There are many reviews already of this book, and I did wonder whether the world needed any more. But I disagree so strongly with some of the opinions expressed that I'm afraid I have to exercise my right to reply. Two things in particular stand out. Let me deal with the simpler one first. Some people seem appalled that the author is putting the guilt for this dreadful tragedy on the shoulders of a young girl. She didn't know what she was doing, they say; she was too young to understand the impor...

In World War II England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets her older sister’s love affair with their family’s gardener to be something much worse than what it is. Her innocence and partial understanding of the world begins a chain of events that tears the family apart and alters the course of the rest of the girl’s life.Sounds a little dry, right? Wrong! I guess I forgot to mention that the book was written by Ian McEwan, the king of uncomfortable moments, weird sex stuff, the rotating thi...

That I can remember, I've never before disliked the start of a book so thoroughly, and by the end, gone on to think so much of it as a complete work.The last 2/3 of this novel are as good as contemporary fiction gets. The first 1/3 is like reading a Jane Austen plot trapped in amber.As the title indicates Atonement is about a future artist's massive effort to redeem herself for ruining the character of a young man when she is a younger girl. There are parts of this novel that are disjointed - or...

Ian McEwan - image from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette - photo credit: Joost van den BroekI was bored with this until half way through, but then it got interesting. It touches on imagination versus reality, fiction versus fact, in addition to the story content. A portrait of an upper middle class English family is interrupted by a supposed rape in which a young imaginative (vengeful) girl misidentifies the rapist. I found that it stayed with me and that I appreciated it more with time. The film, re...

Atonement, Ian McEwanAtonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.Abstract: On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis...

The subject matter of Atonement is literature itself, but it is much more. First, the writer is one of its characters; second, because Ian McEwan’s novel creates a world where subjectivity and objectivity interfere mutually. The characters are full of life and the language, even if elaborate and subtle, does not go around or makes inroads into itself.The narrator and protagonist, Briony Tallis, emerges in the beginner as a pre-adolescent that dreams to arrange the world in her texts, as in the p...

Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003. The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. In the heat of a 1930s Summer, a family reunites at their country home for what may be the last time. Cousins have come to stay, a sister has returned from University and a brother is returning from America with a new friend in tow. Briony, the only child lef...

What a lovely reread this was! I first read this novel almost a decade ago, and the story has stayed with me. The prose is gorgeous, and again I was completely absorbed in this novel. My favorite character is Briony, the young writer seeking atonement for a mistake she made as a child. And my heart aches for her sister, Cecilia, and her wronged lover, Robbie. I've only read a few of McEwan's books, but I like his writing style so much I want to read more. Highly recommended.Favorite Quotes"Was e...

This is where a 2.5 star rating would be ideal. I am extremely ambivalent about this novel--first the pluses: the writing is gorgeous; McEwan has some of the best prose out there. Every line has meat to it, nothing is throwaway, and every visual is so vivid that the reader is transported to a specific time and place. Secondly, (what everyone praises the novel for), the commentary McEwan is making about the novel itself--the fact that it is written, that characters and plots are manipulated by th...

I feel that perhaps I have sabotaged this book somewhat as I read it directly after finishing Love In the Time of Cholera, and perhaps in retrospect should have read a poetry book or some non-fiction in between. Clearly anything I would have read after finishing a Masterpiece would pale in comparison but I decided that the critical raves this book had received and high praise from people around me should be enough to encourage me to see it through to the end.Here is why I found this book lacking...

Having recently seen and loved the magnificent film adaptation, I decided to reread Atonement, which quite impressed me when it was first published. And guess what? It was an even more rewarding experience the second time around. Knowing what was coming -- knowing the plot twist at the end -- helped me focus on the quality of the writing rather than on the development of the story, and as always, McEwan's prose completely sucked me in. He is, quite simply, one of the most talented authors alive,...

Wow! I will embarrassedly share a personal secret. Actually it’s not personal! It’s about the actress and the bloody intense movie adaptation of this book. I am a big fan of charming Scottish Mr. McAvoy (In my opinion not Idi Amin but he’s the real king of Scotland!) so after watching so young but intimidating Saoirse Ronan as thirteen years old Briony Tallis and witnessed how she ruined her own sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley ) and Robbie ( played by magnificent McAvoy) the son of the servant,

A lesson to us all: never put anything in print that one day might come back to bite you in the ass.Having already seen the movie, I didn't particularly want to read the book (I've never read Mario Puzo's The Godfather, now have I?), but seeing as this book is a modern great, I felt it my duty to drag it from my book cave.Pleasingly, McEwan writes with aplomb about the human psyche: of lust, loathing, immaturity and guilt; his prose is word perfect.That said, the novel suffers from its own ident...

In life, we all make mistakes. Some big, some small, but usually we quickly forget them. But what happens when you make a mistake that haunts you every day and you can do nothing about it?This book was fantastic. I loved the writing. I loved the characters. They were so well developed I could feel their emotions in myself as I read. I was deeply and truly satisfied by the story and the writing. When I closed the book after the last page I felt like I was sitting back after finishing an amazing m...

**WARNING: Don't read this if you don't want the ending spoiled!**This book...I hate it! It's beautiful, every word of it is gorgeous, but it's as if the author spends all this time painstakingly crafting a really detailed, intricate vessel for you (I'm thinking of a boat :))and then just before your journey's over he snatches it out from under you & you sink. Why go to such lengths describing the lovers, and the war, and Briony & the nursing when in the end none of it even matters? The problem

Ah, to be young and bookish and to hate your status as a child… To want to be part of the grown-ups' world, to want to understand their strange actions and their esoteric social codes, which seem so mysterious and sophisticated… As we get older we often realize that none of this is quite as glamorous as we had imagined, and the rear-view mirror of memory can give new meanings to events we thought we understood so well in our youth…Briony is the youngest child of rather comfortable British family...

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”

What a strange and powerful novel, one that begins its story with a quote from Jane Austen's Northanger Abby.Why? Because Ms. Austen was the master of comparing the controlled, domestic world of the home with that of the chaotic, spontaneous world of the outside, the unknown.Mirroring this idea, the self-centered 13-year-old Briony Tallis wonders early in McEwan's story, "Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out?"Yes, Briony, that's all there really is. Oh, except one more thing. .

I'm pretty sure this was initially 2 books merged into 1. One on war and one drama used as a cameo. Maybe there was a part bildungsroman thrown into the mess for adding more poignancy to the drama? Maybe not.God forbid ever meeting people like Briony. She's such an idiot with all her aesthetic way of thinking. Even in her mature age she still is one. For one, she believes that her writing is some sort of atonement. As if anyone would care about her graphomany. As if her magical thinking would ha...

Sometimes when I write these reviews, especially when they're of novels with widespread popularity and critical acclaim, I start to feel like a real curmudgeon. Is there anything really wrong with Ian McEwan's “Atonement?” Is it not a compelling story well told? Is the writing not clear, succinct, and free of pretentiousness? Does McEwan not draw the reader into a well-imagined world and hold him there until the last page? The answer to all these questions is yes. Yet still, yet still...Maybe it...

Atonement is a post-modernist interpretation of historical fiction. How historical fiction is a kind of double fiction, a fiction within a fiction. Not that McEwan’s intellectual mischief detracts from his gift for storytelling. For this is a compelling and moving story and it’s not until the end that we are called upon to question the roots of storytelling. How all the stories we tell require a measure of illusion to sustain them. And how narrative itself is a selective process – brilliantly ex...

This was the favourite novel of a friend of mine who died suddenly a few years ago. She loved it so much that she refused to see the film adaptation because, she said, it couldn't possibly be as good as the novel. I, on the other hand, saw the film without having read the book because when the film was released I was still in the won't-read-McEwan stage of my life that lasted from 1988 or 1989 until two or three years ago. Anyway, I quite liked the film, or at least it made an impression on me a...

Is there word beyond 'amazing' that I can use? Some word beyond 'enthralling'? I need them. I'm reaching for them. But I literally just finished the book and I'm so much in awe of it I just can't. It's perfect. It's perfect in every image and line and mirror and echo. Ian McEwan is such a master of language and storycraft.I devoured this book in a day. Less than a day. Ignoring all other work to do so. And it was TOTALLY worth it. I can't think of what to praise first this point, so I'm going to...

I watched the movie before reading the book, which was probably a mistake because I loved the movie and I felt that the book didn't measure up. Which is unfair, I know, but there it is!What impressed me about the book was the powerful statement the author is making on the power of narrative - how much it rules our lives. It does not matter whether it is true or false: in fact, true or false has no say in it, because for each one of us it is entirely subjective. And when the person in question is...

There are so many angles and perceptions to consider in this book. Sometimes the end can make a book and that is certainly the case here where the story is left open for interpretation. This is a book that leaves you thinking and considering, making up your own conclusions--and strong enough characters to make you want to.The first few chapters I did find my mind wandering through lengthy descriptions (I'll call it beautiful, poetic scenery), and yet that scenery set a lackadaisical feel vital t...

When I read a contemporary 21st century novel, especially a really good one, I often wonder, will it become a classic? Will people still be reading it 150 years from now? It's hard to know of course. Occasionally I read one that I think will still be around, will be read and appreciated years from now. Atonement is one of those. The setting, the plot, the time period, the historical aspect, were all perfectly connected. The characters were so real that I felt like I was reading a historical reco...

I have mixed feelings about this book. I struggled with boredom while reading the initial chapters. I literally forced myself to continue reading. The story starts moving only when about 100 pages into the book.When I completed the first 3 parts, I was kind of disappointed with this book and thought I will give 3 stars and was wondering what all the hype was about! That was until I read the last section. It was heartbreaking. Those few pages made me re-think about the 3 stars. They compelled me

Wow, this book was really good but on different levels. The first half gives us an intense story about a family who lives in some kind of a mansion in England. Briony, Cecilia and the other family members are peculiar characters that give you a feeling that trouble is stirring under the surface. The second half of the book takes a turn for the more serious, and while this part had its enchanting moments, it was the first part I loved the most. Maybe it's because I've watched the movie (which see...

Atonement is an incredible story of ignorance and youth.Younger sister Briony catches her sister in the thralls of a passionate embrace - being unsure of the meaning of this situation it leads her to accuse a young man of one of the most hideous acts.The story follows the three characters as they lead separate lives, forever tainted by this one accusation. Briony is unable to find peace when she finds how wrong she was as a child, and how everyone's lives could have been different, had she come

some major mistakes need a lifetime atonementa tragic novel questioning the ability to overcome guilt and repent of a crime that destroyed other lives