loved this book! This is not a book for you if youre looking for entertainment only, or light reading, This is a book full of layers, metaphors, parallels, amp issues to think about, The thing that most reached out amp grabbed me was the idea of a man going about his daily life whether you find his daily life mundane or overly privileged or whatever, when unexpected events occur amp change everything.
Thats always sort of a scary theme for me! On the surface its the story of Henry, a successful London neurosurgeon his wife Rosalind, a lawyer their daughter, a soon to be published poet living in Paris amp their son, a blues musician, also on the brink of success.
Its a story that takes place over the course of one day Feb,, a day just before the start of the Iraq war, when there were huge antiwar demonstrations in London amp around the world.
That morning, Henry wakes up in the early morning hours amp goes to look out the window, He sees an airplane headed toward Heathrow airport, amp it appears to be in trouble, This encounter with disaster amp possible terrorism informs amp affects the rest of Henrys Saturday, On this day, hes planned a series of ordinary activities a game of squash with a coworker groceries dinner, etc, Unfortunately, a minor traffic accident interrupts his plans, amp brings his life into collision with Baxter, a what smalltime crook McEwan never specifically tells us but we know Baxter has some sidekicks who dont hesitate to use violence.
Henry sees that Baxter has neurological symptoms that hes able to instantly diagnose as a debilitating amp fatal genetic disease,
All of that is the surface story, Along the way, you get to learn about neurosurgery fascinating! I thought the detail about this was really interesting, tho have seen a lot of criticism about its inclusion.
Really Roll with it, you might learn something! You get to learn about the game of squash, literature, poetry, genetic diseases, the aging process, music, amp cooking all parts of Henrys day or his thinking about his day.
You get to think about war amp peace amp terrorism amp fear amp politics amp how these huge issues affect all of us even as we cope with the details of our lives.
Maybe you dont want to think about these things in which case, dont read this book!
Themes to find: The need for control in our lives, what things we have control over, what we dont, amp what happens when unexpected events make us doubt our control.
The fear of lack of control or losing control, Work competitiveness how it affects our relationships, Biological determinism to what extent is our destiny controlled by our genes Violence, war, amp what forces are available to us to counteract violence.
Seems like a lot of people were disturbed by Henrys family being “too perfect, ” Legitimate but heres a theme to look for the four disciplines of medicine, law, literature amp music amp how they stack up against forces of chaos amp violence.
Theres a whole idea to think about that has to do with Henry amp how the different parts of his personality work for or against him in the particular struggle he faces on this Saturday or do his children represent different parts of him Or parts of a greater whole that he needs to integrate And who is Baxter, really Maybe hes part of Henry too in a sense read the end! or part of that greater whole.
What does his reaction to the poem that Daisy recites, mean to the story Another theme creativity amp what would it mean to a dying man, to have the ability to create something like a poem, that has a life of its own, amp an ability to inspire particular feelings amp longings in others I could go on but this is much too long! I thought “Saturday” was FASCINATING.
Godawful.
"Saturday" was ponderous, labored, rhetorically thick and therefore perhaps to my mind pretentious, or do I mean pompous It was like a big bloated beer gut, but a beer gut bloated indeed, rendered distended, turgid, and tumescent by the finest chardonnays, Gewurztraminers, and Sauvignon Blancs, sipped quaffed while listening to Bach Partitas.
It was bereft of conciseness, brevity, midgetude, terseness, laconism, abbreviation, and pith, its rather meaningless, hollow sentences curled around each other like vines choking a tree trunk, maybe a turkey oak.
Paragraphs wended, labyrinthinely, toward a ridiculous and pat conclusion, Even when things happened, they were narrated along with the protagonist's meandering thoughts and by thoughts, I mean those electrical impulses traveling from synapse to synapse between the neurons and glial cells in the nodes of the brain as he moved through that last day of the week, also known as Saturday.
This is how I would describe the book if I were writing in the style of, say, Ian McEwan,
I hated this book, He's a great writer but this was pure bullshit, The best doctor in London married to the best lawyer in London, their kids a world class guitarist and a world class poet, the grandfather a world class poet too and even the goddamn grandmother was a channel swimmer.
Isn't there one damn slacker in the whole group Just one fat daughter who dated a criminal amputee and worked at theplease I believed this book for a fast.
seconds. Every punch is pulled. I wanted the crap beaten out of that doctor, not fast talking his say out of it, No permanent damage anywhere. I'd have given it one star but for the writing itself, Living the dream in modern urban London is our man, and protagonist, as a neurosurgeon, happily married, with grown up good kids, with great friends, living his fine and more or less contented satisfying upper middle class existence.
sitelinkIan McEwan stretches this day out in mostly long descriptive paragraphs on the minutiae of the protagonist's life, of his existence, of his inner thoughts, maybe as a nod to how we in the socalled Developed World think and focus our lives on our selves, our family, friends and career On this day there is the momentous antiwar march, in London like everywhere else, the newsfeeds are being watched and monitored like never before with the ongoing growth of digital media, and on this Saturday our neurosurgeon has interactions with a number of different people throughout his day, and each impacts on his behaviour, on his thoughts and sometimes on how he sees himself.
The book also kind of maps how modern overarching political issues like the Iraq War debate and real issues like petty crime can so easily usurp the balance we have created in our modern lives.
There is a pretty interesting and surprisingly intense story throughout the book, that truly tests the world our protagonist has built around himself and his family.
It would be easy to dismiss this as elitist or narrow, but for me it has a wider scope, it could be about any of us, it's about all people, about how we all spend most of our lives trying to live the way we want, how we want as much as we can, and how the external environment is always out there, almost fighting us daily whether it be via aging, time, climate, politics, health or that thing that is the worse of all.
other people!out of.
I found this book: Saturday by Ian McEwan,
Then I read it,
Things happened, some exciting and some less so, nothing of super consequence,
I finished the book, I put it away and forgot about it,
I then went on to another book,
That's my reading experience and that's the arc of Saturday, It's a "day in the life of" short story dragged out into novel length, Granted there's plenty packed into that day and it's admirably juggled by McEwan,
The main character is accosted, He happens to be a doctor and that coincidentally is very helpful, His family is under siege, Oh what to do! Whatever does happen, I assure you, it happens all within one day, Thus the title.
At first I couldn't pinpoint what about this that left me flat, but now I can, It feels pointless, like an exercise, I never felt engaged. So you had a rough day and things are weighing on your mind, Meh. I suppose it would make a good party story, but reading a fulllength novel's worth of this anecdote dragged me down, This eighth book in my current Ian McEwan binge is the one I have now purchased just after reading a digital copy.
All the others have been library copies, The reason being that not only is this story of one day in the life of a neurosurgeon so brilliant and moving that it reduced me to a sweaty puddle, but reading a single line of McEwan's narrative lights a fire in my writer brain.
He reminds me about fullsensory life and how to express itcolor, heat/cold, smell, etc, evoking the words of his thirteenyearold Atonement protagonist, Briony Tallis, who claims that she can describe anything McEwan can, in such original language that its mesmerizing.
Also, in my ongoing study of his narrativeand Im definitely reading as a studentwith this book I began to see the minute parts: how he uses literal movement journeys, panoramic views, even travel from room
to room of a house to convey what would otherwise be stagnant inner thoughts and dialogue.
Id been wondering why what drives me to abandon books excessive inner dialogue has the opposite effect on me with McEwans work, and I think the secret is movement.
He has figured out how to create so much of it that what would otherwise feel inert vibrates on the ride, And the rhythm of the literal movement in journey, punctuated by background or informative narrative is impeccable it never drags it's as if a metronome is marking the edges between the different uses of narratives and he never goes beyond a reader's organic attention span, and slowly, fearlessly he builds the book, escalating from narrative to heartpounding pure action.
There are only a few writers books that inspire me this way, If I read one piece in sitelink The Stories of John Cheever, Im fired up for whatever Im working on.
Same with a chapter of my thriceread copy of John Williamss sitelink Stoner, Percival Everett has recently joined this club, especially with his books sitelink I Am Not Sidney Poitier and sitelink Erasure.
And, prior to finishing this book, my only question with McEwan was which of his literary symphonies to buy, sitelink Atonement, sitelink On Chesil Beach, and sitelink The Children Act are probably better plots, and sitelink Nutshell is a hilarious animal unlike any of his other literary offspring, but I've purchased Saturday for the inspiration impact of a single sentence or paragraph and its palpable pulsating humanity.
Update on reading a second time
It's still wonderful, However
Because I knew what was coming later in the book, I made a special effort to visualize the minutely described house the neurosurgeon lives in this is important information and there is a reason for the detailed, almost transcendent fascination with life details, which you may or may not realize after you finish the book.
During my first reading I was confused by the house layout,
Why
Because I live in a brownstone apartment building in New York City, It is a walkup and I live on the top floor, When you walk into my building, you are on the first floor, and you then must hike up four flights of stairs that everybody who has ever visited me has complained about, claiming I live in the stratosphere, and, after eying my dog and querying how many times a day I do this, responding "How on earth do you do this" and "This must be the reason for your phenomenally good health but I could never in a million years live this way because the climb just about killed me.
"
But I am losing my point, My point is that there are five floors starting with the ground floor, which is also the first floor, Mr. McEwan calls the ground floor "the ground floor" where the front door to the neurosurgeon's house is, and subsequently there is a set of down stairs to a kitchen and maybe a library although I may have misplaced that I really should draw this and perhaps I'm wrong and the library is upstairs.
. . which brings me to the first flight up which, if the kitchen is downstairs, is actually the second flight to what all sane people would call the second floor.
But in this book it is sometimes is called the first floor, Followed by a floor, which by Mr, McE's logic would be the second floor, but is in fact the third floor where the master bedroom is, Or maybe the master is on the second floor, wherever that is, and the son's bedroom is on the real third floor.
As you can see, I am still confused about the architecture of the damned house, Suffice it to say the house has three floors, . . or maybe more, including the kitchen, which is finally identified on pageas the "basement kitchen!" In short, I really think there should be an architectural rendering included.
But now to the really important stuff: On a second reading, I'm even more moved by the perfection of having a neurosurgeonwho throughout the book makes seemingly random yet transcendent observations about why we humans do what we do and believe what we chooselive a wholelife human drama, complete with numinous glimpses of a Bigger Reality, in one day.
The post/preIraq war tumultuous political environment makes this a timely book for the chaos and upset of right now, And finally, I was truly devastated this time around, deeply understanding McEwan's pointthat our only purpose is love as we struggle "here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.
" "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, which is so well used in this magnificent book,
Spoiler question to others who have read this book:
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