Atonement
Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan. 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. Widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works, it was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. In 2010, Time magazine named Atonement in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
6people
2010–2024years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The problem, as the commenters to that question note, is that no one is really sure what it means to be "well read" anymore. Louis Menand talks about how the end of the consensus on the "canon" or lack thereof has played in universities (and their requirements) in The Marketplace of Ideas: where he notes that only a few schools, including Columbia, still have "great books" courses grandfathered in. (See my post here: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... for more on the book).
Anyway, as a consequence most people, with the exception of Harold Bloom and some other literary conservatives, don't know what should be in the canon, or would rather fight about what it means to have a canon than to read it. This is in part related to the larger question of how English and humanities types think; there's a decent book on that subject called How Professors Think, which deals with the legitimacy crisis in English.
That's from an academic angle. As for what I think, I'm not all that impressed by the idea of reading things merely because they have been read, and therefore going from Plato to Don Quixote to Austen to Dickens to James to Joyce to Roth; to my mind, being well-read means reading books that are interesting, unusual, show something new about the world, and so forth, whether they're canonical or not. To me, very little fiction is of real interest before 1900—yet a lot of it is part of the "canon," that I have to put scare quotes around. Do you want to read that, or excellent modern novels that have, in my view, improved on what has been, like Ian McEwan's Atonement, or most of Robertson Davies' work, or Ursula K. Le Guin's better novels (like Earthsea), or Carlos Ruiz Zafon's recent novels (which are very highly plotted and very fascinating), or Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, or, or, or...
As you can tell from the way I've structured my response, I'd prefer the latter. To my mind, being well read means reading a lot and reading meaningfully—not reading a particular set of books.
- A bunch of books by Kahlil Gibran. Read The Prophet twice.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Problem Of Pain by C S Lewis
Disgrace by J M Coetzee
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
On Writing by Stephen King
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavic
Candide by Voltaire
The Labyrinth Of Solitude | Life And Thought In Mexico by Ocavio Paz
I finished that last one today. Read this:
All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -- if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature -- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
I recommend this old book.
- I sent them all to ChatGPT 4o one by one and had it guess the books, this is how it did:
1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one. 2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct! 3. Henry James – Correct! 4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone. 5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct! 6. Samuel Richardson – Correct! 7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit. 8. Marcel Proust – Correct! 9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct! 10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James. 11. E. M. Forster – Correct! 12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct! 13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct! 14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov/Osborne, so I missed this. 15. Jane Austen – Correct! 16. Dan Brown – Correct! 17. Agatha Christie – Correct! 18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one. 19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct! 20. Iris Murdoch – Correct! 21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct! 22. John Banville – Correct! 23. Harold Pinter – Correct! 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct! 25. Tennessee Williams – Correct! 26. Oscar Wilde – Correct! 27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct! 28. Thomas Hardy – Correct! 29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy. 30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!
Final score: 25/30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!
- I haven't read Machines Like Me, but Atonement is one of my all-time favorite novels. To give you an idea of my general tastes, I'm drawn towards late 19th and early 20th century writers. McEwan's style reminds me of English writers in that period, such as Maugham and Greene.
- > film Cement Garden
A minor point, but it's a book by Ian McEwan. He also wrote Enduring Love and Atonement (also great films).
- 50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
