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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
slow-paced
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Normally I love Ian McEwan, but I struggled to finish this one. Middle aged white male navel gazing. Fair enough.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship
Minor: Cancer, Dementia, Death of parent, Pandemic/Epidemic
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Vermakelijk boek over een jeugdtrauma waarin de vraag 'wat als?' van begin tot eind doorklinkt. Zet je aan het denken.
Iets te vaak hetzelfde trucje om spanning op te bouwen, wat op den duur irriteert. Mij dan toch.
Iets te vaak hetzelfde trucje om spanning op te bouwen, wat op den duur irriteert. Mij dan toch.
Lessons is the story of the life of Roland Baines, cash poor, house rich, part-time bar pianist, looking back to when he was eleven and went to boarding school, moving forward into his seventies, and sometimes sideways into other people's lives. And throughout there is comment on the times Roland is living through. The novel is ambitious, sweeping, and wonderful. Roland and all the people who come and go in his life have filled my head for several days as I read voraciously during any spare moment. I hope they will stay for longer.
Roland has three significant women in his life: his piano teacher, Miriam, his ex-wife Alissa, and his second wife, Daphne. There is a reckoning to be done with all of them, although the last is really not her fault (there is a brilliant scene where he fights over her ashes with a junior minister on a bridge in Yorkshire and loses). Miriam seduces Roland when he is only fourteen and changes the course of his life. Alissa walks out on him and their eight month old baby, and becomes a famous and successful novelist.
McEwan clearly draws much on his own life with this novel (North Africa, boarding school, discovered brother) but has Alissa says, everything is fair game. I liked how McEwan plays with this, and I also love the questions he raises around a woman leaving a husband and baby in order to create a masterpiece. It doesn't happen often, is it worth it?
Will certainly be in my top ten reads of the year.
Roland has three significant women in his life: his piano teacher, Miriam, his ex-wife Alissa, and his second wife, Daphne. There is a reckoning to be done with all of them, although the last is really not her fault (there is a brilliant scene where he fights over her ashes with a junior minister on a bridge in Yorkshire and loses). Miriam seduces Roland when he is only fourteen and changes the course of his life. Alissa walks out on him and their eight month old baby, and becomes a famous and successful novelist.
McEwan clearly draws much on his own life with this novel (North Africa, boarding school, discovered brother) but has Alissa says, everything is fair game. I liked how McEwan plays with this, and I also love the questions he raises around a woman leaving a husband and baby in order to create a masterpiece. It doesn't happen often, is it worth it?
Will certainly be in my top ten reads of the year.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
All opinions are my own.
This one definitely missed the mark for me. I liked the concept, seeing 70 years' worth of world events through the eyes of one man, but the execution is just meh. It's very well-written, but sooooo wordy and it was just a slog to get through. I'm sure others would enjoy it, but this was just not for me.
I would not recommend this to others.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the ARC!
All opinions are my own.
This one definitely missed the mark for me. I liked the concept, seeing 70 years' worth of world events through the eyes of one man, but the execution is just meh. It's very well-written, but sooooo wordy and it was just a slog to get through. I'm sure others would enjoy it, but this was just not for me.
I would not recommend this to others.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the ARC!
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“In settled expansive mood, Roland occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, minuscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence. His case was not special - all fates are similarly constituted”. p157
Ian McEwan has written an epic masterpiece in Lessons. The story that is Roland Baines is profound in its ordinariness and extraordinariness. Transcending generations, we are privileged to journey with Roland from childhood through to the final years of his life when he is an old man. We live vicariously through some of the most momentous happenings of the 20th and 21st centuries and navigate the emotional events both ecstatic and traumatic, that make up a single life, the layers that compound to constitute an entire life experience, shaping trajectories and determining pathways.
I find myself drawn to Roland Baines in so many ways. Firstly because McEwan has chosen to gender his protagonist male, musical, piano playing, a bit ‘lost’, shaped by his teenage addiction, I felt a kinship and wanted to read more and more about the things that influenced him and the pathways he chose or perhaps were chosen for him. I also found the whole unspoken premise of what is determined or what is random chance in our lives to be provocative. Do we truly have any control over how our lives turn out? Roland was certainly impacted by his experiences with Miriam Cornell at such an impressionable age that a profound imprint occurred, compelling him down certain pathways, influencing his way of being and causing him to live out his days in certain ways.
I love the way McEwan intersects such significant world and personal events with Roland’s trajectory, highlighting the interaction between a life and the global forces that serve yet again to shape and influence. The Berlin Wall, Cuban missile crisis, White Rose German WW2 resistance, English politics through to aging parents, relationship with parents, relationship breakdown, abuse, terminal illness ... all wrapped around the life of a man who is already on a pathway precipitated by each of the events occurring beforehand. Each event is a lesson in and of itself... and at each turn, Roland is looking for something, always slightly out of reach, yet unsure of what it is that he is looking for and not sure that he would recognise it if he found it.
“It became a hindrance - whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments.... He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him through into a paradise regained” p51
For me, Roland Baines epitomises life in all its messiness. I relate on every level. This is a five star book in every way for me.
Ian McEwan has written an epic masterpiece in Lessons. The story that is Roland Baines is profound in its ordinariness and extraordinariness. Transcending generations, we are privileged to journey with Roland from childhood through to the final years of his life when he is an old man. We live vicariously through some of the most momentous happenings of the 20th and 21st centuries and navigate the emotional events both ecstatic and traumatic, that make up a single life, the layers that compound to constitute an entire life experience, shaping trajectories and determining pathways.
I find myself drawn to Roland Baines in so many ways. Firstly because McEwan has chosen to gender his protagonist male, musical, piano playing, a bit ‘lost’, shaped by his teenage addiction, I felt a kinship and wanted to read more and more about the things that influenced him and the pathways he chose or perhaps were chosen for him. I also found the whole unspoken premise of what is determined or what is random chance in our lives to be provocative. Do we truly have any control over how our lives turn out? Roland was certainly impacted by his experiences with Miriam Cornell at such an impressionable age that a profound imprint occurred, compelling him down certain pathways, influencing his way of being and causing him to live out his days in certain ways.
I love the way McEwan intersects such significant world and personal events with Roland’s trajectory, highlighting the interaction between a life and the global forces that serve yet again to shape and influence. The Berlin Wall, Cuban missile crisis, White Rose German WW2 resistance, English politics through to aging parents, relationship with parents, relationship breakdown, abuse, terminal illness ... all wrapped around the life of a man who is already on a pathway precipitated by each of the events occurring beforehand. Each event is a lesson in and of itself... and at each turn, Roland is looking for something, always slightly out of reach, yet unsure of what it is that he is looking for and not sure that he would recognise it if he found it.
“It became a hindrance - whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments.... He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him through into a paradise regained” p51
For me, Roland Baines epitomises life in all its messiness. I relate on every level. This is a five star book in every way for me.
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced