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Post by Frank on Feb 23, 2008 19:00:42 GMT -5
Did anyone see this movie? I just saw it an hour ago so here are my first thoughts... I liked it as sort of an exploration of the tragedy of the human condition. The ending left me unsatisfied as a resolution to that problem, but maybe that was the point? Better yet, has anyone read the book?
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Post by ebdonlon on Feb 25, 2008 9:36:38 GMT -5
From my experience, McEwan is ALWAYS dissatisfying and he THINKS he is the authority on the tragedy of the human condition.
I have read the book and am emphatically NOT a McEwan fan. For one thing, he is a very cruel author, submitting his characters to extreme suffering and the basest humiliations, but without benefit or hope of salvation. It is not so much that redemption is not attained (some of the greatest works of literature have ended darkly), but that it is never really an option at all. His novels are truly the work of a bitter atheist. Life is hell, and there's no hope, and if there were a God, He would be a malicious, vicious spirit.
Beyond this, McEwan toys with two "sops" to the misery of reality -- eroticism and narrative. The first is presented with graphic and implausible obscenity. It is as if the author has seen too many soft-corn porn Hollywood films. When I was not turning away in revulsion, I was shaking my head in disbelief. The second provides perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book. McEwan is actually a moderately skillful writer, and the question of narrative redemption is a very rich one. But, again, with the willful despair characteristic of the man, the very fabric of the narrative falls to pieces in the reader's hands. This might have been, as I say, used to very interesting effect, but I was, by the end of the novel, rather inclined to roll my eyes. It is perhaps not unsurprising that most of his novels conclude with the protagonist declining into senile dementia or other mind-debilitating diseases -- what else can happen when there's no hope or purpose to anything?
In a way, McEwan can be taken as a prime example of the two nightmares born of Cartesian doubt -- the first, that reality is simply a dream of our subjective perspective, therefore narratives are hollow, hopeless exercises in self-delusion; or the second, that reality is ruled over by a malicious spirit, bent on inflicting senseless suffering on all and sundry.
As the hopelessness/perverse eroticism/Alzheimer's paradigm seems to be McEwan's stock and trade, and to little purpose, I am disinclined to recommend anything he has written, unless it be to catch a glimpse of what we, as sincere, Catholic writers are fighting against in the literary market. A pity, since the man has some talent.
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Post by firefolk on Feb 26, 2008 10:44:43 GMT -5
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.
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Post by ebdonlon on Feb 26, 2008 14:13:14 GMT -5
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