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Ian Mcewan

Ian Mcewan Books

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Atonement

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Enduring Love

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Saturday

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Sweet Tooth

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Amsterdam

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Lessons

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The daydreamer

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Nutshell

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Solar

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Black Dogs

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The Innocent

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“There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.”

OrdinaryMemoryEveryday LifeForgetting
Book:Nutshell
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“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

Fate
Book:Lessons
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“It was in the Cornish summer of his twelfth year that Peter began to notice just how different the worlds of children and grown-ups were. You could not exactly say that the parents never had fun. They went for swims - but never for longer than twenty minutes. They liked a game of volleyball, but only for half an hour or so. Occasionally they could be talked into hide-and-seek or lurky turkey or building a giant sand-castle, but those were special occasions. The fact was that all grown-ups, given half the chance, chose to sink into one of three activities on the beach: sitting around talking, reading newspapers and books, or snoozing. Their only exercise (if you could call it that) was long boring walks, and these were nothing more than excuses for more talking. On the beach, they often glanced at their watches and, long before anyone was hungry, began telling each other it was time to start thinking about lunch or supper. They invented errands for themselves - to the odd-job man who lived half a mile away, or to the garage in the village, or to the nearby town on shopping expeditions. They came back complaining about the holiday traffic, but of course they were the holiday traffic. These restless grown-ups made constant visits to the telephone box at the end of the lane to call their relatives, or their work, or their grown-up children. Peter noticed that most grown-ups could not begin their day happily until they had driven off to find a newspaper, the right newspaper. Others could not get through the day without cigarettes. Others had to have beer. Others could not get by without coffee. Some could not read a newspaper without smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Adults were always snapping their fingers and groaning because someone had returned from town and forgotten something; there was always one more thing needed, and promises were made to get it tomorrow - another folding chair, shampoo, garlic, sun-glasses, clothes pegs - as if the holiday could not be enjoyed, could not even begin, until all these useless items had been gathered up.”

ChildrenFunGrowing UpSummerAdultsVacationRelaxationHabits
Book:The daydreamer
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“This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.”

WarTerrorInnocenceAdulthood
Author:Ian Mcewan
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“دخل الرتل الآن قرية مدمرة بسبب القصف، ربما كانت ضاحية مدينة صغيرة، فالمكان أنقاض برمّته ويصعب التعرف عليه؛ من يهتمّ؟ من في وسعه أن يصف هذه الفوضى ويأتي بأسماء القرى وبالتواريخ لتدوينها في كتب التاريخ ويتخذ موقفاً عقلانياً ويبدأ بتحديد المسؤول؟ لا أحد يعرف كيف سارت الأمور في هذا المكان، فإذا ما غابت التفاصيل انعدمت الصورة الكبرى.”

War
Book:Atonement
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“I couldn't motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn't remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon's shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back - a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”

ChoicesDepression
Book:Machines like Me
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“back early from Vienna. For some reason, perhaps a nasty hunch, she had gone out to the cottage. Or they had gone there together. In the bedroom was my laundered blouse. Then came the scene in Suffolk or London, and her ultimatum – get rid of the girl, or march. So Tony had made the obvious decision. But here’s the point. He had made another choice too. He had decided to cast himself as the victim, the wronged, the deceived, the rightly furious. He had persuaded himself that he had said nothing”

Choices
Book:Sweet Tooth
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“It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

Childhood
Book:The Child in Time
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“Maria's blushes were brought on by shame at the laughter she knew Leonard would misunderstand. For hers was the laughter of nervous relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of being physically abused had receded. She would not be obliged to do anything she did not want. She was free, they both were free, to invent their own terms. They could be partners in invention. And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze and the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in solitude. At the time they erupted in the single hoot of relief and hilarity which she had suppressed to a yelp.”

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Book:The Innocent
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“They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away.”

LoveSex
Book:Atonement
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“so I talked about the colonisation of Mars. Apparently it might be possible to plant simple life forms like lichen, and then, later, hardy trees, and over the course of thousands of years an oxygen-based atmosphere could develop. The temperature would rise, and in time it could be a beautiful place. Clarissa stared through the windscreen and the road rolling under our feet and, to the left and right, the thickening fields and the cow parsley just out along the hedgerows. 'What's the point? It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy.”

HappinessMars
Book:Enduring Love
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“Quando il connubio tra uomini, donne e macchine sarà completo, questo genere di letteratura diventerà obsoleto perché allora ci comprenderemo troppo bene. Abiteremo una comunità di intelligenze a cui avremo accesso immediato. La connessione avrà raggiunto livelli tali che i grumi isolati di soggettività si dissolveranno in un oceano di pensieri, di cui internet, per come la conosciamo, non è che la rudimentale anticipazione. Arrivando a poter dimorare nella mente gli uni degli altri, perderemo la capacità di mentire. I nostri racconti cesseranno di essere interminabili cronache di malintesi. La letteratura perderà la propria malsana fonte di nutrimento. E l'haiku, nella sua lapidaria, immobile e tersa percezione e celebrazione delle cose per quello che sono, rimarrà l'unica forma imprescindibile. Sono sicuro che faremo tesoro della letteratura del passato, per quanto possa inorridirci. Ci guarderemo indietro, meravigliandoci della bravura con cui individui di tempi remoti hanno saputo descrivere i loro difetti, di come hanno ideato geniali favole non senza speranza, a partire dai loro conflitti, dalle loro mostruose inadeguatezze e dalla reciproca incomprensione.”

HaikuFuturoItalianoLetteraturaAndroid
Book:Machines like Me
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“That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children's eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children's eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail.”

ChildrenFamilyFatherhoodBedtime Stories
Book:Sweet Tooth
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