jacob’s Reviews > What We Can Know > Status Update

"The imagined lords it over the actual . . . The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist . . . [W]e embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them."

"But how strange, even awkward, it was to say for the first time 'I love you' to an old friend. It was done, we had crossed the line and made a promise, one that we would have found difficult to define. We would not always be standing here in a rhapsodic state, arms looped around the other's neck, deep in warm clear seawater in beautiful evening sunlight with no one around . . ."

"In English, approximately 30,000 classics of literature, television and film press in on us, with more to be rediscovered. Vastly more numerous are the barely lesser works . . . It is hard now to regret that artificial intelligence did not add substantially to the pile before man-made disasters slowed its progress."

A bit pat, McEwan, and a bit too optimistic, I'm afraid. But, time will tell.

"‘I’ve never hated him. Never! But.’ You might try to guess at the truncated final sentence or gaze at the middle letter of ‘but’ as though it might swing open on its hinges to reveal a peephole through which you could see a disappointed heart, reduced by lost opportunities."

LOL: "But" working hard for this lady. Anyway, here we have an intriguing parallel: For one, Vivien of the disappointed heart, thwarted . . .

"Early on, she had kept herself ‘sensible’ researching her second book . . ."

"Sensible" can mean:

1) "rational, reasonable," or,
2) "emotionally aware & responsive," or,
3) "conscious," or,
4) "perceptible as real or material: substantial"

It is meant, here, of course, in all 4 senses—& perhaps in more, e.g. 5) "practical".

Clever woman. And clever McEwan! Golly, I adore lexical and connotative precision! ✨

". . .the twelve volumes of Vivien Blundy’s journals . . . which, for reasons scholars have never resolved, once rested marsupially within her husband’s."

LOL "rested marsupially": so this McEwan feller can turn a phrase, eh? Wink. Anyway, sounds like a sort of kinetic metaphor for wife as property. On marriage, after all, "I now pronounce you *man* & wife": man stays man—woman alchemically converted to wife.