Classics Challenge: Atonement, by Ian McEwan

I finished this book maybe 45 minutes ago? I love vacations for their uninterrupted reading time. I don't know that I can fully formulate my thoughts right now, but I do want to say that this book reminded me very much of Lolita in a couple of ways -- not just because it is so well-written (although stylistically, radically dissimilar), but also because the events in the book have only a casual relationship to what the book is actually about. Yes, it is about love and war and family and betrayal and growing up, but it is much more about perspective, about what Doctorow calls a "multiplicity of witness," about the different ways we set about constructing truth for ourselves - the most obvious of which is in the creation and manipulation of narratives, like novels. There's something a little (ok, a lot) egotistical about this kind of project, the self-conscious invocation of the novelist's project within the novel. It's not overbearing, but it leaves a certain note in the air, or a smudge, somehow. That's why I say that this book requires more thinking-time. I'll enjoy going back over the book in my mind and discovering the structural underpinnings of McEwan's main theme, in large part because I love to write and to think about writing. At the same time, something about it feels a little smug and self-absorbed, a little self-congratulatory.

Nevertheless, it's an absorbing and beautiful book. I got about 100 pages into it last summer, and then picked it up again today and read the whole thing, cover to cover. It was like it was stuck to my fingers; I could hardly bring myself to put it down, even when I wasn't actually reading it. And can I just say? After so many years of reading and writing about books 50+ hours a week, I am so happy that I haven't lost the capacity to get drawn in that way. And then, of course, to rush off and write about it. If I was the kind of person who said LOL when I wasn't actually laughing out loud*, I would say it here. Do you know how hard it was for me to even type that? I am tempted to erase it, but I won't. Yet. Ok, maybe. No, not yet. Ok, to bed.

*or at all. Who says it at all. Because I don't. I need to tell you that, so you don't misunderstand me. Ok, now I'm really going to bed.