On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan

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We learn about their families and upbringing; how they met and how they dated. Both are intellectuals. He’s studying to be a professor of history; her life is music and playing the violin.

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Complete Review On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Complete Review

McEwan said that he never rushes from notebook to novel. “You’ve got to feel that it’s not just some conceit,” he said. “It’s got to be inside you. I’m very cautious about starting anything without letting time go, and feeling it’s got to come out. I’m quite good at not writing. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I’m a hesitater.”The biggest difference in the movie, apart from the abuse being much clearer, is the ending. As I point out in my review of the movie, film and literature are different mediums. I think we want to see certain things play out in a movie that we don't necessarily need in a book. So the ending in the film has a certain power. (I cried both times I saw it.) I love the book's ending – it's quiet, subtle and more believable than what we're given in the movie. But even though it doesn't all work the old age-y makeup, especially for Edward, is a bit much, it's still very effective. Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. However ..I may re- read this book soon ( it only takes a few hours) with an open mind to see if my thoughts have changed.

On Chesil Beach - Penguin Books UK

Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.

Yardley, Jonathan (2 December 2007). "Jonathan Yardley". Washington Post . Retrieved 29 January 2019. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].) The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

Ian McEwan’s Art of Unease | The New Yorker Ian McEwan’s Art of Unease | The New Yorker

You’re so wrong about this!” Raine said. “At first, I felt exactly the same thing. Then I read it again and realized how it all fitted together.” Both are used to leaving things unsaid: Florence is “adept at concealing her feelings from her family” and “lived in isolation within herself”, while Edward grew up in a family that colluded in his mother’s fantasy of a well-run household by not talking about it. He secretly chose a London university instead of nearby Oxford as part of “his sense of a concealed life”. McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing. Both Edward and Florence fear that she is 'frigid', that antique word, and view that state as an affliction or curse with no remedy. McEwan's subject has often been the way in which innocence goes bad; here, the serpent in the garden is the time-honoured one - desire and its discontents.

The author tells us “the pill was only a rumor.” They had no opportunity for intimacy while dating. While in school in London he lived in a room in the house of a strict aunt. She lived in a women’s rooming house with a dorm mother keeping watch, no men allowed. Few young people had cars.