3.5
Lessons
ByPublisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue • The New Yorker
“Masterful.... McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers…. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland’s biography…. The pleasure in reading this novel is letting it wash over you.” —Associated Press
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue • The New Yorker
“Masterful.... McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers…. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland’s biography…. The pleasure in reading this novel is letting it wash over you.” —Associated Press
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.
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3.5
“In this book, we watch Roland, a British kid born in the 1940s, navigate life (spoiler: the end of the book isn't Roland's, but he's a grandpa by then). It's a very dense book; not much happened to Roland, or at least, his adventures, his drug trips, and/or travels are not detailed. We learn about it because of quick references made here and there, but it's not prevalent.
We learn of how his piano teacher, a 20-something beautiful young woman, abused him as a boy, and then a few years later, how he knocked at her door, thinking that the end of the world might be near, and she was his chance to experience sex before annihilation. How their "affair" that went on for 2 years after that shaped, or not, his life.
The book starts with him as a new dad, finding out that Alissa, his German wife has left him and their 7-month-old baby boy to pursue her dream of becoming an author. Which she will, very successfully.
He will go on with his life, his friends, and his little jobs through life. I love how British and world political events peppered the book as they peppered our lives. The writing is beautiful, the book super dense, a lot to take in, family, parents, how his mom abandoned her first child because the father wasn't her husband, who was fighting (WWII), but fathered by another military man, his dad. I like how the family dynamic is not always in the forefront, but still always present, with his 2 older siblings (Suzanne, Henry), and then later on with the introduction of this third sibling (Robert). I heard that the author discovered he had a sibling. The writing is beautiful. Not much "action" in this book, but at the same time so much happens: life happens, with kids growing, him marrying very late (62), his lifelong friend, divorced, and separated again from her husband, his friend too. I like how he talks about the Labour Party, about his kid, Lawrence, growing up, Daphne & Peter's kids, Daphne, whom he marries late, and who found out the day after he asked her to marry him that she has stage 4 cancer. Again, beautiful writing. It took me a bit to get into it, but once I did, it was total immersion.
A few excerpts:
-"Nothing is dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be "governed" by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct."
-"....how language, German, English, French, Arabic shape perception, how culture shapes language."
-"...and here it was again, the simplest feature of death, always startling absence."
-"By what logic or motivation of helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin's falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?"
I think one thing that I love in this book is that Roland is never petty. He forgives, sometimes because it's the easiest way to navigate events, but still, I like that. I like that he's aware of what could have been, but never bitter, nor vengeful. Even when he meets his piano teacher later on, or his boy's mom who abandoned them to live her life.”
About Ian McEwan
IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Other books by Ian McEwan
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