Ian mcewen nutshell reviews

Freud’s repressed realm of bitter little embryos, spying from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

There’s the epigraph to my article, and maybe the spark that later ignited in Ian McEwan’s brain; here’s the epigraph (from Hamlet) to Nutshell: “Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.”

A Teller of the Tale, Who Is Striving To Be

Ian McEwan specializes in great beginnings and great endings to his fictions. Who has ever written a better bravura opening then this one to Nutshell, Random House, , pp: “So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently a

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Nutshell

September 12,

The start of this book feels like McEwan in elder statesman mode, sitting down at his laptop, rolling up his sleeves and saying, ‘Right, out the way, fuckwads, let me show you how it's done.’ It's so conspicuously brilliant, so controlled and aware and unusual, that although the rest of the book can't quite sustain the ferocity of the first fifty pages, still this rarely felt like it was going to be be getting less than full marks from me.

Nutshell is a sly contemporary version of Hamlet, where the infidelity between ‘Trudy’ and her brother-in-law, ‘Claude’, is observed not by a teenage prince but by a nine-month-old foetus two weeks away from his due date. This may seem like a youngish choice, as narrators go, but McEwan's prepartum protagonist is a joy of a companion – witty, eloquent, someone who enjoys a nice glass or two of Sancerre ‘decanted through a healthy placenta’ and who has plenty of time and material for contemplative flights of fancy: ‘my

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Nutshell by Ian McEwan review: ridiculous or rather brilliant

Nutshell

Author:Ian McEwan

ISBN

Publisher:Jonathan Cape

Guideline Price:£

Twenty years ago, inom read a novel narrated by a supermarket trolley. Now in principle inom have no objection to novels narrated by supermarket trolleys but the success or failure of the book depended on whether the author had the creative imagination to convince me that this what was a supermarket trolley would sound like had it been given a larynx and vocal chords instead of a basket and fyra wheels. (He didn’t.)

New novel

That book came to mind when inom was reading Ian McEwan’s new novel, which has a similarly unconventional narrator: a foetus only days from birth who finds himself the unlikely eavesdropper on a murder plot. He listens, constrained and unable to act, as his mother and uncle plot the death of his father, recounting the events in a tone of such erudition and profound wisdom that one wonders what must happen between