Lecții

by Ian McEwan, Dan Croitoru (Translator)

Pe când lumea încă evaluează consecinţele celui de-Al Doilea Război Mondial şi Cortina de Fier coboară, viaţa lui Roland Baines, în vârstă de unsprezece ani, e dată peste cap. Departe de casă şi de dragostea protectoare a mamei, abandonat într-o şcoală cu internat neobişnuită, vulnerabilitatea lui o atrage pe profesoara sa de pian, Miriam Cornell, lăsând cicatrici, precum şi amintirea unei iubiri care nu se va estompa niciodată. Peste ani, când soţia lui dispare, lăsându-l singur să-şi crească fiul încă bebeluş, Roland se vede obligat să-şi înfrunte existenţa neliniştită.

În timp ce norul radioactiv de la Cernobîl se răspândeşte peste întreaga Europă, Roland începe să caute răspunsuri – o căutare ce va sonda istoria familiei şi care va dura tot restul vieţii sale. Călătoria lui pune întrebări cruciale pentru noi toţi. Ne putem controla cursul vieţii fără a le face rău altora? Cum ne modelează existenţa şi amintirile evenimentele globale aflate dincolo de controlul nostru? Şi ce putem învăţa cu adevărat din traumele trecutului? Amplă, fascinantă şi profund umană, Lecţii este cronica epocii noastre – o meditaţie remarcabilă despre istorie şi umanitate prin prisma vieţii unui singur om.

„McEwan revine cu cea mai bună carte a sa de la Ispăşire încoace.” (Publishers Weekely)

„Un tur de forţă... O viaţă individuală proiectată pe fundalul evenimentelor globale.” (The Sunday Times)

„Un roman strălucit, superb scris, despre vieţile imperfect trăite.” (Vogue)

„O întreagă viaţă dezordonată între coperţile unei singure cărţi: un festin literar.” (The Spectator)

„Un povestitor magistral.” (Elif Shafak)

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Book Club, Novels

504 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2022

About the author

Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. 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.

McEwan lives in London.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lessons is a meticulously written combination of a period piece and a slice of life. Although it is the obvious fiction, the axis of the story is apparently based on some facts of Ian McEwan’s life.
The narration begins with the hero’s wife walking out on him, leaving him behind with a helpless infant boy and a brief valedictory message lying on the pillow…

To Roland, from this threshold everything looked randomly imposed as though he had been lowered from a forgotten place into these circumstances, into a life vacated by someone else, nothing chosen by himself. The house he never wanted to buy and couldn’t afford. The child in his arms he never expected or needed to love. The random traffic moving too slowly past the gate that was now his and that he would never repair.

Gradually his memory limns the picture of the past: his childhood, his war generation parents and in-laws, acquaintance with his future wife, political climate, his school, music lessons and his immature love affair with his music teacher…

She crossed the room and went into the kitchen. Watching her bare white feet, hearing their scuffing sound on the flagstones, made him feel weak. A couple of minutes later she came back with glasses of orange juice, actual crushed oranges, a novel taste. By then, he was standing uncertainly by the low table, wondering if now he was expected to leave. He would not have minded. They drank in silence. Then she put her glass down and did something that almost caused him to faint. He had to steady himself against the arm of a sofa. She went to the front door, knelt and sank the heavy door bolt into the stone floor. Then she came back and took his hand.
“Come on then.”

His precocious love prevented him from completing his studying… This way his grownup life commenced… From place to place… From post to pillar… He turned into a kind of intellectual drifter: a photographer, tennis coach, hotel lounge pianist, freelancing journalist, magazine reviewer, failed poet… Then he fell in love and got married… But his wife had ambitions and aspirations… She considered him standing in her way…

“All right. She too deceived herself in marriage. She thought you were a brilliant bohemian. Your piano playing seduced her. She thought you were a free spirit. Just the way I thought Heinrich was a hero of the resistance and would go on being one. You misled her. ‘He’s a fantasist, Mutti, he can’t settle to anything. He’s got problems in his past he won’t even think about. He can’t achieve anything. And nor can I. Together we were sinking. Then there was the baby and we sank faster. Neither of us were ever going to achieve anything.’”

Did he wish for vengeance? Time isn’t just a healer… Time is also a perfect avenger… However it revenges upon both sides…
An implicit question is posed: is it better to live a common life among friends and earthly delights or to become a soulless automaton mechanically achieving goal after goal and exist in cosmic vacuum?
Life tries to teach us many lessons – some of which we learn and some we ignore.

[Andy Marr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ian McEwan deserves a lot of credit for writing such an ambitious novel. But he loses a good deal of that credit because, really, it isn't nearly as good as it should have been. The writing is stuffy, the prose is long-winded, and the life it describes - that of abandoned son, confused lover, jilted husband and loving father, Roland Baines - is actually overwhelmingly dull.

I went into this with some excitement. I love epic stories like this, and count William Boyd's 'Any Human Heart' and John Boyne's 'The Heart's Invisible Furies' among my all-time favourite novels. However, while this work was certainly in a similar vein to these, McEwan has failed entirely to reach the dizzying heights set by many other authors of the genre.

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I was in my first London bookshop, I overhead a gentleman saying that he had read the latest Ian McEwan, but it was terrible. I so wanted to interrupt and say, "I agree!"

Lessons by Ian McEwan centers on a man by the name of Roland Baines. We follow Roland through his life: his major romantic relationships, his various familial relationships amidst the backdrop of various historical events, World War II, the Suez Canal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the recent pandemic.

First of all, I would like to mention how much I respect Ian McEwan, and no part of this review is easy. McEwan’s name carries some serious weight in literary circles (my circles), and Atonement is on the list of 100 Books To Read Before You Die According to the BBC. Criticizing this literary legend doesn’t bring me any joy. My words feel like footsteps, echoing in the halls of greatness.

So, shall we rip the band aid off?

The writing style of this book is archaic. For example, the formatting of this book just does not work. The paragraphs are gigantic, huge, page-long paragraphs. Short-term memory only lasts between 15 and 30 seconds. However, these paragraphs are so long that you can’t even remember the beginning of the paragraphs.

Lessons is very character driven versus plot driven, and I don’t connect with character-driven books. Additionally, the book flows as a general stream-of-consciousness. There are chapters in the book; however, they are not labeled with a word.

The best illustration that I can give you is if you watch YouTube videos. In the first video, the person is what we call a “talking head.” This person just says anything that comes into their head. After a few minutes, you don’t feel like you are missing anything, and you click off. In the second video, you watch “8 Reasons The Lost Apothecary Disappointed.” You watch the video all the way to the end because you don’t want to miss out on the last reason.

McEwan should have better organized this book. Also, he went far, far too broad in this book. He tried to cover so many relationships, so many historical events. He went wide instead of deep. Lessons would have been better if he had focused on one historical event and perhaps one relationship. I found it very difficult to really connect with the many different characters.

Personally, I didn’t like Roland Baines. He was boring. He might have been interesting, but McEwan tries to cover so many years in this book that he didn’t go deep enough. Roland reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye because some horrible things have happened to him in his life; however, he doesn’t adjust well to the losses.

The topic of aging is important and relevant. This is coming from someone who rubs her face twice a day with a jade stone in the hopes that my chin will somehow appear 20 years younger. Roland is very flat emotionally, and I wasn’t moved by him.

Further, if I was the editor of this book, I would have suggested McEwan rewrite it in the first person. I wanted to feel the emotions of Roland, what he felt in those moments. Instead, this was told in a very detached, cold way, almost like the events happened a long time ago. They don’t have that urgency, that sense of excitement, the sense of living in the moment with that character.

Additionally, this book did not feel very original. Without spoiling anything, there was a book which came out not too long ago, discussing the main topic of this book, and it was far superior.
Mr. McEwan – I would be happy to read any of your work in the future and provide feedback. My door is always open to you.

*Thanks, NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.

Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my…..
…..What an incredible epic reading experience by one of my favorite authors. The length is long — but the journey is worth it.

Roland Baine’s heart and mind was very close to my own.
His voice was the full rainbow of gentleness, confused, vain, proud, fearful, angry, lonely, optimistic, pessimistic, sad, sweet….etc.
His past speaks as much about himself as it does about other people. We can see ourselves in him ….. and 95% of the time I was swept under the spell of McEwan’s writing….his juicy storytelling.
Through deceptions, growing awareness, global history and personal painful experiences….
Ian McEwan Illuminates the struggles and dilemmas a man — and/or women — might face in a lifetime: 70 years to be exact: same age as me: 70.

It took me almost a full month to finish this book. But - be clear — it was my choice to read it slow. It includes so many historical highlights — I needed time to digest them all — radiation from Chernobyl, post WWII affects, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Suez Crisis, the White Rose, the fall of Berlin Wall, 911, poverty, government disappointments, global warming, racism, immigration, Brexit, Covid, etc.
It also includes a compelling mystery - along with some latent family issues - (an interesting tale about his half brother and sister: Henry and Susan), love issues -and moral issues.
Childhood, teen years, sex, marriage, art, music, literature, friendships, illness, desire, ambition, and loyalty….conjuring moments in relatively recent history…..unleashing a collision of universal forces—evoking gritty challenges — and causal heroism of single fatherhood—to son, Lawrence.
“When Roland was in the park he heard two women, who were pushing their pram, walk by use the word ‘emergency’. The country stood together, United in anxiety. The sane impulse was to run.
“His first duty was to get some bottled water home and start to seal the windows. He must continue to keep the world out. It was a twenty minute walk. As Roland took the front door key from his pocket Lawrence woke. For no reason, and the way of all babies, he started to bawl. The trick was to pick him up as soon as possible. It was hot and clumsy work, unfastening the straps, lifting the screaming red-face child, getting the push chair, the water, the flowers, the dust sheets into the house. He was in, and saw it lying on the floor, writing side up, another card from Alissa, her fifth. More words this time. But he left it where it was carrying Lawrence and the shopping towards the kitchen”.

The personal stories sang to my soul.
The connections, friendships, parenting, boyhood, self-doubts, background family history (I especially treasured Roland’ relationship with his mother, Rosalind, when he was a child)….were very relatable. I enjoyed ‘the juiciness’ of many varied tales.
The historical, cultural and political details were > in parts > very interesting > to mildly ‘not so much’. I always wanted to get back to the characters (directly) — their heartbreaks —more than the traumas of the world….(yikes…reveals something about me)….
But overall ….
…..’Lessons’ is outstanding- an ambitious stunning journey— profoundly humane— written in gorgeous prose.
Ha…
And….
Given that we never really ‘grow up’…yet have to make our way into the world anyway….“Lessons” ends at being thought-provoking, intelligent, wise, sad, and illuminating. Some parts were funny.
McEwan nails both the complexities of childhood and adulthood……
……reflecting, forgiveness- freedom- honor, pain, grief, loneliness , art, music, writing, success, obedience, disobedience, danger, flirtations, love, loss, death…..family in all the shapes and forms, more marriages- more friendships, more babies, more grandchildren….more life stories for our era.
…….it’s about the long road one must walk between one’s beginning and one’s end…..and all that happens in-between.
The drama, history, a small mystery, romance, friendship, fatherhood.moral quandaries, shame, hope, doubt, and redemption….
“Lessons” is a curl up with a favorite blanket novel….a cuppa tea….(many cups of tea)…..to relish, learn, and indulge in the spanning story of a man’s life.
A few times I wondered if it needed to be as long as it was — but I think so … as it allows room for our random thoughts— examining good and bad— the nature of humanity, the nature of identity, and whether or not choices are entirely within our control — even when the consequences aren’t.
Life is fragile…..
“Lessons” reflects the tenuous link between who we are — and the world we live in.
Kudos to McEwan…his quest for grace is the pulse of this superb novel.

A few sample excerpts:

“At times there was a mixture the excitement of danger mixed with exaggerated sense of security. There were times that Roland had hours of unsupervised play with his military children chums— A release from his mothers sadness and from his father‘s authority.
Unspoken family problems have a power over Roland as perverse and mysterious as gravity”.

“British students arriving at Heathrow from Minsk we’re radiated to 50 times normal levels. Minsk was 200 miles from the accident. The Polish government was advising against drinking milk or eating dairy products. The radiation leak was first detected by the Swedes 700 miles away. Soviet authorities had passed on no advice about contaminated food or drink to their own people. It could never happen here. It had happened already.
France and Germany had said there can be no harm to the public. But don’t drink the milk”.

“Like awesome Doris Lessing before her, glamorous Alissa Eberhardt made the sort of scary leap many women only dream about. She abandoned baby and husband and high- tailed it into the Bavarian Forest, where she lived on leaves and berries (just joking!) and wrote her famous first novel, ‘The Journey’. The book world pronounced her a genius and she’s never looked back. Her latest, ‘The Running Wounded’, is our Book of the Month. Watch out, Doris”.
“Whenever Roland read Alissa’s work, he looked for the character who embodied some elements of himself. He was prepared to be indignant if he found him. The kind of man her heroine might hole up with for many sensual months. The pianist, tennis player, poet. Even the failed poet, the sexually overdemanding man, the restless unfulfilled man of no settled work that a reasonable woman my tire of. The husband and father that a woman character deserts. What he found instead were, among many others, two versions of the big Swedish sailor with the ponytail, Karl”.

“Whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight and friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what - in the real world - he was waiting for. And the dimensions of the unreal, it was to relive the eight days he spent in the confines of 10
Armored Workshops. REME, at Gurji Camp in the autumn of 1956”.

“It was almost forty years since he saw Miriam. He dreaded what she might have become. He wanted her preserved as she had been.
He did not want a bloated sixty-five-year-old matron down on her luck taking her place.
A policeman was questioning Roland about his first piano teacher. Roland was trying to summon his fourteen year-old self.
Memories came back remembering his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist— turning up on his bike—

Ian McEwan writes with a vulnerability that is powerful, sensual, angry, passionate and gentle…..it’s overflowing with value and richness.

[©hrissie ❁ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Book of the Year 2022

Never has Ian McEwan been as ambitious in his writing projects. Published on September 13, Lessons is a refreshing and rewarding opus spanning several generations and historical (un)doings. It resists 'collective amnesia' through the indefatigability of its (re-)turning to historical events. But this act of counteroblivion -- the writing itself -- is also symptomatic of passion, keen curiosity, and, above all, the deep human desire to engage with history: our own sense of belonging to and within history, even. McEwan reveals the mechanics of his project rather surreptitiously towards the end of the novel: Roland Baines, in his seventies, is said to be contemplating what we could call, with Blanchot, the 'Book to Come' -- an 'imaginary history' of the hundred years of the twenty-first century, most of which lie beyond his reach. How he desires to peruse this as yet inexistent book's Contents page, if nothing else!

This desire is key, because the full thrust of this novel finds its source in the assumptions underlying this magnetic immersion in history, and one's limited positioning towards and within it. What McEwan accomplishes in Lessons through Baines's personal-historical and multi-memoiristic narration, is indeed epic in scope: the protagonist relays the revised entirety of his existence, alongside the story of his family, friends, lovers, and alongside that of the twentieth century, in a metahistorical-cum-metafictional replica of that very same book-to-come. In some respects, therefore, Lessons could be said to enact a reversal, reworking, amplification of Saturday: a day in the life-history of Henry Perowne, versus 'hundred years' in the life-history -- real and imagined, the history of the future -- of Roland Baines. Indeed, it is most tempting to suggest that another mechanism, or thematic/structural layer, is at work here, through McEwan's trademark back-and-forth narrative mode, which further sustains the idea of continuity and consistency in seeming or momentary rupture. In this manner, the different strands of Roland's narration progressively spill over into each other. Elegantly and superbly executed, these piling transitions accumulate echoing stories and take McEwan's seamless storytelling to an unprecedented, new level entirely, laying bare the full force of its consummate grace. In every solid, lengthy chapter, and on every wholesome, dense page, he explores with controlled yet delightful passion bordering on obsession the notion that the historical is also personal, and that the personal is also, indeed, historical. 'Controlled yet delightful' is what makes this an important 5+ stars for me: in this novel, perhaps urged by its notable autobiographical components, McEwan surrenders more generously to his number one skill -- storytelling. This is not to say that it does not require extensive preparation and presence of mind: his literature here is of a different order to his more easily digestible reads. But the narrative's sheer amplitude does indeed soften -- subtly diluting -- the tendentially rigorously defined framing of his shorter novels. (Think Amsterdam or On Chesil Beach, for instance.) In this sense, therefore, the length and breadth of Lessons is -- I am inclined to argue -- fully motivated. Not only does it diffuse that laconic crispness and allow for tenderness to prevail, but it additionally contributes to that utter joy of storytelling -- both individual and collective -- which makes it downright irresistible, whilst consolidating further the sought after engagement with history.

The title itself is equally suggestive: it is as simple as they get, no doubt, and yet it is made to penetrate the nooks and crannies of all the narrative folds, and is reinterpreted at every pit stop of Roland's narration, venturing far beyond the realm of morality. Lessons, of course, mark the momentous event in Roland Baines's life, the very same that 'rewires' -- as is suggested several times -- his brain: that is, his piano lessons with Miriam Cornell (in her twenties, at the time) as an eleven-year-old attending Berners Hall boarding school, and the ensuing life-defining passionate affair. An intimacy never again experienced, for both parties, which was consummated when Roland was fourteen years old, afflicted and alarmed by the thought of his life possibly coming to an end -- because, in history, the early 1960s delivered their own momentous event, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In this fashion, Roland retraces history's steps by and while retracing his own steps; his first wife Alissa's steps, leading up to her complete desertion of the family and devotion to her literary endeavours; their previous generations' failings; and the equally tasking steps of the future generations -- his son Lawrence and his own children. Through Jane's journals -- Alissa's mother -- he delves into the White Rose and existence- via-resistance during the War, while setting the tone for Alissa's decision to break the cycle of her mother's past departure from her own literary ambitions. Through Alissa's German friends, Ruth and Florian, Roland narrates the unjust, horrific suffering brought about by the Berlin Wall, and the rush of possibility collectively experienced in 1989, which in turn allows him to contemplate the 'so many lessons unlearned' by and within history, with the displaced walls emerging in New Mexico aka The Trump Wall, for instance. The polar ends of the novel too refer to this personal-historical movement: the driving force of the initial present of the narrative is Chernobyl and the general concern around nuclear power and radiation post-1986, and in its concluding part it ominously remembers the discomforting present of our COVID age. Moreover, his son and wife, Ingrid, hail from a generation which is inevitably far more conscious of and invested in the issues raised by climate change: it is one of the main fields Lawrence takes interest in and pursues, and it also introduces him to oceanographer Ingrid. This is McEwan, of course: nothing is left to chance. And yet, McEwan seems to want to pull out all the stops here, fully conceding -- even more than usual -- the extent to which, indeed, chance and contingency bend and mould individual lives in impossibly minute and grand ways and details. (Missed) lessons and reckonings are the foundations of life...and history.

McEwan readers need not fear. The literary territory meticulously fabricated by this magnificent writer in all his previous novels is actually further refined and extended in Lessons. Sustained cultural references of all sorts -- music-related and literary, of course, but also a plethora of specifically socio-political contexts (say, Thatcher or Brexit, to mention a few others, which reminds us of his The Cockroach), retrospectively interpreted in a historical vein -- find their rightful place in Roland's narration. Added to this is the brilliant McEwan wit and erudition, which return to amuse the captives of good literature. Interestingly, there is much displacement at work in this novel. Though Roland -- who happens to make a project out of reading Musil's The Man Without Qualities in German -- writes his own journals and poetry for greeting cards and dabbles in journalism from time to time, it was not in McEwan's interest to present him as one of the most accomplished authors of his time. No, Roland is your relatively average, fairly underachieved, inconstant human being, telling his tale of youth (the extended parallelism with Conrad's Marlow in 'Youth' is particularly striking), ageing, and encounters with death (most notably through his second wife, Daphne). But he -- Roland or McEwan -- will carry out his metaliterary duty, as it were, through other characters -- via reflections on Alissa's publications and her literary fame, in particular. Stylistically, Roland's own narration is also firmly introspective, without however disrupting the established narrative flow, which is suspended between the most ordinary aspects of existence and its most momentous events. Incredibly, McEwan never loses sight of this, nor does he take unnecessary detours.

As I sit here writing -- bedazzled by his latest offering, and feeling positively bereft at its close -- it strikes me that there remains only one story to be told: of a 17th novel, by this author, (im)possibly being his best one yet...With the very best traits of his very best novels, combined in one Best Novel, and enhanced.


Many many sincere thanks go to NetGalley and publisher for the advance copy of this brilliant novel. These are but a few stray initial thoughts on what will undoubtedly be a much talked and written about work.
Thank you, above all, to McEwan for writing this book.

[Paromjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian McEwan's latest sprawling and ambitious epic has strongly autobiographical elements, such as his childhood spent in Libya, a story that focuses on Roland Baines through the decades of a life intertwined with and shaped by the background of global and national history right up to the present. The challenges of growing up in this period of history, going back and forth in time, trying to make sense of life and the world, the ageing process, and lessons offered are illuminated through Roland, separated from his blended family for good when he is sent to boarding school when he is 11 years of age. Few can get through life without scars, and in this Roland is no different, his dysfunctional family is marked by its lies, secrets, deceptions and silence, how will single father, Roland, fare in bringing up his baby son, Lawrence, when his wife, Alissa, walks out on them, sacrificing them at the altar of what will be a hugely acclaimed writing career?

Alissa, and his piano teacher, Miriam, both of whom might be seen as extreme versions of womanhood, are to have everlasting effects on his life, irrespective of their absence. Miriam extracts a heavy price for the lessons she offers as the world teeters during the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to emotional damage and his truncated education. This he endeavours to address, by becoming an autodidact, reading widely, including Joseph Conrad and Robert Lowell, and it is through choosing to learn German that he first meets Alissa. With the potential of become a gifted concert pianist, all this is lost as he shifts aimlessly through life and careers, intent on living, taking drugs, travelling, serial monogamy, plagued by a past that leaves him with a FOMO of what's round the corner and the future. This leaves him ill prepared and unwilling to make choices based on what is happening in the present. There is little Roland can do as he watches Lawrence grow up and echo many of the patterns of his own life. As he ages, becomes politically disillusioned, Roland begins a journal and finally makes the decision to ask Daphne to marry him, a lesson finally learnt.

McEwan compares the life of Alissa with her dazzling career, but lived entirely alone, with the mediocrity and failures of Roland's life, but rich with the circles of growing family, friends and ex-lovers. This is a beautifully stitched together narrative of global history and the intimate, the personal, of politics and culture, growing older, family, and trying to make sense of who we are, and the times we live in, shot through with some light, grace, forgiveness and hope amidst so much bleakness. It is hard to remove the more unpalatable aspects and lessons of life when, as seen here, they are so inextricably woven in with the good, such as the birth of Lawrence. This is likely to resonate with many readers, and what makes this a great read for me is that since I finished, I cannot stop thinking about it, with other thoughts continually interrupting my daily life. I can see myself remembering and reflecting on this novel for some time to come. On a final note, this was a difficult review for me to write because there was so much I wanted to say, but I forced myself to stay brief, such as the White Rose movement in Germany and so much more, in the hope that readers will be intrigued by the snippets offered here. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

VIVERE



Lezioni è una lezione di scrittura. Gioco di parole che viene facile, e spontaneo. È il miglior romanzo di McEwan che leggo dai tempi di “Ian McAbre”, cioè i suoi primi, quelli degli anni Ottanta del secolo scorso. Mi dicono che Espiazione sia alla stessa altezza, se non addirittura superiore: ma io non l’ho letto. Ancora.



In modo magistrale McEwan intreccia quasi cento anni di storia – ottanta, a essere più precisi – partendo dalla seconda guerra mondiale, l’immediato dopoguerra – nel corso del quale, nel 1948, nasce il protagonista, Roland, lo stesso anno di nascita del suo creatore – arrivando fino alla Brexit, al covid e alla post-pandemia, attraversando la guerra fredda con la minaccia nucleare, la crisi dei missili a Cuba, il Vietnam, la Thatcher, dal disastro di Chernobyl alla caduta del muro di Berlino, il cambiamento climatico, dalla guerra nei Balcani all’11 settembre 2001 a Capitol Hill.
Il tutto incrociato con gli eventi personali di Roland: i suoi undici anni in Libia, al seguito del padre militare, il collegio lontano dai genitori, la storia con l’insegnante di musica, lei venticinquenne e lui quattordicenne – facile pensare alla situazione ribaltata della Lolita di Nabokov, e McEwan non dimentica di nominarla, qui il minorenne è maschio invece che femmina - il matrimonio con Alissa, la separazione e via andare.
Microcosmo e macrocosmo vanno a braccetto, la Storia collettiva, quella con la esse maiuscola, si sposa con quella personale, individuale, minuscola.



La moglie di Roland, Alissa, molla di punto in bianco neonato e compagno per seguire la sua strada e diventare la scrittrice che ha sempre voluto essere, quella che sua madre Jane avrebbe voluto diventare. Altrettanto fece Doris Lessing, nominata.
Il suo romanzo d’esordio, settecento e rotte pagine, romanzo-mondo come si potrebbe dire di questo Lezioni, è magnifico, per Roland un autentico capolavoro. La “lezione” che Alissa offre a Roland è facilmente fatta propria dal lettore di McEwan:
Devo proprio darti una lezione su come si legge un libro? Prendo a prestito. Invento. Saccheggio la mia vita. Prendo un po’ dove capita, modifico, faccio tornare le cose come mi pare…Tutte le cose che mi sono capitate nella vita e anche tutte quelle che non mi sono capitate. Tutto quello che so, tutti quelli che ho conosciuto – tutto quello che è mio, mescolato con quello che invento.
E vale per tutti quelli che muoiono dalla voglia di individuare i tratti autobiografici in queste cinquecentosessanta pagine, sembra che McEwan ci dica, non vi meravigliate ma lasciatemi in pace e guardate altrove.
E poi McEwan aggiunge nel finale che
È un peccato rovinare una bella storia trasformandola in una lezione.






Roland è un uomo di straordinaria ordinarietà. Lo si potrebbe definire mediocre, ma secondo me suona esageratamente categorico: d’altronde, per qualcuno Ulrich è davvero “un uomo senza qualità” e per qualcun altro Stoner è davvero un mediocre. Assomiglia a tanti, ma è unico. È umano, come tutti, ma è Roland. E infatti si potrebbe sintetizzare che questo è un magnifico romanzo su cosa significa essere umani.

La sua storia qualsiasi risplende ed emana luce e calore. Poteva essere un grande pianista concertista, oppure un campione di Wimbledon, o forse un poeta: ma probabilmente non ha voluto con sufficiente ostinazione essere nessuna di queste cose, forse ha preferito non rinunciare ad altro. La musica gli serve per il suo lavoro part time di esecutore da pianobar, la poesia per scrivere (retribuito) biglietti di auguri per ricorrenze varie, il tennis per un impiego altrettanto part time da istruttore di lezioni private.
Il vero talento di Roland è suo figlio, il suo essere padre e madre, crescerlo da solo e consegnarlo al mondo.



Ci vuole talento per trasformare in un gran bel romanzo una trama come questa che sembrerebbe più adatta a una serie TV. Ci vuole talento a mettere giù una bella frase “facendola seguire da una ancora più bella”. E ci vuole talento per rendere moderno e perfino attuale un romanzo tutto sommato novecentesco.

Inevitabilmente, il passato si insinuava dentro al loro silenzio. Ce n’era così tanto ormai.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve enjoyed Ian McEwan’s other books, but I struggled with this one. A character rich story, it lacked enough drama to pull me in, despite covering most of the major events of the last 70 years and seemingly all of the British political changeovers.
The story starts in 1986, when Roland’s wife walks out, leaving him with their 7 month old son. As the story progresses, we hear the story of his life starting with boarding school at age 11 and forward. The plot even includes the story of his in-laws. At age 14, he is seduced by his piano teacher. It has a lasting impact and he just sort of meanders through life. I didn’t care for him and had trouble relating to him. This was a man who was abandoned by parents and wife, seduced at a young age. It should have been easy to feel sorry for him. But he was just so flat and spiritless, I couldn’t. Of course, his wife, Alissa, isn’t any more likable. This is a woman who leaves her son to go find herself, in the parlance of the day. She becomes a famous novelist and sections of this book are spent recapping her books.
I feel lately I’ve been plagued by books that could have benefitted from a better editing job. This was a slow slog. The writing felt pompous more than rich, like McEwen was trying too hard to impress the reader. I would have preferred “a little less talk and a lot more action”. The ending does manage to bring a resolution and helped at last pull this up to a 3 star for me.
I will obviously read anything else McEwen writes, but I can’t really recommend this one.
My thanks to Netgalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing for an advance copy of this book.

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It could be said that people shape History same as History shapes people. In Roland Baines’s case, and the vast majority of people on this planet, the latter applies. This book is his personal history and that of the second part of the 20th century. Born in the late 40s, Roland has ‘drifted’ through the years for seven decades, having not influenced any particular event but having been part of many that shaped the world. With him we get to revisit them, if only to examine how they lead and alter the course of one person’s life. This novel quietly but deftly reminds us, lest we had forgotten, how small and inextricable we are from the sociopolitical and economical circumstances of our times.

Still, our hero, as a child of the postwar West, has had to a large extend the ‘luxury’ of shaping his own existence:
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.

Ian Mc Ewan is on top of his game here. A work of maturity, however banal this sounds. Himself in his 70s, I think he couldn’t have written the same book a decade ago. Time has softened his hard edges that never failed to sneak in the bulk of his earlier work. In the #MeToo era he’s still cunningly clever to present us with a male hero who has been abused and abandoned by the women in his life. His female piano teacher sexually initiates him at 14 and further uses him as her very own male concubine (is there a word for that? It looks like some linguistic innovation is called for here.) This results in trauma he has since been trying to come to terms with.

His wife abandons the family nest early on to ‘find herself’ and pursue her writing ambitions, leaving it to him to single-handedly raise their son. She succeeds big-time, giving the abandoned the feeble consolation that their abandonment served a greater cultural purpose, if nothing else. The biggest question the story raises is to what extend we are free to take control of our lives without hurting those close to us. Mc Ewan always had a knack for strong female characters and more of those are strewn all over the novel; two of them, his mother and his lifelong friend-turned-soul-mate have a major impact on Roland's life but in both cases he acknowledges it a little too late…

You would think that this is a book about heartless women, regret and bitterness. It is not. It is a book about Love and its many forms. It’s the story of a man’s journey and the Lessons he learns while on it. I’m glad that the English language still allows the use of the word 'man' in both its male and general meaning; the hero’s journey is as full of triumphs and defeats as that of anybody else’s. Anybody who has lived in a society free enough to have allowed them to make and account for their choices, that is. In the end, if one is lucky and sentient enough, there comes the unavoidable evaluation of rights & wrongs, ups & downs, what ifs & actual events. That’s what this book is all about, the lessons we learn (or don’t) in a lifetime and how we congratulate or forgive ourselves accordingly. It couldn’t have been written earlier by this author and it wouldn’t have been properly appreciated if read earlier in life by this reader. I ‘discovered’ Mc Ewan in my 20s and I have this sense that together we’ve embarked on a writing/reading trip all these years. It’s a sense worth of a 6th star if ever there was one on this site.

P.S. I was very fortunate to attend the launch of this book in Bath, England this past September. The author amusedly assured us that although there are tons of autobiographical elements in the story, there never was an abusive piano teacher in his life.

"Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need…Everything that ever happened to me and everything that didn’t. Everything I know, everyone I ever met – all mine to mash up with whatever I invent."

[Taufiq Yves · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Roland entered the latter half of his life, the book presented this poignant and concise line: ”How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

This novel, in a quasi-autobiographical style, portrays the life of a British man born after World War II. The plot is rich, encompassing external environmental changes, encounters and conflicts between people, and the inner turmoil, sadness, self-reflection, and liberation of the human heart. The book's structure and plotline are exceptionally complete, with all foreshadowing and suspended plot points carefully addressed. The benefit of the quasi-autobiographical form is that, due to its fictionality, it avoids the first-person narrator's tendency towards excessive self-indulgence or self-justification, providing a more objective subjective perspective.

Roland’s life story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly changing era. His experiences, compared to these monumental shifts, seem insignificant. He is, after all, just one face in the crowd. Yet, it is these ordinary occurrences – mismatched parents, a dreary boarding school (albeit with a slightly more complex situation), failed relationships and marriages, mundane jobs, average children, and so on – that McEwan imbues with remarkable detail and emotional depth. The constant internal dialogue of self-doubt, resignation, and going with the flow presents a sense of authenticity that makes me feel as though I've lived Roland's life alongside him, experiencing his frustrations, disappointments, and joys, and witnessing life's final twilight.

McEwan also captures the evolution of Roland's monologue, from the anxious frenzy of youth to the profound tranquility of old age, as he navigates from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the current pandemic. At the same time, he makes us realize how easily personal history can be forgotten or overlooked. We lament the insignificance of the individual in the grand scheme of things and the fleeting nature of life, yet we are forced to bid farewell to everything, including our own existence.

The female characters in the novel are memorable and are portrayed mostly through a lens of understanding, sympathy, and acceptance. Five women: his ex-wife Alissa, mother-in-law Jane, mother Rosalind, best friend Daphne, and the pivotal Miriam; each representing five completely different female lives: the one who abandoned her family for self-achievement, the one who sacrificed her life's pursuits for the family but felt bitter, the repressed and silent devotee, the one who balanced everything and seemed perfect, and the wild lover/sinner. Their individual stories are scattered throughout the book, and McEwan provides enough detail and outline for readers to form their own interpretations. Each woman could easily be the subject of another novel. What's remarkable is that the empathetic understanding of these women comes from Roland's perspective, even though many of them were often on the opposite side of his interests (except for Daphne). This grants him an unspoken quality of openness and tolerance. Despite his lack of significant achievements or charisma, the overall impression of Roland after reading the book is positive.

The most intense emotional connection in the entire book is arguably Roland and Daphne's trip to the Lake District. Their farewell-like companionship and reminiscences make one hesitate to call McEwan a "horror" writer, as some domestic media have labeled him. This contrast is a testament to McEwan's talent.

Alissa, who successfully left home and eventually became a German literary icon. Although Roland resents her, he consistently acknowledges the excellence of her writing. The novel devotes considerable space to describing Alissa's novels through Roland's eyes. I imagine that if McEwan were to write a review of a novel he admires, these passages would serve as a model – using sophisticated adjectives, offering direct and specific praise, and accurately capturing the feel and style of the work without direct quotes.

As an ordinary reader, all I can say about the novels I appreciate is: I must read more of McEwan's work.

4.2 / 5 stars

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roland Baines grows up in Tripoli with a somewhat distant relationship with his military father, a warm but hard to figure out relationship with his mother. The influence of the other women in his life : the relationship with his piano teacher when he is just fourteen, being abandoned by his wife. There are flashbacks to the time when he is sent off to a boarding school in London when he is eleven, from the present as he cares for his baby Lawrence solely after his wife leaves him . Chernobyl has just occurred and Roland blocks the windows . Then flashbacks to Cuban Missile Crisis and where he was in his life moving forward again to 9/11 and the recent Brexit and current Covid pandemic. Sprawling describes this novel so well as it depicts world events and where he was in his life in that particular time. If I made it sound confusing moving around, you can trust that McEwan does this seamlessly. This novel is a view of a man’s life, a commentary on the world, the culture, the people in it . As big and broad in scope as it is, it is also intimate.

Life lessons, hard earned at times and not learned until years later evaluating one’s hopes and desires, lost chances. With the emphasis on world events at various times in Roland’s life, I couldn’t help but think about all of the events that are happening simultaneously at this time in our country and around the world. How will these things impact us personally as we move forward, but especially how will the future generation of young people be impacted. How has each of our personal upbringings brought us to where we are, who we are ? It’s so wonderfully written as we’ve come to expect from McEwan, a master story teller. I couldn’t quite give it five stars for lack of a connection to the other characters, but I certainly felt for Roland. McEwan fans will be pleased.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Knopf through NetGalley.

[Hanneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian McEwan’s ‘Lessons’ displays his profound writing skill once again. I thought it was a masterpiece. I am relieved because it has been a while that he wrote such a mesmerizing novel. It affected me greatly and it often was pretty confrontational to me personally. I would assume it to be strongly autobiographical but, then again, it is hard to establish this. Roland, the protagonist, certainly is portrayed as a typical product of the seventies, not ambitious, roaming the world, taking meaningless jobs here and there and not taking that one last step to make his life more successful while he could easily have done so. An ‘almost there’ sort of person, but he is not an unhappy man in general. You could even consider him quite a content person when he got older.

I’ll have to let the novel sink in a bit before I can write a more extensive review. I’ll like to ponder now about some of the symbolisms I think I detected when reading along, such as that bone splinter in his chest or Roland’s easy absolution of the abuse of his piano teacher which forced him to enter upon a new course in his life. And how about the use of the name ‘Roland’! I thought the novel outstanding, perhaps one of his best!
.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Readers drawn to Ian McEwan’s gorgeous novel “Atonement” 20 years ago may have drifted away from the writer’s bizarre recent work.

His last three books have been minor, fantastical stories, wormy with weird wit. “Nutshell,” for instance, was an homage to “Hamlet” narrated by an imperiled fetus. “Machines Like Me” told the tale of a man cuckolded by a sex robot. And “The Cockroach” squished together Boris Johnson and Gregor Samsa.

It’s safe to come back now.

McEwan’s new novel, “Lessons,” is a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill. While the story shares a few tantalizing similarities with the author’s life, it’s no roman à clef. Instead, it depicts an ordinary man, a failed writer, buffeted by intimate and international crises over the course of more than seven decades. And for an author famously devoted to brevity, “Lessons” is also his longest novel. Here, finally, McEwan — who won the Booker Award in 1998 for “Amsterdam” — luxuriates in all the space he needs to record the mysterious interplay of will and chance, time and memory.

The man at the center of this story is Roland Baines. For many years he presumes to think of himself as a professional poet — or at least a prospective one. We meet him in 1986 soon after his wife, a fellow writer, has vanished, leaving him and their baby son behind. The police suspect. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published today 13-9-22

Among his subjects were other single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array. On close examination the errors dissolved into questions, hypotheticals, even into solid gains. On this last he may have been deluding himself. But in surveying a life it was inadvisable to acknowledge too much defeat. Marrying Alissa? Without Lawrence there would have been no joy, no Stefanie, Roland’s new best friend. If Alissa had stayed? He had reread The Journey in February and early March when he and most of the people he knew locked themselves down three weeks ahead of the government. Her novel remained exquisite. Leaving school early? If he had stayed, Miriam, by her own admission, would have hauled him from the classroom and he would have been sunk. Even now that thought, as if in prospect, stirred him just a little. Abandoning classical piano and the chance of becoming a concert pianist? Then he would never have discovered jazz, would never have run free in his twenties or learned to respect manual labour or developed a snappy backhand. He would have been bound to five hours a day practice for the rest of his life. ..... Should he have stayed in the Labour Party to argue for its liberal and centrist traditions? He would have been driven miserable and mad after four consecutive defeats. So his life was an unbroken succession of correct decisions? Clearly not. Finally he came to the true turning point, the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail: the boy mounting his bike, mid-Cuban Missile Crisis, to present himself to Miriam for a two-year erotic and sentimental education with its ludicrous finale, the pyjama week, that terminated his schooling and distorted his relations with women. This was difficult. When he asked himself if he wished none of it had happened he did not have a ready answer. That was the nature of the harm.

This is Ian McEwen’s 16th novel, his first – if you exclude the satrirical Brexit novella “The Cockroach” - since his AI/Turing novel “Machines Like Me” in 2019. Six of his previous novels have been Booker nominated (between 1981 and 2007 – one win, four shortlistings) and he was nominated for the first two years of the International Booker (when it was an award for lifetime achievement).

The book (or at least my ARC) opens with a letter from the publisher to the reader talking about how Ian McEwan has “written some of the most lasting, resonant and original fiction of our time” , and that this is a story which is “at once universal and deeply personal ……… set against the past seventy years of political and cultural upheaval” ending “the word masterpiece probably gets thrown around too often, but I use it deliberately and emphatically here”.

The book is narrated in a fairly traditional first person voice by Roland Baines who started Boarding school in England in 1959 when he was 11. Baines father is a working class Scotsman who worked his way up through the war and afterwards to a Major; his mother, Aldershot based originally, had a previous marriage to a soldier who was killed in World War II. Roland’s step brother and step sister from that marriage were placed by his parents with a paternal grandparent and London institution respectively – and when Roland was young his parents moved to Tripoli with the army.

Now for anyone with a knowledge of McEwan’s own biography, or who has just glanced at Wikipedia, there are large amounts of autobiographical detail here – which means for anyone with a little more familiarity one major plot development is inevitable around 300 pages before it becomes clear to Baines.

The book effectively starts in May 1986 (just as the Cherynobyl disaster was beginning to be discovered – one of a swathe of world events which cut across the book), but starts with a memory (“The past was often a conduit from memory to restless fantasising”) of 1959/60 as Roland, a intuitively brilliant but nervous piano player, is effectively assaulted by his female school piano teacher Miriam Connell. Back in 1986, Roland is alone with his very young child Lawrence, his wife Alissa having left after writing a note saying she could not stay in their marriage (albeit the police initially are sceptical of Roland’s role in the disappearance).

He knew it could be pleasurable, handing out wise counsel. Receiving it could be suffocating when you’ve moved on. Where exactly? Backwards, twenty-seven years, to the core. Alissa’s vanishing had left open ground to the past. Like trees felled to clear the view. In rare moments like this, he could see the origin, a point of light in sharp focus, of all that troubled him and those who came close to him. The piano teacher haunting him that first night was often on his mind.

From there we look back over some nearly 500 pages to Roland’s school days and early marriage, and forwards over the next 35 years or so right up to the present day.

On his schooldays we particularly focus on his re-encounter with Miriam Connell at the age of 14, where he is haunted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and a commonly shared worry among his schoolfriends that they might die without “doing it” and Miriam effectively seduces and then grooms him for a couple of years before the two break up when she proposes elopement on his 16th birthday (Roland is far more interested in the physical side of the relationship).

This relationship (and the desire for sexual fulfillment it gave him); and slightly more oddly (and I can only assume more autobiographically) a week in Libya where he lived with a sense of unreal freedom in a camp (where forces families were taken to in the feared aftermath of the Suez Crisis) – affect Roland for life with firstly a sense of physical entitlement and secondly with a sense that freedom is possible if only he avoids commitments – both of which are of course anathema to a stable long-term relationship. Added to this a unfulfilled desire to be the very best at whatever he does (piano playing, poetry, tennis playing are all deemed failures) leads Roland to a life of drifting – over time he makes his living from , respectively, playing the piano in the lounge bar of a hotel, teaching amateur tennis players, and writing literary doggerel for a start up high-quality greeting card company.

And we see this and how it impacts Roland’s life and his relationship with his friends and family, all of which plays out against major events. The fall of the Berlin Wall, various General elections – Roland shares McEwen’s centrist Labour tendencies, terrorist attacks etc are more than just backdrops to the book, but more like the stage on which Roland lives out his own life.

Another important aspect of the novel are Alissa (who he originally meets teaching German classes)’s parents. Her father was a member of the (real life) White Rose movement of anti-Nazi but non-violent intellectuals in Germany. Her mother an English lady who forced her way to be foreign correspondent for the (real life) UK literary magazine Horizon – with an original idea to write about the White Rose movement post-War and then to travel but who met her now husband and abandoned her plans, then becoming a mother and frustrated (by domesticity) and unpublished memoir/journal writer. I must admit I found this part of the book extremely uninteresting – the pre WWI Blaue Reiter art movement features quite a lot also – and a classic example of McEwan at his very worst “I have done some research and I am putting it in the book regardless of whether it fits or is of an interest to my readers” tendency which has blighted many of his other works.

His son Lawrence starts as a precocious mathematician, before abandoning those studies around A Level stage – to which his father says “not everyone needed a degree in maths from somewhere like Cambridge”, to which I can only agree and say that such an excellent degree would anyway have been beyond someone who, while having a grasp of co-primes seems to believe earlier that fifty one is a prime number: a trip to a pub to watch a darts match is all that is needed to disabuse that mistake.

But otherwise the relationship between parent and child – what at one stage Roland calls “parenting, its double helix of love and labour” is a key and important part of the novel – and one we see from many sides including Roland’s own differently difficult relationship with his parents, and Alissa’s with hers (particularly her flammable relationship with her mother and overwhelming desire to avoid repeating what she sees at her mother’s mistaken frustrated surrender to domesticity) and the autobiographical twist to Roland’s (Mc Ewen’s) extended family of siblings.

At one stage, effectively when Alissa enters the public stage (and re-enters the book’s stage) as a rapidly successful and hugely acclaimed novelist, this novel takes a turn which is not so much autobiographical as self-referential, in a way in which I was not sure what was entirely motivating McEwan.

For example:

At one stage a collage of dinner party conversational fragments includes a debate of the ability of male authors longlisted for the 2002 Booker longlist (and an incorrect tip from Martyn Goff) – only 4 years after McEwan’s own win of the prize (and 1 year after the shortlisting).

At another point, Roland places a bet on the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009, thinking its time for a German speaking author to win, only to pick the wrong German author – and we cannot help but think how McEwan (recognised for prizes and literary awards around the world) reacted to his fellow UEA-alumni and English language novelist Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Later Roland admits he was dismissive of contemporary Oxbridge-alumni authors who “busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic descriptions of class differences … lightweight tales [where the] greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair or divorce” and topical issues were ignored, only to decude years later that “a tweed jacket never stopped anyway from writing well” (McEwan managing to be an author not from Oxbridge and he does look at topical themes – perhaps too much so – but who is still often pictured in a tweed jacket – so is this trying to have the best of both worlds?).

There is also an odd dig at the literary editors commissioning “novelists rather than critics to review each other’s works” – something I would agree with as the reviews are often superficial and far too positive (hoping the favour may be returned) but which Roland (or I suspect McEwan speaking through him) condemns due to “insecure writers condemning the fiction of their colleagues to make elbow room for themselves”) – which made me tempted to Google the reviewers and reviews of McEwan’s latest novels.

And then towards the end of Alissa’s career (and life) we are told “‘She’s our greatest novelist. Teenage school kids are made to read her. But she’s white, hetero, old and she’s said things that alienate younger readers. Also, when a writer has been around long enough people begin to get tired. Even if she does something different every time. They say, She’s doing something different – again!’ – this from a white, hetero, old author who writes a set of novels which are ostensibly hugely varied (climate change satire, spy romance, court drama and anti-religious polemic, Shakspeare rewrite, AI alternative history and now epic to pick the books since he was last Booker nominated) but which I think most readers would say has a distinctive style.

And perhaps most daringly/ambiguously (I am not really sure at all) we have Alissa’s own novels. When Roland first reads the self-translation of her first work “The Journey’s” he immediately loves it against his better resentment-fuelled judgement: “The prose was beautiful, crisp, artful, the tone from the first lines had authority and intelligence. The eye was exact, unforgiving, compassionate. In some of the starkest scenes there was a near- comic sense of both human inadequacy and courage. There were paragraphs that rose from Catherine’s limited perspective to provide a broad historical awareness – destiny, catastrophe, hope, uncertainty.”

And later he quotes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s ecstatic review hailing it as “Tolstoyan in sweep, with a Nabokovian delight in the formation of pitch-perfect sentences” - and (remember the editor’s letter with which this book and this review open) “a masterpiece”. Further we are told “Alissa Eberhardt is not afraid of our recent past, or of history itself or of a gripping narrative, of full and deep characterisation, of love and the sorry end of love” but that “Only her title escapes her capacity for brilliant invention “

Are we meant to treat these as passages from which to extract quotes to use in our own review of this book (one with a similar historical sweep, a similar treatment of love and the end of love, and even a similarly uninspired title)?

At times (particularly in the rather interminable German sections) I was more inclined to say my thoughts resembled those of Roland on reading of the Chernobyl crisis in detail: “The entire story, the accumulated details, were beginning to nauseate him. Like eating too much cake. Radiation sickness.”

But I think McEwan (even in this quote) is deliberately playing with us – and later as he discusses a fable like children’s story with his beloved granddaughter Stefanie, we have a link back to this book’s title

‘Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Don’t be silly, Opa. It’s about cats and dogs.’ He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.

So overall I found not a masterpiece but definitely a good tale.

My thanks to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an ARC via NetGalley

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, how many good things can I say about this one? This is so big! McEwan has put a lot into this novel. To start with, there is the personal story of Roland Baines, from the age of 11 to deep in his 70s. Actually, Baines is what our society in general would call a 'loser', a man who just muddles along in life, wastes his remarkable intelligence and his talent as a pianist, but ultimately manages to win our hearts. And that's probably because Baines is all too aware of his shortcomings and failures, constantly reflects them, muses on how he could have done things differently, or on how he could have taken charge of his life instead of letting it go. In a sense, McEwan has created a variation on John Williams' Stoner: Baines and Stoner share the same passive, resigned attitude towards the vicissitudes of life.

Of course, there are some marked differences. And the most important one happens early in Baines' life: as a young teenager he became involved in what we would now clearly call a case of sexual abuse (by his female piano teacher). The result is that as a reader you wonder – all throughout the novel - whether Baines' impotence in life is the result of that early ‘damage’. But it testifies to the greatness of McEwan that he does not give a clear answer to this issue, even after more than 450 pages. It's as if he wanted to emphasize that perpetrator and victim are not as clearly delineated as we conveniently assume. The same goes for the character of Alissa, Baines' wife, who leaves him with their 6-month-old baby, just so she can pursue a successful writing career. But just as the piano teacher, also Alissa, whom you could easily see as a real bitch, isn't portrayed as the devil in disguise, on the contrary. In the end, almost all characters (with the exception of a really villainous Brexiteer) are victims of passions, ambitions and actions they can't control. Yes (I hear you thinking) a bit like in a Greek drama.

Another plus is that this novel, spread over constantly changing moments in time, gives a good overview of more than 75 years, from 1945 to 2020, with McEwan regularly zooming in on major world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the fall of the Berlin Wall, up to and including the covid crisis. No wonder this book is so popular with boomers (myself included): it covers a lot of their lifes! And then there is the literary style: it is consistently of such a high level that you jump effortlessly from one time period to another, in and out of the head of Roland Baines and his vicissitudes. Yet at the same time, this novel is quite demanding for his reader: it has been a long time since I spent so long on a novel, such an intensity it offers at times. I guess in the meantime my message is clear: read this!

[Beata · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those novels which I find difficult to rate ... I was invested and intrigued by complicated family stories and the saga feeling about the novel. Simple writing and complex characters do agree with me. On the other hand, from the very opening scenes, I was unable to approve of the relationship which is the core in this novel between the main character and his music teacher. I did not like the not-such-a-big-problem feeling around the relationship, which in fact shaped the teenager. The conversation which they have after decades seems natural, what else could be said or done? But what she did as a young woman was morally wrong, and she knew it, Roland can't have known that.
The panorama of the last seventy years, some events in which Roland Baines participated, his love for his son and quest, not always fulfilled, for a meaningful life, make this novel an interesting read. I am certain this book will receive most varied reviews.
OverDrive, thank you!

[Fionnuala]

Music lessons as well as more general life lessons feature in this long novel, so the title is very apt. And there are lessons for readers here too—at least that was my experience.

Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.

That quote is not from this book but from the one I read just before it, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter. I'm inserting it here because it's as if Gospodinov were talking about this exact book in the first part of that quote.
Lessons gives the impression of a writer who holds all the threads of the action firmly, and who is determined to serve us a narrative that is perfect both in order and form. And what's extra interesting is that Lessons delivers its carefully controlled narrative while at the same time roaming backwards and forwards through the very same decades that Gospodinov examines in his deliberately more chaotic but very nostalgia-inducing Time Shelter.
Many of the main political events in Europe between WWII and the present day are dealt with in both books, so that Lessons feels just as history focused and nostalgia driven as Time Shelter because the main character, Roland, is constantly striving to pin down and examine the past in a similar way to Gospodinov's narrator: Roland thought that those in his own country who itched to get back to...the nineteen fifties should think harder.

Was I more drawn to the order and form of McEwan's book than I was to the nebulous non-order of Gospodinov's?
I find that hard to decide. What I do know is that I was able to make complete sense of the fiction setting of Lessons whereas I struggled to understand Time Shelter's fictional world.

The fiction setting of Lessons concerns the many and varied lessons Roland Baines learns in his long life. Those lessons are all taught to him by women, and although Roland isn't the most noble of characters, those women, his mother, his music teacher, his ex-wife, are made to appear ignoble in the extreme. I wondered about that, about why McEwan seemed so bitter towards women in this book (and the one woman who is noble dies as soon as she becomes a main character).
I've often wondered what motivated certain aspects of Ian McEwan's novels over the many years I've been reading him. But in spite of not liking some of those aspects, I continue to read him because I've always admired his writing at the sentence level. Oddly, this is the first of his books in which I didn't stumble on fine phrases very frequently. I did find one eventually at the bottom of page 457, but that was a long time to wait in what was a very long book. In fact at one point, when Roland is reading the critics' opinions of his difficult ex-wife's latest novel—What was new was her exceptional prose, it's lyrical bitterness...Only she, they agreed, could manage so adroitly, with such delicate evocation of pain and anger, the many cross-currents of feeling, of mutual misunderstanding...—I found myself wishing that I was reading her novel (which sounded quite like a typical McEwan novel) instead of the book in my hand.
But the sober book in my hand was all I had so I made the best of it. And I learned a little lesson about how to read McEwan's novels without over interpreting them. It occurred when the difficult ex-wife asked Roland, Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need. Ok, lesson learned.

Meantime, Roland is learning other lessons about reading : Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid....He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other's work...His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland's favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton....

This was a side of Roland that appealed to me better—or was it McEwan talking, I wondered? Ok, I shouldn't over interpret. But still, the ex-wife also says, When a writer has been around long enough people begin to get tired. Even if she does something different every time. They say, She's doing something different—again! I couldn't help feeling that Ian McEwan was talking directly to his critics there. And just so you know, Ian, I've always admired how you treat a new subject in every new novel.

The aspect of this book that appealed to me most was the intertextuality. Lolita haunted the early sections, though the book itself was never mentioned. Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale, about a young man and his older lover, was also in my mind while reading, and McEwan did confirm that connection. I also thought of Orlando Furioso since Roland is a poet and driven crazy by love at some points in the novel. Conrad's Youth was in here too. And Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights was evoked very meaningfully, as was Doris Lessing's life and times in connection with the ex-wife's writing career. And although she wasn't mentioned, I was reminded of Muriel Spark's writing life—but not of her playfulness. Playfulness is something I never find in an Ian McEwan book. He is an utterly serious writer, which is ok when he's writing novellas, but when his books are as long as this one, I feel the need for him to take himself and his material a little less seriously.
But I'm sure he'll have a lesson for me on that subject in his next novel!

[Ceecee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 rounded down

Roland Baines, sleep deprived, his restless baby son Lawrence at his side, reflects on the lessons at boarding school specifically those of music. His mind runs feverishly on mistakes or otherwise with Miriam Cornell his piano teacher and on his relationship with his German born wife Alissa who has fled the marriage and motherhood leaving him under a cloud of unjustified suspicion. This epic novel is a journey through Roland‘s life and takes us from his early years in Libya through to his 70s and Covid restrictions. As the title implies it’s about life lessons and it’s very insightful on how external world events over which we have no control impact us and how more personal experiences shape our life and determine its course.

It is without doubt beautifully written as you would expect from an author of this calibre. Parts are absolutely fascinating such as the early years in Libya and he’s very illuminating on his soldier father who is without doubt a bully. The early 1960s years at boarding school in Suffolk and the dysfunction there with his piano teacher are viewed as if through a gauze, I’m sure deliberately so. These years are vastly formative and the impact lingers and looms large over his later life as it creates a restlessness and unfulfilled potential and ambition. His relationship and what follows with Alissa, who becomes a highly successful novelist, affects him too in a multitude of ways and damage piles on damage.

The historical context is absolutely outstanding with everything from the Cuban missile crisis (this seriously effects his decision-making) to the Cold War through to the Thatcher years , 911 and finally to Covid.

I love the sections in Germany especially the White Rose organisation via his mother in law Jane and the situation and dangers in east/west Berlin and the coming down of the Berlin Wall. With the latter you almost feel as if you are there with Roland experiencing the excitement, concerns and some fears for the future.

The novel makes you feel something, it makes you reflect upon yourself and your own life lessons. There are some moments of acute sadness, there are lies and buried secrets and some confrontations, one of which is especially vivid which all adds up to the sum of a life.

It’s brilliantly done but it does ramble a bit in places hence the four stars not the full five. This is possibly the author‘s most ambitious novel to date. Has he pulled it off? A resounding yes.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Random House U.K./Vintage for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.75* of five, rounded up

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sometimes gambling on a less-than-loved writer's work, when it's a story one really resonates with, pays off; other times, not so much. This experience, after my deep dislike of Solar and Atonement yet genuine appreciation for The Children Act, split the difference.

It's not news to regulars here that I was sexually abused by my ephebeophile mother when young. Quite recently I read The Kingdoms, an alternate history novel by Natasha Pulley, which contained a truly astonishing scene of unwanted intimacy between a man (the victim) and his wife (the violator) that, for the very first time ever in my experience of reading, contained the truth of coercive heterosex where the man's the coerced partner. It was...healing...for me to see that on the page. It gave me the inner resources to request this book back in June.

Lessons comes out tomorrow, and I recommend it to you as a good, solid novel of reckoning with emotional damage across a lifetime.

What about that equivocal waffle above? Well. Now. Author McEwan hasn't suddenly burst forth from a chrysalis and become a wildly passionate and gloriously sensuous prose stylist. He's still a man of his age and class. He's not built for flights of fancy or even particularly emotionally available prose stylings. It's one of the main reasons I haven't become a fanboy of his. But, and this is where I sound weird to my own inner ears, when there's a story to tell that *needs* to be kept buttoned up, he's the writer to do it. That was completely evident in The Children Act, another flat and affectless person's attempt to contextualize the wildly ungovernable emotions of others as they rampage through her (in that case) carefully designed lifestyle. It's the technique that was needed to tell this story and, blessedly, Author McEwan used it.

What happens to young Roland isn't all that unusual. I know we, as a culture, like to think men are perpetrators and women are victims, but this has never been true. It's time we faced up to it in the post-#MeToo moments. It isn't at all surprising to me that the pace of this story varies as much as it does. The youthful disasters are the ones that set the stage, often act as the pattern, for the hurts and buffets of the future. The manner of Author McEwan's telling of the different stories was quite clearly meant to reflect this. Where something happens for the first time, it is given narrative weight; when it comes around again, it gets less of it. I approve, if that needs saying, of this strategy.

No one is immune to the stresses and strains of The World as it runs amok and periodically threatens to kill us all. This life, Roland's years on this planet, contains all of my own years on it. I was at different stages of life than Roland, of course, being two decades younger; but the fact is I was formed by the same things Roland was. It felt to me as though Roland trudged and slogged a lot of his life away. Given the emotional damage he carries with him, that was perfectly logical to me. It wasn't, however, a chucklefest. When you're going to take me on a five hundred-plus page trip inside one man's skull, I as a reader would like some lightening of the shadows, say with humor. Author McEwan doesn't offer that to us; this is something to be aware of in deciding whether you'd like to read the book.

Many other early readers seem to have a problem with Alissa, the wife who abandons Roland with their infant son to become a writer. I'm entirely unsure what the heck the problem they have with that subplot is. It's not like it can't happen, since it's something Doris Lessing (eg) actually did. I myownself wasn't in the least surprised that Roland would marry someone who could calmly walk away from messy emotional realities in order to serve her own needs. Like calls to like, after all.

The one moment I felt Author McEwan really rather overplayed his emotionless hand had to do with the Chernobyl disaster...it felt, in its handling, like something was finally just off in the manner of his weaving the event into the story. But honestly, as said above, this book is telling a story about the reverberations of an emotional cripple's awkward flailings, and nobody I can think of could do it better than Ian McEwan has done.

[Gabriela Pistol · Rating 5 out of 5]

M-a plimbat domnul McEwan printr-o grămadă de arii, linia muzicală a fost superbă de la început, unele secvențe din prima parte m-au plictisit un pic, dar au crescut din ce în ce mai puternice și mai emoționante, ca Boleroul lui Ravel. Chiar mi se pare că ce a scris aici seamănă cu o operă de muzică clasică.

Cu toate dilemele morale, îndoielile, răzgândirile și slăbiciunile umane, cu toate lecțiile pe care nu le învâțăm, cu lipsa noastră de sens și încercarea de a fi, pur și simplu. Cu momentele de mare entuziasm colectiv, când ni se pare că am progresat, am depășit dictaturile și violența, doar pentru a ne prăbuși și mai dezamăgitor.

La început mi s-a părut că orchestra lui McEwan are prea multe instrumente și că nu reușeste să le acordeze împreună. La final am știut că a reușit să conducă magistral simfonia unei vieți și a unei lungi epoci de pace, pe care noi am pierdut-o definitiv.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer, editor, and admirer of great technique, I am mesmerized by Ian McEwan’s way of getting from here to there, for creating motion in narrative, and in this sometimes-languorously written book, his literary locomotion has hit a peak of elegance and originality that had me simultaneously surrendering to his spiral rocking movement and marveling as I scrutinized every shift.

As an editor, I often receive manuscripts that go completely haywire when the writer has no sense of chronology but has tried to pack a story with past events. Most often, I’ll suggest movements of whole sections to make the line more chronological.

McEwan would be right to eschew such notes. He breaks every rule of clarity through chronology and instead moves through history by logical mind moves: A memory evokes a scene from childhood, and then a space break icon in the text suffices to bring us back to present. A memory within a memory takes us to further past, and then somehow the natural movement spirals back to first memory or present. Never hurried, it is nothing to have protagonist Roland Baines, a poet who has been jilted by his wife and left to care for his infant son, suddenly pick up a book, evoking the entire plot of a Conrad novel. Or to go from the Cuban Missile Crisis to one of the most surprising, honest, and original love scenes I’ve ever read, launching character and plot through human complexity and depravity that was worth waiting for—perfectly crescendoing to the end of Part 1.

In all this meandering (in three parts; 431 pages) there is no dead time. No stasis. No confusion. Even when it got a bit too slow for me, I found that I appreciated—required—what I’d learned during those intervals as soon as he returned to the present-day plot. This book moves to its own pulse, and, for me, this was like being rocked like an infant, secure in my mother’s all-protective heartbeat under my head.

Until suddenly, a third of the way through, I realized what I was being seductively rocked into without awareness of the grooming going on. This is a breathtaking dance. So subtle and ultimately shocking that I dare not say more.

But I lie: The central event to which I’ve just alluded turns out to be only a chapter in a sprawling whole-life drama. There’s history, political tirades, hurts, betrayals, and finally our incredible smallness in this mysterious, magnificent story of life.

Just let McEwan take you. Assume nothing. Surrender.

And, writers, read this book for a master class in narrative writing. Although my style (tight, fast, funny) is almost the opposite of McEwan’s in this book (not all his books are this meandering), I so admire his narrative that I’m sure I’m picking up things that I will one day steal without acknowledging any theft.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this rather traditionally (but expertly so) rendered narrative, McEwan remixes parts of his own life experiences to ponder what influences a person's development and destiny throughout their lives. Main character Roland is a drifter whose life has been impacted by the decisions of two women: For one, there is his piano teacher, who starts sexually abusing him when he is 14 - for the rest of his life, Roland is not able to clearly categorize this experience. Then, there is his first wife Alissa, the mother of his son, who leaves him and the 7-month-old infant behind to fulfill her ambition to become a writer. Still, these traumatic events do not fully define Roland; rather, he is often torn between using his agency and letting things slide, trying to get by as a pianist, a tennis coach or a poet. Overall, McEwan writes the story of a more or less ordinary man who stumbles through life while being impacted by personal tragedies and also, to some degree, historic events that reverberate in his direct surroundings.

These connections between the personal and the political are played out regarding all characters in the family: Roland's father works for the military, he spends his first years in Singapore and Libya; Alissa's father was connected to the Nazi resistance group Weiße Rose; both men treat their wives badly. The son is born in 1986, the year of Chernobyl; Roland is in Berlin in 1989 when the wall comes down. Twice, Roland is confronted with police investigations: First, he is suspected to be connected to the disappearance of his first wife; then, he is (rightfully) suspected to be the victim of sexual abuse by his piano teacher.

McEwan has written an epic story, his longest novel yet, and it really takes a careful and patient reader to follow him through this elaborate, detailed panorama. Of course, it is extremely well written, and to illuminate the life lines of an average person is the whole point, but I was not the perfect match as a reader: I was longing for a little more drive, more concise writing.

Nevertheless, Ian McEwan is clearly one of the best British writers working today.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ian McEwan's work and this one surprised me: there is, as always, the profound examination of character and motivation -- why we do what we do. There is, as always, the precise and luminescent prose. There is the sweep of history or the sweep of one great moment in history. But, in LESSONS, we follow one man, Roland Baines, from childhood to old age, and the profound and prosaic moments that have shaped his life. We meet the three women who matter to him most (other than his mother), beginning with the female music teacher who turns out to be a deeply disturbed sexual predator, followed years later by the love he will marry, who will become the hero of history that Roland never will. It's another bravura performance for McEwan -- different than what I have come to expect from him, but just as rich and wonderful and thought-provoking.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate Ian McEwan's ambition to write his longest work yet after more than 15 novels.
At times, this ambition feels not just professional, but personal. Like there is a need for the author to share... something. And "Lessons" shines the best in those confessional moments, even if at times it is hard not to be confused about what parts of the story are the important ones.

However, "Lessons" ambitions are also professional. Ian McEwan tries to tell a story that includes every important political event from The Second World War until the present. And, unfortunately, he wants us to believe that the protagonist had all his life the correct political opinion. That's dishonest, but, more important, that's boring. He is also in error if he thinks that by name-dropping everything that happened in history, he said anything about those subjects. U can see that the best when the novel arrives in 2020. McEwan even talks about J.K. Rowling.Why?

The tone keeps this together. It is old-fashioned, like something written in the 90s, but evolves when the characters arrive in the new millennium.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the free copy.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure this book is quite the full four stars for me but there were moments that really worked in this long sprawling novel about the life of one man, Roland Baines and the events, both personal and wider world, that affected his decisions and therefore the course of his life. A lot of the time I was just waiting for something more (I don’t know what) and I didn’t ever find it a chore to read but a lot of the peripheral characters and their stories would’ve made a far more interesting main character for a novel. I found myself wishing I could read the novels of Alissa Eberhardt, Roland’s wife who leaves him and their baby son to pursue her literary career or the story of her mother Jane or Daphne, Roland’s friend and later wife, or his son Lawrence. Another persons point of view might have been interesting but then it would be even longer! The novel jumps about in time a bit but mostly it’s linear from Roland’s childhood in Libya, postwar to boarding school in England (where he is abused by his female piano teacher, a significant event that changes the course of his life and affects his relationships with women) to his marriage to Alissa, parenthood, friendships, relationships, to now and old age. It covers a lot and perhaps that’s why I’m finding it hard to review. The introduction describes it as a masterpiece, maybe but I wouldn’t call it that. I have been much more emotionally involved in other Mcewan novels, so was a bit disappointed with this one.

[Peter Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atonement was my first encounter with the genius of Ian McEwan. I've read several of his novels since in the hope of recapturing some of that magic, but nothing has quite hit those heights. However, I'm pleased to say that Lessons, his latest effort, stands right up there with the very best of his work.

It's one of those 'whole life' stories, or 'cradle to grave' if you prefer. The life in question is that of Roland Baines, a pianist and part-time journalist living in Clapham. At the beginning of this tale he finds himself in a very difficult situation. His German wife Alissa has gone missing, leaving him to take care of their baby son Lawrence. The police are notified and for a short while Roland is suspected in the case, but it soon transpires that Alissa is fine - she has just decided to abandon her family in pursuit of a career. Roland looks back on what has brought his life to this point, in particular his time at boarding school, and an illicit relationship with a piano teacher that had a transformative impact on his personality. He reminisces about his romance with Alissa and tries to find clues to her unhappiness. Gradually he comes to terms with his circumstances, finding contentment and struggling with heartbreak in whole new ways.

As well as Roland's challenges in everyday life, McEwan describes him reacting to major world events, which lends a layer of authenticity to the story. He is a Labour member in his youth, buoyed by Tony Blair's arrival at 10 Downing St, appalled by Brexit in his later years. He despairs at the politics of the present day, with people swayed by populist, hate-filled propaganda:

"It often happened like this, Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital public spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus."

However, what really makes the story special are the reflections Roland has on his own existence. Even though he's quite unaccomplished professionally, he is a deep thinker, and comes to some profound observations. Alissa's departure causes him to reevaluate things and he contends that:

"In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you. Parenthood must cast some light."

He looks back on his life with Alissa (who is now an author of some renown) and realises that even his own memories can't do their relationship justice, to really capture what it was like in the moments it was alive:

"But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory."

The parts of the novel I found most affecting were its opinions on ageing, as I am entering my fifth decade myself and seeing its effect on my own parents. Roland first comes to terms with his folks' mortality and it is difficult to process:

"He had reached that point—late thirties was common—when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car."

In his own old age, he can't believe how fast time is moving, and it is a cause of sadness for him and his peers:

"Two years sat lightly in memory, like two months. Time’s gathering compression was a commonplace among his old friends. They routinely shared their impressions of an unfair acceleration."

I realise I am quoting many lines here and that's because my Kindle is strewn with paragraphs I've highlighted. I found Roland's conclusions truly perceptive and, in many cases, felt like they chimed with my own. Some reviewers may argue that he is too passive a character to be memorable but I would argue that he's quite aware of this ("How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events."). And in any case, it doesn't make his hard-won insights any less significant. I feel like I got to know Roland Baines as well as some of my own friends and it was a real pleasure to be in his company. What a treat it is to have Ian McEwan, one of our very best novelists, right back at the peak of his powers.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine example of a work that would flounder badly under a less accomplished stylist. McEwan’s overly long but exquisitely wrought Bildungsroman actually works particularly well as an audiobook, in which the reader is able to fully contemplate and appreciate the nuances and cultural diversions that abound throughout.

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Lessons" is about wisdom. The wisdom that you won't ever be wise in life, because there is always a lesson to learn.

Just as Marlow served as Joseph Conrad's literary alter ego, Ian McEwan uses the protagonist Roland Baines as a figure of identification to present autobiographical fragments in a fictional guise spanning seven decades (and beyond). He uses key events in world history to give his characters' fates a historical anchor so that they do not drift along in the arbitrariness of their existence. There is talk of the White Rose, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the triumph of populists in contemporary politics and the coronavirus pandemic, among other things. In this respect, McEwan's monumental work is a political mirror of world history, with its blind spots resulting from the need for restriction.

Beyond this, however, the novel is above all a work with psychological depth and complicated relationships. First and foremost there is teenage Roland's piano teacher, with whom he has an affair, and his future wife Alissa, who disappears one day without a word, leaving grown-up Roland alone with his son Lawrence.

It is a novel about great moments, missed opportunities, stupidity, human weaknesses, grief and forgiveness. And about ageing. The numerous self-referential and metafictional references show McEwan's personal connection to the plot. Here, one of the great British authors of our time provides deep insights into his inner self - and then again, he doesn't, because a novel is and remains fictional. This is one of the lessons that Roland also has to learn. 

The underlying problem with the novel is its prolixity. It takes time to get into the plot. In the first half in particular, there is a lot of jumping around between different characters, time periods and historical events, so that too many doors open, which you enter with increasing reluctance. Gradually, however, these doors close again and you are left with a corridor that you curiously follow to the end - and are ultimately rewarded.

[Adina]

DNF at 20%

Not for me it seems. Hit or miss with McEwan. This time a miss.

[Paula Mota · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depois do último livro de Cormac McCarthy, começo a perceber uma determinada tendência nos escritores de uma certa idade: o narcisismo leva-os a escrever o que bem entendem, como bem entendem, e se os fãs por acaso gostarem, óptimo. Acontece que não sou fã de Ian McEwan: por cada livro que adorei dele, detestei outro. Assim sendo, “Lições” não tem a delicadeza de “Na Praia de Chesil”, não tem a subversão de “Expiação”, não tem o nível de demência de “O Fardo do Amor”, não tem vestígios do Ian “Macabre” de “Cement Garden”.
Falta consistência a esta obra, falta-lhe uma voz distinta, falta-lhe brilho, falta-lhe ritmo. Não saindo do tema das lições de piano, que são o ponto de partida desta obra, o staccato que caracteriza as frases de McEwan é monótono e quase básico.

Mas isso era irreal. Ele conhecia o famoso verso de Auden. Tinha de perdoá-la por escrever bem. Algo tão insuportável como não a perdoar. Ela não tinha sido egoísta e fria ao retirar o seu amor? (...) O paradigma da virtude humanista! Que engano. Permitido apenas na ficção.

O que sei eu de música? Nada, sempre fui uma aluna medíocre a Educação Musical, mas percebo qualquer coisa disto de ler livros, depois de décadas a consumi-los, e este foi um frete, que levei até ao fim porque as 650 páginas têm letra do tamanho das edições de YA e comprei-o com o desconto acumulado no cartão Continente, quantia que poderia ter gastado num suprimento de Milka que decerto me traria mais alegria.
Falando em YA, McEwan tem afirmações tão pueris como....

As suas necessidades eram vagas. Adivinham mais de um hábito ininterrupto de a querer, de um desejo que incluía mais ia além do erótico. Tinha qualquer coisa de infantil, de inocente, de feroz. Provavelmente era amor.

Se não é amor, só pode ser Impulse, que também eu tenho as minhas referências pessoais dentro do grande cenário que é a História Mundial.
“Lições” pode ser visto como a resposta masculina e britânica a “Os Anos” de Annie Ernaux, mas com mais autoficção, mais ambiciosa, querendo abarcar todos os temas e tornando-se, por conseguinte, fastidioso. Por outro lado, é com assombro que noto que não está imune ao efeito telenovela. Quando o protagonista volta a ver a professora de piano passados 40 anos, sob nome falso e o falso pretexto de uma lição, ela abre a porta virando costas ao estranho, faz-lhe as perguntas da praxe sem olhar uma única vez para ele e só quando ouve os primeiros acordes é que cai em si. Poupem-me!
Mas as influências perniciosas não terminam aqui, inspirando-se até em Paul Auster, autor que, por acaso, aprecio. Exactamente nos dias que se seguem à queda do muro, Roland consegue uma conveniente boleia num jacto privado para Berlim com um amigo que vai a uma reunião de trabalho precisamente lá e aí, no meio de uma turba formada por milhares de pessoas que passavam de uma Alemanha para a outra, ele encontra nem mais nem menos que pessoa que queria. Não há coincidências? Claro que há, para um enredo duvidoso poder avançar.
Entusiasmou-me nesta obra a subversão inicial de papéis, sendo a mulher a abandonar o marido e o filho e não aquilo que vemos repetidamente na ficção e na vida real, e isso puxou-me até à parte em que se percebe o motivo. Queria muito ver o que seria da vida de Roland Baines como pessoa, como o traumatizado sexual que só mais tarde percebe que é e, acima de tudo, como aspirante a poeta a braços com um bebé de colo, e apesar de ser “maçador, sem perspicácia, passivo”, achei-o uma personagem credível, carente e simpática, que acaba por salvar a recta final de “Lições” com as suas reflexões na meia-idade e na velhice.

Mas ali estava essa essência que todos esquecem quando um amor se esvai no passado – como era, o que sentia e a que sabia estarem juntos durante segundos, minutos e dias, antes de tudo o que fora tomado como certo ser descartado e depois reescrito pela história de como tudo acabou e, mais tarde, pelas vergonhosas insuficiências da realidade.