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Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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Jeremy is a sensitively depicted, pleasant enough character who "is found by love" in his late thirties. Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, "Black Dogs" is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider. Jeremy speaks to Bernard and June separately: he interviews Bernard during a 1989 trip to Berlin to celebrate the fall of Communism; he talks to June as she lies in a nursing home, reassessing her life. This is a book of intellectual substance, but it is seductively easy to read and -- despite its grim title and cover -- probably the most positive McEwan has so far written. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

Jeremy finds their story interesting and revealing, and decides to record it even though he knows it will cause Jenny embarrassment. McEwan's narration moves fluidly back and forth between the present discussions between June and Jeremy and the various pertinent timelines, going back to 1946 and the couple's honeymoon in a remote region of southern France. They don’t have nearly enough sex, which, unlike politics, is one of the things McEwan is particularly good at describing.Of course tripping isn't random as such, one trips because one is clumsy, or fails to notice an uneven cobblestone, or else is drunk. McEwan, un poco en modo Zadie Smith, elige hacernos escuchar las dos perspectivas (la de la que cambió y la del que cree que ese cambio fue una locura) en las voces de un matrimonio separado. I'm also constantly amazed that Ian McEwan is a widely respected, 'serious' author who very often ends his stories with twists or major revelations which make us reconsider what comes before. He becomes deeply immersed in the story of his wife’s parents, Bernard and June, even embarking on writing a memoir based on what June, from her nursing home bed, tells him of their early life (Part One). The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside.

In the London Review of Books, Graham Coster complained that the final section's authoritative account is inconsistent with the "relativistic collage of verdicts over the preceding pages", and also criticized certain climactic encounters for the novel's narrator as areas where "McEwan’s metaphysical inquiry shrinks to [. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites , won the Somerset Maugham Award. McEwan attempts to create a mystery around the event, which, while helping to drive the narrative, falls flat in the reveal. The Child in Time bagged a wonderful 5 - which I'll link here because it's a nice positive review: This is me being nice to McEwan. Bernard, travelling with Jeremy to watch the Berlin Wall come down, dismisses his wife’s deism as ‘magical thinking’.It makes the impression that the author wanted to answer the ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but without the humorous focus of Douglas Adams, and without the number 42 guiding him through the maze of geopolitical and historical issues that haunt humankind. The story is fictional, but it’s presented as the non-fictional memoirs of two idealistic British communists who live through the aftermath of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are snippets where McEwan's perceptive writing shines though; it's the book as a whole that doesn't work for me. running down the path into the Gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones . I thoroughly approved of this: ever since his debut McEwan has been virtually unique in the Boys’ Own Brigade in depicting women as strong and resourceful.

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