Word: mcewan
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...McEwan is often hailed as Britain’s greatest living novelist, and in 1998 he received that country’s prestigious Booker Prize for his morality tale Amsterdam. Four years later, McEwan unleashed the large, solid Atonement to extremely positive reviews. His newly-released Saturday is being saluted as the work of a writer in his prime. But is this really the case...
After Atonement, with its focus on the past, McEwan wanted his next book to engage fully with the world after 9/11. "The present," he says, "had become horribly interesting." Horribly interesting is also not a bad way to describe most of McEwan's work. Among his generation of British writers--Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie--McEwan always stood out as the one with the morbid streak. His early short stories brought to nasty behavior and abnormal psychology the full resources of literary nuance. Then came his first novel, The Cement Garden, in 1978, about four children who have buried...
...safe to say this new book comes from a place close to home. Certainly the contented side of the neurosurgeon comes from the man who imagined him. At 56, McEwan swings up and down the stairs of his house with the ease of a man who still does his share of hiking, a passion of his. He has a Booker Prize for his 1998 novel Amsterdam, and several of his novels, including The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love, have beenturned into pretty good films. Moreover, judging from his descriptions of Perowne's marital bliss--"What a stroke of luck...
...aging. I feel as if I've got less time left; I want to make sense." Not perfect sense; his later novels, like The Innocent, Black Dogs and Enduring Love, are still full of absurdity and enigma. But the characters have a more full-blooded life. Combine that with McEwan's companionable mind--strange to say of a man with such a dark disposition, but there it is--and with his intricate but unfussy prose, and you understand the gathering power of his work. Perowne finds majestic pleasure even in the simple act of shaving with his "extravagantly disposable triple...
...Saturday, McEwan also befriended a London neurosurgeon, Neil Kitchen, and spent two years following him at the hospital, finally joining him in the operating room. What he learned is set down in long passages that describe in loving (and graphic) detail the procedures of brain surgery. Work itself is a form of heroism in this book. So is love. So is a dry-eyed realism about our fates. McEwan and Perowne are both fond of quoting Charles Darwin: "There is a grandeur in this view of life." There's a grandeur in Saturday...