2 posts tagged “books”
I read this book on a recommendation from a friend and I ended up loving the story. It's a story within a story (as told by the protagonist) about a young man name Kvothe (pronounced Quothe) who becomes orphaned after his family is murdered by the mysterious Chandrian. After spending many years begging on the streets, Kvothe decides he must make his way to the university as this was what his family would have wanted him to do. Using his quick wits and his penchant for mischief, he is accepted into the university where he makes both friends and enemies. Kvothe is a magician, a musician and a young man trying to solve the mysteries of his parent's murder - this story is set in a completely original world with all the fantasy elements a reader would want to see.
Ever since I discovered Ian McEwan in college when I read his masterpiece Atonement, he has been my favorite contemporary author. His upcoming novel, On Chesil Beach, will be out later this year and I'm already excited about getting my hands on it. It's hard to fully explain why I like McEwan's writing because it is more a feeling of intellectual emotion that is evoked when I read his novels. I think what draws me most to his writing is his acute ability to accurately describe micro-emotions and also explain how these subtle thoughts and emotions intertwine with the way we interact with other people. I would regard McEwan as one of the great contemporary authors whose novels will make their way into the canon of literary studies. He's truly brilliant and I recommend his works to everyone.
This is a blurb from McEwan's website on the upcoming book:
In the December 25, 2006 & January 1, 2007, Winter Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, Ian McEwan, the Booker Prize-winning author of Amsterdam and Atonement, presents the anxieties of two young newlyweds, Edward and Florence, as they are served a formal dinner in their honeymoon suite, overlooking the English Channel (“On Chesil Beach,” p. 98). Transporting the reader to Britain in 1962, McEwan skillfully crafts an evening that is taut with secret, conflicting emotions. He writes, “This was still the era—it would end later in that famous decade—when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a fresh pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth—Edward and Florence, free at last!... From these heights they could see clearly, but they could not describe to each other certain contradictory feelings: they separately worried about the moment, sometime soon after dinner, when their new maturity would be tested, when they would lie down together on the fourposter bed and reveal themselves fully to each other.” As they work their way through a meal for which they have no appetite, Edward and Florence, who are both virgins, struggle through their own internal battles with sexual anxiety, fear, disgust, love, and nerves.
A further excerpt from the novel can be found here in the New Yorker online.
