Reading 1001 discussion

This story is packed full of frustration and sadness, but it is also a fascinating and beautiful story. I really enjoyed the writing style and the method of telling the story from the perspective of the novelist. This method made me stop and think carefully about what I was reading as well as my thoughts on the perspective several times.

Read for TBR Takedown April 2019

Read in 2009 as a my face to face book club group. "A really good book about a young girl's telling of what she thought was real that affected her family. She wishes to have atonement, to make things right but WWII gets in the way. It is a great story with an ending that is hard to guess. I really liked this one.

5/5 stars
This being only my second McEwan novel. I loved the prose, I loved the story. Look forward to more of his novels.

“But she had seen Robbie's letter, she had cast herself as her sister's protector, and she had been instructed by her cousin: what she saw must have been shaped in part by what she already knew, or believed she knew.”

“She had come looking for her sister – no doubt with exhilarated notion of protecting her, or admonishing her, and had heard a noise from behind the closed library door.”

“At this stage in her life Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably.”

I read this book after a lot of other books by McEwan. This was one of the hardest for me to actually finish. I didn't like the main character at all, so I kept wandering off to read something else. The book did get better after a while, and I even enjoyed it a bit, but this is definitely not my favorite McEwan book.
I gave this novel 4 stars on Goodreads.

I have just got round to reading this book after never seeing the film and I have to say it is one of the best character study books I have ever read. The characters all do things on the scale from questionable to awful but they are so well developed that you understand their multi-layered motivations.

I also found the atmosphere incredibly immersive from the sleepy summer country house, to the busy hospital and the banks of Dunkirk. Each setting is powerfully evoked in, at times, uncomfortable ways and this combined with the characterisation, really put you in the perspective of the characters.

Finally, the writing was just so perfectly crafted and changed throughout the book to mirror the characters and their perspectives and the changing style made complete sense with the reveal at the end. Descriptive sections were used sparingly but effectively and it was overall a joy to read.

A worthy classic and my first 5 star book of the year!

On the one hand, I am not sure how I can give this five stars because it is just so sad, so tragic, so devastating. On the other hand, it is so enchanting, so well written, so cleverly plotted. God, I loved it while it was breaking my heart. The film adaptation is simply gorgeous and has a long take that manages to be simultaneously stunningly beautiful and absolutely horrific.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐