Atonement

Text read: Atonement by Ian McEwan

Number of pages: 351

Number of reading days: 10

Why I read this book: I've wanted to read this book for a while now. It's on my 100 Greatest Reads list and the major themes of the novel interested me.

Thoughts:
Two things: Firstly, it's rather too bad that I watched the film before reading this book. While reading, I kept wondering: Would I be prejudiced against this character if I didn't already know what happens? How would I feel about the ending? How would my reading experience be different if I didn't know. Unfortunately, I can't answer those questions.

Secondly, I won't be able to write much about this lovely novel without giving away key details that could disrupt another individual's reading experience. But I will say a few things.

We've already established how much I love all things "meta." And this novel did not disappoint in the meta-fictional department. Briony Tallis, one of the main characters, loves to write and there were many wonderful passages about the act of writing and story-telling.

"It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade..."

I found the second half of this book more appealing than the first. Probably because the first half just made me angry, in a good way. (Read it, you'll understand.) Part II and III were wonderful. I just loved the descriptive passages about the war and the hospital. Before living in London, I wasn't terribly interested in reading books about the World Wars; now my interest is growing and this book was a perfect starter.

"When the last [gauze] was out, the resemblance to the cutaway model they used in anatomy classes was only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen. Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?"

Also, when a novel makes Virginia Woolf references, my heart is easily won.

Favorite Passages & Quotes:

"He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch."

"How had it crept up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? Surely Freud had something to say about that in Three Essays on Sexuality. And so did Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, and all the rest, and it was in The Romaunt of the Rose. He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a discarded token, he was worshipping her traces--not a handkerchief, but fingerprints!--while he languished in his lady's scorn."

"What could be simpler, once the social element was removed? He was the only man on earth and his purpose was clear. He was walking across the land until he came to the sea. The reality was all too social, he knew; other men were pursuing him, but he had comfort in a pretense, and a rhythm at least for his feat. He walked / across / the land / until / he came / to the sea. A hexamater. Five iambs and an anapest was the beat he tramped to now."

"It was clear enough--one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty as emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat. Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach. She was waiting, yes, but then what?"

"She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting. It almost didn't matter what she wrote."

"Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine of an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person, is among all else, a material things, easily torn, not easily mended."

"Warfare, as we remarked, is the enemy of creative activity."

"Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream--three streams!--of consciousness?"

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For other books I'm reading this summer, see: Summer Reading List 2012