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[Edited 2/15/22]We know the story in advance from the book jacket: a disastrous wedding night. Both are virgins. Young people will find that hard to believe these days, but this is set in the 1960s. As the author tells us, “the pill was only a rumor.” They had no opportunity for intimacy while dating. While in school in London he lived in a room in the house of a strict aunt. She lived in a women’s rooming house with a dorm mother keeping watch and no men allowed. Few young people had cars.We le...
i read this book in one sitting, on a plane from l.a. to nyc, and it just knocked my socks off. and i came up with a scenerio: imagine if i was flying cross country for some kind of mcewanesque purpose … suppose last time i had been in new york I had met a girl, had spent only a few hours with her, but came back changed. i walked around los angeles buzzed, different, everything slightly altered, colored with that feeling… alright, yeah, it sounds stupid, but go with me (and mcewan) on this. what...
I've been in a relationship with Ian McEwan for less than a month now, and, let me tell you. . . he's driving me CRAZY!I wonder things about him, like. . . does he have a particularly magical keyboard that only types out the right words?Does he even bother with an editor, or do his manuscripts sprout wings and fly independently to the publishing house, where they are lovingly pressed into clever books?Has he been in every complicated, interpersonal entanglement?How does he do this? How does he t...
I have a First Edition of this small hardcopy book. I read it in 2007. There are other passionate 5 star reviews.. but I was incredibly disappointed. I felt it could have been a short story -I was angry that I paid full price for it. However ..I may re- read this book soon ( it only takes a few hours) with an open mind to see if my thoughts have changed. I’m guessing people today didn’t pay $30 for this as I had. Funny how the price bothered me so much.. and it did at the time.
AlmostA brilliant book, but such a sad one; it would be unfair not to say so up front. Ian McEwan is a master at dissecting emotions. Every page of this wonderfully-crafted novel gave me the uncanny feeling of living within the skins of the two main characters, Edward and Florence, just married as the book opens. When they fall in love, nurture ambitions, experience happiness, I feel these things too. But when happiness eludes them, the pain is unbearable, not least because the author never let...
Having only previously read Atonement & Saturday, I was both incredibly reluctant and eager to know what the “literary device” used in On Chesil Beach was; a.k.a., why it almost won the Booker Prize. I must say that the prose is so simple as to be deceitful and I was instantly aware, as I reached its final pages, that this novel was NO Atonement. (Indeed this is the stark opposite of that new classic: it is small where Atonement is enormous & epic, simple while Atonement is complex, & Atonement
On the first floor of this Georgian-style Dorset inn in this confined living room, Edward and his wife, Florence, dine alone. After the St Mary's Church ceremony in Oxford and the festive reception, the young couple offers a wedding night. What could be more beautiful and romantic than this suite in this inn, in front of the open French window, overlooking the Chesil beach with its pebbles as far as the eye can see? Then, the four-poster bed and its pure white quilt in the next room. This bed on...
Love lost through an inability to speak truth.It is 1962. Edward and Florence have gone to a lovely seaside hotel on their wedding night, totally unprepared for the actual mechanics of sex. Both are virgins. Both have little knowledge of what can or should be done and the result is not a happy one. Still, the issue here is not about the mores of the 50’s, I believe. Is it really possible for two 20-somethings to be so ignorant, even in 1962? I suppose it is possible. But this is a novel about co...
"...being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now."-- Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach Almost no one can write about sex well in my opinion. You've got your erotic writers, fine, if your need for arousal and release comes from text rather than pictures or actual lovers. There are certainly millions of toss-n-tug novels that can certainly get things done. But these books, obviously, aren't literature. There are writers, like Ken Follett, w...
The greatest book about a premature ejaculation ever written--now why isn't that one of the cover blurbs? Too gushing? Or not something to be simply splashed across the cover? Alternative subjects for a cover blurb and/or Goodreads review: young love, constrictive heteronormativity, retro appetizers--the symbolism of the cherry, the Art of the Novella.
Most people have already heard of Ian McEwan's presumable masterpiece Atonement, but many of his other novels have remained underrated ever since. On Chesil Beach is a simple love story about two opposing souls - but it is no love story in a typical way. In this short book, Ian McEwan reverses the love story and tells it backwards from their wedding night, allowing those events described to find a climax which might take them into a future with each other or separate them forever.In the beginnin...
