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Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
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Enduring Love (original 1997; edition 2004)

by Ian McEwan

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5,7881071,722 (3.68)296
One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organised life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Joe, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Joe's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.… (more)
Member:lisabygrave
Title:Enduring Love
Authors:Ian McEwan
Info:Vintage (2004), Paperback, 256 pages
Collections:Your library
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Enduring Love by Ian McEwan (1997)

  1. 10
    The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (lucyknows)
    lucyknows: The Reader could be successfully paired with Enduring Love for English Studies. In addition either book could also be be paired with the film The Talented Mr Ripley under the theme of obsession or even Border Crossing by Pat Barker
  2. 10
    Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick (Limelite)
    Limelite: Both are literary love stories. Both spiral into violence.
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» See also 296 mentions

English (93)  Spanish (3)  Dutch (3)  Italian (1)  Danish (1)  Hebrew (1)  German (1)  Hungarian (1)  Polish (1)  Swedish (1)  All languages (106)
Showing 1-5 of 93 (next | show all)
I think I've worked out what McEwan's "thing" might be. He writes very different stories, but in all of them you are left with a nagging sensation that there's something that's not been said, that there is more to this that you've been told. In Atonement, he did the whole rip the carpet out from under your feet in the last chapter trick. IN Amsterdam you're left wondering if there is a mastermind at work, pulling all the strings. In this, the seeds are planted mid way through that what Joe is saying might not be true, he might be seeing things, he might be the one with the mental instability. It's very clever, it's also rather unsettling. I think I'm going to space hos books out, too many at once could lead to increasing instability.
In this, the story starts with an accident, where a group of disparate people come together to try and hold a hot air balloon on the ground after the pilot miscalculates. The various people arrive, take hold of the balloon's ropes but are unable to keep it under control and there is a dreadful accident. The incident is the point at which the two male characters are first brought together and one of them completely misinterprets what's taking place. The relationship that is formed is one sided and not at all healthy, but it does endure, as the second appendix makes clear. It's quite a sad book as there is the ending and a fruitless beginning wrapped up in this one story.
Joe is presented as unreliable narrator, and even after the appendix, I'm still left with the nagging feeling that he's not been entirely honest, either with us or himself, about something. It's well done, but the religious mania element, while entirely relevant to the story, felt to have been laid on rather heavily at times. But then, I am speaking fomr an agnostic position, in the same way that Joe is from an atheistic one. I can understand his discomfort at what ensues, but I'm not sure he went about dealing with it in a logical manner, which is something he prided himself on. Hence my ambivalence about the truth of the matter. Hopefully that's danced around to many spoilers! ( )
  Helenliz | Nov 4, 2022 |
Can this author really be the same man who wrote Atonement? I have now read enough of his books to know there is a range from horrid to sublime and a bit of everything in between, and this one is the in between.

I hated the first half and almost tossed it in. I didn’t for the obvious reason, I wanted to know which of the two scenarios was right, who was the crazy man here? In the end, I realized, it didn’t really matter if Joe was right or wrong, he was still unbalanced, and he was still a very unreliable narrator. What was most frustrating was that for all the elevated subject matter and intellectual writing, there was nothing greater than “story” here for me.

There is something at the heart of this book that repelled me. Perhaps it was the treatment of God and faith. I believe; and I find it sad that anyone’s belief would be ridiculed or mocked, and, notwithstanding the obvious element of insanity attributed to Jed Parry, I found McEwan’s treatment of the topic hostile and mocking in nature.

I have two other McEwan books sitting on my library bookshelves. I think they will go with me on my next trip to the used book store and I can lighten my TBR by two books. I don’t see me ever cracking a McEwan bookcover again. I am so glad I started with Atonement, because had I read these others first, I would never have gotten there.
( )
  mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
McEwan is one of my favorite authors but this one is going to the bottom of my list of his books. There is definitely creativity here and the entire story has the mark of a great writer. But it never quite worked for me. I can see the catchiness of the title. Enduring love is what many want to read about. Unfortunately a more appropriate title might be Strained Love or even What doesn't Kill You will Make you Stronger. Rather than learning about a love that endures we learn how your life can get ruined by a stalker.

What I struggled with the most are some of major plot twists. The wife is thoroughly put off by her husband's fixation on with the stalker. She can't accept his fixation and decides she needs a separation. Everything else we learn about her would lead us to expect that she would be more supportive. While her lack of support supports the storyline it just doesn't feel real. I know fiction requires some suspension of disbelief. I still had to struggle to accept it. To McEwan's credit he employs a novel way to wrap up the novel with a pseudo medical article describing the syndrome the central figure, a science writer, has referred to throughout the book. Buried deep in it is a single sentence which restores our faith that this was really an enduring love. ( )
  Ed_Schneider | May 2, 2022 |
The human mind is a wonderful and baffling thing. Its capabilities amazes even ourselves while its misfunctions and illnesses destroy our lives and sometimes the lives of others. This book digs deeply into the psychology of its characters, describing in vivid and earnest detail the functioning of a mind which has beheld a horrific event, the ecstasies of a mind in love, the despair of a mind confronting a lost love, and most significantly, the dangers created when a mind goes astray creating for itself a reality that cannot co-exist with the actual realities of our lives.
I have always been partial to book where the psychology of the characters dominates the storyline of the book. The psychological insights found in so many novels by 19th and 20th century Russian novelists, the terrors wrought in the minds of characters created by Edgar Allan Poe, the tortures the mind endures from a character in love, the pain experienced when a person experiences tragedy and every other human emotion novelists explore as they tell their stories all offer depth and reality to the fictional accountings of the novels, these are the things I most enjoy finding in a book. "Enduring Love" is rich in explorations of the human mind. It demonstrates excellently that the novelist often understands people and the workings of their minds better than highly trained psychologists.
This is a good book, a worthwhile read and a good example of what Faulkner meant when he said that all good literature "explores the human mind in conflict with itself." ( )
  PaulLoesch | Apr 2, 2022 |
Every so often Ian McEwan picks up a familiar plot-driven genre and rebuilds it with a slow, dark emotional engine. The Innocent, which was made into a movie I didn't like much, was a spy thriller and a Hitchcock-like can-things-possibly-get-worse murder thing, wrapped around a love story and a painful character study, and shaped by the two meanings of the title (the hero's youthful ignorance, and the way the plot leads him to do worse and worse things without being really guilty of anything); I mostly loved it. Similarly, the story of Enduring Love could have been done as a stalker-of-the-week movie leading up to a big chase scene, and some of its strength comes from how simple the premise is: a man finds that an unpleasant delusional stranger is romantically obsessed with him.

Again going in two directions from the title, McEwan writes about what makes love endure, even to the point of psychosis, and how it can dwindle into a thing to be endured, like the narrator's collapsing marriage. How you can care and fear for a guy who's almost more unpleasant than his persecutor (though I'm sure not everyone will) is part of what makes the book impossible to summarize. McEwan also tends to build his characters around some odd area of history or knowledge that he's researched lovingly, and in this case his helpless narrator, a popular science writer, applies the buzzwords of "sociobiology" to his love life, in ways that both satirize and humanize that currently fashionable school of thought -- all while keeping the threat of murder in the air.

And after the "ending" -- where, as we expect, the plot spends itself in a bit of violence, followed by a pastoral recovery -- McEwan does something I've only seen done once before (by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale) and does it awfully well: he retells the whole thing in a few pages from a chilly academic perspective, as a psychiatric case study, removing both the suspense and the empathy while adding some new information that may or may not change how you see the characters. I don't know what to call this device or whether Atwood really invented it, but in both cases it had a delayed punch-in-the-gut effect on me, because the next time you read a case study or historical essay or news report like that, you can't help going through the same process in reverse and imagining the personal depths that were left out of it. ( )
  elibishop173 | Oct 11, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 93 (next | show all)
Das naturwissenschaftliche Weltbild des Ich-Erzählers wird - mit feiner Ironie oder entlarvender Kaltschnäuzigkeit - gegen die Unlogik der Liebe (zwischen Männern, zwischen Männern und Frauen, Eltern und Kindern) ausgespielt.
 
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.
 

» Add other authors (13 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
McEwan, Ianprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Basso, SusannaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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to Annalena
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The beginning is simple to mark.
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When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was.
'Een boom gaat nog wel, maar het is een hele stap om een pistool op iemand anders te richten. In wezen geef je toestemming om zelf gedood te worden' H22
"A stranger walked into our lives, and the first thing that happened was that you became a stranger to me."
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organised life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Joe, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Joe's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

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