Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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The novel has themes of love, faith, and political ideology, as viewed through the eyes of a married couple as they travel through the cities of Europe. The moment when June and Bernard realized the differences in their beliefs came during their honeymoon in 1946, on a walking tour of the barren Cévennes mountains in the South of France. Their goal is to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of a utopian communist society through active involvement in socialist politics.

Este libro habla sobre ese momento de revelación en que un ser humano se cuestiona las convicciones que lo definían y transformaban, a las que defendía y a las cuales se aferraba, para dar lugar a algo nuevo y distinto, aunque no necesariamente más acertado que lo anterior. Usually, that happens when you don't have too many characters and so there are not many introductions to be made. Whilst there were a lot of great things about it (a lot of which I can't go into because of spoilers), at times the narrative bored me.His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. Schon von der ersten Seite an wird eine Szene zwischen den frisch verlobten Schwiegereltern beschworen, die bis zum Ende nicht erzählt wird und die den eigentlichen Wendepunkt im Leben des Paares darstellen soll. In the end, everything clears up like a fog, making you see more clearly what you perhaps intuited all along, about who was right and who was aloof. The preface, written by the author but through his main character and completely connected to the story, hit me after about 20 rows in the first page.

Forse tanta, troppa carne al fuoco: essere giovani durante la guerra, essere giovani durante il nazismo – incluso detour al lager polacco di Majdanek - crescere credendo nel comunismo, assistere al divenire dei paesi sotto il controllo sovietico fino ad arrivare al crollo del muro e al dissolversi della vecchia Unione, lo scontro tra chi dal marxismo passa alla religione e chi invece rimane fedele a quella interpretazione, nonostante tutto quello che succede a partire dal 1989 – il tutto cucito dell’io narrante impersonato da Jeremy, che si accinge a scrivere un memoir su richiesta della suocera ormai anziana e malata. When I read something that has a preface, maybe written by the author, like Stephen King does on a lot of his books, maybe by a critic, it's even worse. Ian McEwan torna a Berlino: c’era già stato per ambientare il suo romanzo precedente, il magnifico The Innocent – Lettera a Berlino, e ci torna adesso, ai giorni del novembre 1989, quando la città si è riunita, est e ovest si sono congiunte, il muro è stato scavalcato, aperto, e poi demolito. He revisits the Cévennes, a harsh landscape but also a purifying one, and once again becomes embroiled in an apparently senseless act of violence. I'm also constantly amazed that Ian McEwan is a widely respected, 'serious' author who very often ends his stories with twists or major revelations which make us reconsider what comes before.An anonymous reviewer in The Observer declared Black Dogs to be McEwan's best book yet, as did Andrew Billen. One always suspected male novelists besides Nicholson Baker breathed in hot, thick pants while writing, but it is gratifying to find a member of the Famous Four admitting to two-dimensional vision as well. I can see what Mcewan was trying to do but I found the characters he used (upper middle class types) just frustrating. They both feel like they do all the work in the relationship and are essentially supporting the other partner.