Atonement by Ian McEwan
On December 7 the film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan's Booker prize winning novel, with Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy in the lead roles, opened on limited release. The novel, first published in 2001 and nominated for a Booker Prize, was called by PW a “haunting novel." On The Bob Edwards Show of December 7, director Joe Wright discussed the movie. Click here for the website of the film About Atonement - From the hardcover jacket notes:
"On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. "
"On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. "
About the Author - from Ian McEwan's website :
"Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday. "
"Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday. "
Discussion Guide from Publisher
Conversation Starters from BlogaBook:
Critics have praised McEwan's close observation of people in the English upper middle-class in 1935. Did you enjoy this? What does the opening of the novel on a long sweltering summer's day at a country house-party contribute to the novel?
Critics have praised McEwan's close observation of people in the English upper middle-class in 1935. Did you enjoy this? What does the opening of the novel on a long sweltering summer's day at a country house-party contribute to the novel?
The book is, in effect, three books in one. The first part is the crime, the second part is Robbie in the war, the third part is Briony working as a nurse in London. Do you think this tripartite approach works?
What did you think of the descriptions of Dunkirk? What significance does Dunkirk have for the characters and for the book?
One critic says, "McEwan brilliantly engages readers in a tour de force of what ifs and might have beens until they begin to wonder what actually happened. " Could you decide what actually happened? How much of the book is real and how much imagined?
Readers have enjoyed the psychological insight McEwan brings to his characters. Did you find the characters well-drawn and their actions believable? Could you detect motives for their behavior?
Would you agree that the book is about the power of memory, the search for truth and absolution, and the human capacity to forgive?
Would you agree that the novel is reminiscent of the works of Virginia Woolf?
"In its broad historical framework, Atonement is a departure from McEwan’s earlier work, and he loads the story with an emotional intensity and a gripping plot reminiscent of the best nineteenth-century fiction. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, country and class, the novel is a profoundly moving exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution."
Labels: Atonement, atonement-fiction, book discussion, English country houses - fiction, Ian McEwan, reading groups, World War II -fiction
posted by Elizabeth @ 12:39 PM
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