BookShared
  • MEMBER AREA    
  • Enduring Love

    (By Ian McEwan)

    Book Cover Watermark PDF Icon Read Ebook
    ×
    Size 20 MB (20,079 KB)
    Format PDF
    Downloaded 570 times
    Last checked 7 Hour ago!
    Author Ian McEwan
    “Book Descriptions: Joe planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after 6 weeks in the States. The perfect day turns to nightmare however, when they are involved in freak ballooning accident in which a boy is saved but a man is killed. In itself, the accident would change the couple and the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that same night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

    Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in de-familiarisation. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. --Alex Freeman

    Google Drive Logo DRIVE
    Book 1

    Stone Yard Devotional

    ★★★★★

    Charlotte Wood

    Book 1

    Birdsong

    ★★★★★

    Sebastian Faulks

    Book 1

    Raising Hare: A Memoir

    ★★★★★

    Chloe Dalton

    Book 1

    The Sense of an Ending

    ★★★★★

    Julian Barnes

    Book 1

    Lo schermo bianco

    ★★★★★

    Enrico Pinto

    Book 1

    White Teeth

    ★★★★★

    Zadie Smith

    Book 1

    The Girl at the Lion d'Or

    ★★★★★

    Sebastian Faulks

    Book 1

    Our Evenings

    ★★★★★

    Alan Hollinghurst

    Book 1

    Flaubert's Parrot

    ★★★★★

    Julian Barnes

    Book 1

    Never Let Me Go

    ★★★★★

    Kazuo Ishiguro

    Book 1

    Staring at the Sun

    ★★★★★

    Julian Barnes