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December 30, 2007
Atonement
But before I say anything about There Will Be Blood, I want to speed through the list of movies I've been catching up with this past week - The Savages, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Sleepaway Camp and 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days - to get to the one that I haven't yet seen, Atonement. I was going to see it on Christmas Eve, but then I saw the novel sitting on Yen's bookshelf and decided to read it instead. And what a godsend! It was one of those books that came at just the right time, whose simpatico prose pierced some membrane in my head and gave beautiful form to thoughts and feelings I feel I should have outgrown. It helped me, in its own minute way, like all great things, grow up a bit without growing older. At least, Part One did; the rest, by comparison, is all consequence, all aftermath, making (to turn the book's own meta-thematics and Woolfian allusions back on it) a great yarn of a crystallized present. But as the platform of that story is building, McEwan wraps his words around the workings of a child's mind with a precision that is by turns comforting, alarming, comforting and alarming. It's put certain things into perspective for me as I prepare to push my own form upon those same avenues.
I'll see the film on Monday, and will likely project upon it the entire time. I hope the book only makes it better.
Posted by David Lowery at December 30, 2007 4:48 AM
Comments
Ah, I just finished it, too! Alas, we have different views on the book. I'm excited to discuss it with people though.
Happy New Year!
Posted by: nicole at December 31, 2007 4:55 PM
I was going to e-mail you to see if you finished it yet. Where does your difference in opinion lie? I'm curious. I just got back from seeing the movie, which is all fine and good and very pretty but hardly seems a flash in the pan compared to those ice cold emotional conflagrations of the novel (that first part, at least)...
Posted by: David Lowery at December 31, 2007 7:29 PM
I thought the pacing was so slow. I had a hard time getting into it, and kept with it because everyone told me it was such a great twist ending. The entire time I felt like I was reading a novel...which in a meta-kind-of way, I was! It's a hard feeling to describe. Some books I get so wrapped up, I forget I'm reading, and this one I was aware of it the entire time.
I can see how, with your current project involving kids, it would be a really good read right now!
I'll see the movie this weekend, though, and I'm curious how they'll adapt it.
Posted by: nicole at January 2, 2008 8:43 PM