel should have won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

I remember reading it shortly after it was published (and, indeed before it was warded that prize) and enjoying it. At that time, I was working on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Team at the Department for Education, and Michael Beard, the rather unpleasant protagonist, struck me as uncomfortably reminiscent of some of the external stakeholders in the science world with whom my colleagues and I had regularly to interact. Re-reading it now, a long way removed from the world of academic scientists, I found it heavier going.

There are some very humorous moments, but it is not by any customary definition a comic novel. Michael Beard, a Nobel Laureate, is also a decidedly unempathetic character. Having been married four times when the novel opens, he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of being the cuckold, as is beautiful and much younger wife has taken up with a builder who had been working on their house. Thitherto, marital infidelity had been Beard’s own speciality, and he does not like having the tables turned. That particular bump in the marital road is resolved in unusual circumstances, and Beard moves on.

McEwan’s observation of the gradual unravelling of Beard’s self-confidence is acute, and the hoops he goes through to try to retain his prominence within the academic science community (always terrified that the discoveries that had secured his meteoric early success might come to be challenged in the light of subsequent discoveries) and secure his financial future are very capably drawn. Somehow, though, the novel struggled to hold my attention this time around. While still a good book, it has not, in my view, aged well, and is not on a par with McEwan at his imperious best. ( )
  Eyejaybee | Dec 27, 2023 |
I expected a lot more from this book. It deals with such an important issue; global warming. But unfortunately, the main character was one of the most un likeable people I've ever come across in a work of fiction. I got so tired of his moaning and whining and frankly, the best part of the book was when it ended, and he finally got what he deserved . ( )
  kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 |
This book was like reading a romantic physics book if you can picture that. Lots of jargon and then back to the romance story. I dragged myself through this book and wish I would of quit earlier. Michel Beard is a dislikable character. He is running on his merits of times past and doing nothing to continue except looking for money, food and women. ( )
  wincheryl | Jun 20, 2022 |
his book was named by the science fiction web site I09.com as one of the best science fiction books of 2010. It is a good book but it is not science fiction. It's the story of a physicist, who made a name for himself early in his career but has not had an original thought since. He manages to parley that original success into a long career but he is a fraud and he knows it. ( )
  capewood | Mar 11, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 123 (next | show all)

Solar is grappig, slim geschreven en spannend tot op de laatste bladzijde. Een roman om, Beardsgewijs, duimen en vingers bij af te likken.
added by PGCM | editKnack, Jan Stevens (Nov 25, 2010)
 
Despite the book’s somber, scientific backdrop (and global warming here is little but that), “Solar” is Mr. McEwan’s funniest novel yet — a novel that in tone and affect often reads more like something by Zoë Heller or David Lodge. Like “Amsterdam,” this latest book shows off his gifts as a satirist, but while it gets off to a rollicking start, its plot machinery soon starts to run out of gas, sputtering and stalling as it makes its way from one comic set piece to another.
 
Solar” is een vermakelijke en bijzonder goed gevulde roman, waarvan ook de wetenschappelijke gedeelten strak en helder geschreven zijn. Ian McEwan weet als zo vaak minutieus realisme en stilistische elegantie met elkaar te verenigen. De vraag die velen zich wel zullen stellen is: waar wil McEwan met zijn lezer naar toe? Er is namelijk slechts één gids: de onbetrouwbare anti-held Michael Beard, “passé” als geleerde maar niet genoeg om hem zo maar van de tafel te vegen. Zijn seksuele en andersoortige geeuwhonger maakt van deze Nobelprijslaureaat wel een karikaturale omkering van wat de nieuwe mens zou moeten zijn en hoe hij zich op een verantwoordelijke wijze tot de aarde en zijn medebewoners zou moeten gedragen.
 
Lightness, however, comes less easily to McEwan, whose style depends on deliberateness and a certain ponderousness. The ominous lining up of causes and effects and the patient tweaking of narrative tension don't always mesh well with the aimed-for quickness and brio. Some of the humour is quite broad: there's a rather clunking motif concerning polar bears, and Beard gets involved with a stereotypical Southern waitress who's called, in the way of trailer-trash types, Darlene. He emerges as a figure of some comic dynamism, but the pages on his childhood and youth, though brilliantly done, articulate poorly with the knockabout parts of the plot. Once it became clear that the book's world is comic, I also found myself wondering if it wouldn't have benefited from being more loosely assembled, with shorter, discontinuous episodes and Beard functioning along the lines of Updike's Bech, Nabokov's Pnin or the consciousness in Calvino's Cosmicomics.
 
Beard is as robust and full-fleshed and ebullient a character as McEwan has come up with. And in Solar, he shows a side to himself as a writer — a puckishness, a broadness of humour, an extravagance of style — that we haven’t seen before.
 

» Add other authors (4 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
McEwan, Ianprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Basso, SusannaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bastos, Ana FalcãoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Camus-Pichon, FranceTraductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dauster, JorioTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dean, SuzanneCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ekman, MariaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Hansen, JanTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Keníž, AlojzTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kristiansen, HalvorTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lindholm, JuhaniTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Olcina, EmiliTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schmitz, WernerÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Verhoef, RienTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Zulaika, JaimeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
"It gives him great pleasure, makes Rabbit feel right, to contemplate the world's wastings, to know the earth is mortal too."

Rabbit is Rich, John Updike
Dedication
To Polly Bide
1949-2003
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He belonged to that class of men - vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever - who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women.
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La Edad de Piedra no terminó a causa de la escasez de piedras.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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When Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard's personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.

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