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fionnualalirsdottir 's review for:
Lessons: A novel
by Ian McEwan
Music lessons as well as more general life lessons feature in this long novel, so the title is very apt. And there are lessons for readers here too—at least that was my experience.
That quote is not from this book but from the one I read just before it, Georgi Gospodinov's [b:Time Shelter|58999261|Time Shelter|Georgi Gospodinov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1645247437l/58999261._SY75_.jpg|80554438]. I'm inserting it here because it's as if Gospodinov were talking about this exact book in the first part of that quote.
Lessons gives the impression of a writer who holds all the threads of the action firmly, and who is determined to serve us a narrative that is perfect both in order and form. And what's extra interesting is that Lessons delivers its carefully controlled narrative while at the same time roaming backwards and forwards through the very same decades that Gospodinov examines in his deliberately more chaotic but very nostalgia-inducing Time Shelter.
Many of the main political events in Europe between WWII and the present day are dealt with in both books, so that Lessons feels just as history focused and nostalgia driven as Time Shelter because the main character, Roland, is constantly striving to pin down and examine the past in a similar way to Gospodinov's narrator: Roland thought that those in his own country who itched to get back to...the nineteen fifties should think harder.
Was I more drawn to the order and form of McEwan's book than I was to the nebulous non-order of Gospodinov's?
I find that hard to decide. What I do know is that I was able to make complete sense of the fiction setting of Lessons whereas I struggled to understand Time Shelter's fictional world.
The fiction setting of Lessons concerns the many and varied lessons Roland Baines learns in his long life. Those lessons are all taught to him by women, and although Roland isn't the most noble of characters, those women, his mother, his music teacher, his ex-wife, are made to appear ignoble in the extreme. I wondered about that, about why McEwan seemed so bitter towards women in this book (and the one woman who is noble dies as soon as she becomes a main character).
I've often wondered what motivated certain aspects of Ian McEwan's novels over the many years I've been reading him. But in spite of not liking some of those aspects, I continue to read him because I've always admired his writing at the sentence level. Oddly, this is the first of his books in which I didn't stumble on fine phrases very frequently. I did find one eventually at the bottom of page 457, but that was a long time to wait in what was a very long book. In fact at one point, when Roland is reading the critics' opinions of his difficult ex-wife's latest novel—What was new was her exceptional prose, it's lyrical bitterness...Only she, they agreed, could manage so adroitly, with such delicate evocation of pain and anger, the many cross-currents of feeling, of mutual misunderstanding...—I found myself wishing that I was reading her novel (which sounded quite like a typical McEwan novel) instead of the book in my hand.
But the sober book in my hand was all I had so I made the best of it. And I learned a little lesson about how to read McEwan's novels without over interpreting them. It occurred when the difficult ex-wife asked Roland, Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need. Ok, lesson learned.
Meantime, Roland is learning other lessons about reading : Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid....He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other's work...His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland's favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton....
This was a side of Roland that appealed to me better—or was it McEwan talking, I wondered? Ok, I shouldn't over interpret. But still, the ex-wife also says, When a writer has been around long enough people begin to get tired. Even if she does something different every time. They say, She's doing something different—again! I couldn't help feeling that Ian McEwan was talking directly to his critics there. And just so you know, Ian, I've always admired how you treat a new subject in every new novel.
The aspect of this book that appealed to me most was the intertextuality. [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377756377l/7604._SY75_.jpg|1268631] haunted the early sections, though the book itself was never mentioned. Flaubert's [b:L'Éducation sentimentale|1420825|L'Éducation sentimentale|Gustave Flaubert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356152703l/1420825._SY75_.jpg|314156], about a young man and his older lover, was also in my mind while reading, and McEwan did confirm that connection. I also thought of [b:Orlando Furioso|38154|Orlando Furioso|Ludovico Ariosto|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385193032l/38154._SX50_.jpg|1161788] since Roland is a poet and driven crazy by love at some points in the novel. Conrad's [b:Youth|392274|Youth|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330401868l/392274._SY75_.jpg|691580] was in here too. And Elizabeth Hardwick's [b:Sleepless Nights|347413|Sleepless Nights|Elizabeth Hardwick|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647044062l/347413._SY75_.jpg|1045351] was evoked very meaningfully, as was Doris Lessing's life and times in connection with the ex-wife's writing career. And although she wasn't mentioned, I was reminded of Muriel Spark's writing life—but not of her playfulness. Playfulness is something I never find in an Ian McEwan book. He is an utterly serious writer, which is ok when he's writing novellas, but when his books are as long as this one, I feel the need for him to take himself and his material a little less seriously.
But I'm sure he'll have a lesson for me on that subject in his next novel!
Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.
That quote is not from this book but from the one I read just before it, Georgi Gospodinov's [b:Time Shelter|58999261|Time Shelter|Georgi Gospodinov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1645247437l/58999261._SY75_.jpg|80554438]. I'm inserting it here because it's as if Gospodinov were talking about this exact book in the first part of that quote.
Lessons gives the impression of a writer who holds all the threads of the action firmly, and who is determined to serve us a narrative that is perfect both in order and form. And what's extra interesting is that Lessons delivers its carefully controlled narrative while at the same time roaming backwards and forwards through the very same decades that Gospodinov examines in his deliberately more chaotic but very nostalgia-inducing Time Shelter.
Many of the main political events in Europe between WWII and the present day are dealt with in both books, so that Lessons feels just as history focused and nostalgia driven as Time Shelter because the main character, Roland, is constantly striving to pin down and examine the past in a similar way to Gospodinov's narrator: Roland thought that those in his own country who itched to get back to...the nineteen fifties should think harder.
Was I more drawn to the order and form of McEwan's book than I was to the nebulous non-order of Gospodinov's?
I find that hard to decide. What I do know is that I was able to make complete sense of the fiction setting of Lessons whereas I struggled to understand Time Shelter's fictional world.
The fiction setting of Lessons concerns the many and varied lessons Roland Baines learns in his long life. Those lessons are all taught to him by women, and although Roland isn't the most noble of characters, those women, his mother, his music teacher, his ex-wife, are made to appear ignoble in the extreme. I wondered about that, about why McEwan seemed so bitter towards women in this book (and the one woman who is noble dies as soon as she becomes a main character).
I've often wondered what motivated certain aspects of Ian McEwan's novels over the many years I've been reading him. But in spite of not liking some of those aspects, I continue to read him because I've always admired his writing at the sentence level. Oddly, this is the first of his books in which I didn't stumble on fine phrases very frequently. I did find one eventually at the bottom of page 457, but that was a long time to wait in what was a very long book. In fact at one point, when Roland is reading the critics' opinions of his difficult ex-wife's latest novel—What was new was her exceptional prose, it's lyrical bitterness...Only she, they agreed, could manage so adroitly, with such delicate evocation of pain and anger, the many cross-currents of feeling, of mutual misunderstanding...—I found myself wishing that I was reading her novel (which sounded quite like a typical McEwan novel) instead of the book in my hand.
But the sober book in my hand was all I had so I made the best of it. And I learned a little lesson about how to read McEwan's novels without over interpreting them. It occurred when the difficult ex-wife asked Roland, Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need. Ok, lesson learned.
Meantime, Roland is learning other lessons about reading : Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid....He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other's work...His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland's favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton....
This was a side of Roland that appealed to me better—or was it McEwan talking, I wondered? Ok, I shouldn't over interpret. But still, the ex-wife also says, When a writer has been around long enough people begin to get tired. Even if she does something different every time. They say, She's doing something different—again! I couldn't help feeling that Ian McEwan was talking directly to his critics there. And just so you know, Ian, I've always admired how you treat a new subject in every new novel.
The aspect of this book that appealed to me most was the intertextuality. [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377756377l/7604._SY75_.jpg|1268631] haunted the early sections, though the book itself was never mentioned. Flaubert's [b:L'Éducation sentimentale|1420825|L'Éducation sentimentale|Gustave Flaubert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356152703l/1420825._SY75_.jpg|314156], about a young man and his older lover, was also in my mind while reading, and McEwan did confirm that connection. I also thought of [b:Orlando Furioso|38154|Orlando Furioso|Ludovico Ariosto|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385193032l/38154._SX50_.jpg|1161788] since Roland is a poet and driven crazy by love at some points in the novel. Conrad's [b:Youth|392274|Youth|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330401868l/392274._SY75_.jpg|691580] was in here too. And Elizabeth Hardwick's [b:Sleepless Nights|347413|Sleepless Nights|Elizabeth Hardwick|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647044062l/347413._SY75_.jpg|1045351] was evoked very meaningfully, as was Doris Lessing's life and times in connection with the ex-wife's writing career. And although she wasn't mentioned, I was reminded of Muriel Spark's writing life—but not of her playfulness. Playfulness is something I never find in an Ian McEwan book. He is an utterly serious writer, which is ok when he's writing novellas, but when his books are as long as this one, I feel the need for him to take himself and his material a little less seriously.
But I'm sure he'll have a lesson for me on that subject in his next novel!