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Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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Mi è sembrato un McEwan meno ispirato del solito, al punto che ho cominciato a diradare la mia frequentazione della sua letteratura, intensa negli anni a precedere. Like Bernard and June, who have lived apart despite loving one another for most of their married lives, the stances wrangling inside the narrator’s skull are doomed to remain wedded, yet unreconciled. He recently set himself the challenge of writing a short story in which he had to be optimistic about the future up to 2060 (there are “a couple of strategic nuclear explosions” – cheery). “I thought, am I just writing a delicious fantasy? That old saying that most things aren’t as bad as you fear?” But he is reluctant to make any real predictions. “The world is so connected now it’s like a giant mind,” he reflects. “And just as with our own minds, or with our own fates, we can never predict what we’re going to do next collectively.” When I read something that has a preface, maybe written by the author, like Stephen King does on a lot of his books, maybe by a critic, it's even worse. I don't mean to say I don't pay attention, it's just I don't get into it. I read it cooly, calmly, without any emotion for the story whatsoever. The liturgy at a funeral was "a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine".

Forse non lo è neppure il sud della Francia, ma per l’episodio che vi succede, è quella la parte di mondo che contende a Berlino lo scettro dell’attenzione, la vetta narrativa. L’episodio si carica di valenze simboliche e June sente d’essersi salvata per miracolo. Ergo, abbraccia una nuova fede, non più quella comunista, ma una che contempli appunto i miracoli, sia rivolta a un qualche dio: una fede religiosa. Ian McEwan gelingt ein furioser Start in den Roman. Die Geschichte handelt von einem Waisen, der bereits in der Jugend die Eltern seiner stark pubertierenden Freunde "übernimmt" und sich von diesen als neues Objekt der Fürsorge ordentlich bemuttern läßt. Vor dem Hintergrund historischer Ereignisse wie beispielsweise der Fall der Berliner Mauer erzählt der mittlerweile erwachsene verwaiste Ich-Erzählter größtenteils die Geschichte seiner verfeindeten, von seiner Frau übernommenen Schwiegereltern, sowohl in der Gegenwart als auch vom Hörensagen aus der Vergangenheit. Forse tanta, troppa carne al fuoco: essere giovani durante la guerra, essere giovani durante il nazismo – incluso detour al lager polacco di Majdanek - crescere credendo nel comunismo, assistere al divenire dei paesi sotto il controllo sovietico fino ad arrivare al crollo del muro e al dissolversi della vecchia Unione, lo scontro tra chi dal marxismo passa alla religione e chi invece rimane fedele a quella interpretazione, nonostante tutto quello che succede a partire dal 1989 – il tutto cucito dell’io narrante impersonato da Jeremy, che si accinge a scrivere un memoir su richiesta della suocera ormai anziana e malata. Due visioni del mondo e della vita che finiscono col contrapporsi, che Jeremy col suo amore – e con la sua ricerca di amore – dovrebbe riuscire a conciliare. Ma senza successo.The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Jordan, Tina; Ellingwood, Susan (17 May 2018). "6 Noteworthy Works by Ian McEwan". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 16 January 2020. A perfect case of bending the facts to the idea.” How often do you interrogate your own beliefs? What is important to you when forming them?

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Born in 1919 in New York, the novelist and short-story writer J. D. Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He was conscripted into the United States army in 1942, where he served for four years. During that time, he met Ernest Hemingway, with whom he began to correspond. Salinger’s most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was published a few years after his return to the US, but brought him more attention than he desired. Salinger gradually became more reclusive, and is often described as having struggled with spiritual beliefs and personal relationships. Salinger died in 2010. For Bernard, the rational scientific humanist who left the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and became a Labour MP, it is human beings who inscribe on reality whatever intelligibility it yields; we make things the way they are, and we can change them for better or worse by changing the way we think and behave as individuals and communities.

McEwan, un poco en modo Zadie Smith, elige hacernos escuchar las dos perspectivas (la de la que cambió y la del que cree que ese cambio fue una locura) en las voces de un matrimonio separado. Y logra hacerlo calmada y objetivamente. Gran mérito. June and Bernard later learn from the villagers that the dogs had been brought there by the Gestapo during the German occupation. The mayor claims that two men saw the dogs being forced to rape a woman, but Bernard refuses to believe this tale, saying that June trusts it because it fits so neatly into her interpretation of her experience. June considers her instinctive understanding of the dogs’ evil to be the essence of her spiritual transformation. For June, her battle with the dogs “explained everything—why she left the party,…why she reconsidered her rationalism, her materialism, how she came to live the life she did, where she lived it, what she thought.” Jeremy is skeptical about the overwhelming significance attached to one event until his beating of the brutish father. How June translates the evil of the dogs into what she calls “an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness” is another matter.

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