Rating:  Summary: Brilliantly written but flawed Review: I can't understand why people are so critical of this book. The style is far superior to most modern fiction I have read. The descriptions are immediate and succinct, particularly the opening passage, which has a cinematic quality, but imparts more rich detail than film ever could.The book is by no means perfect; the main characters are flawed; the lack of understanding shown by Clarissa is not convincing, and Joe's reactions are sometimes not entirely credible. The plot is also weak in some areas; if Parry really was hanging around outside the flat and Clarissa failed to believe it, then why didn't he get her to look out of the window? Would the police really have treated Joe's account of the scene in the restaurant with so much contempt? Wouldn't they at least have brought Parry in for an ID parade? Despite this, the writing is so brilliant, and the psycology is so fascintating, that the book compensates for these flaws. Well worth a read.
Rating:  Summary: Here's an American who enjoyed the book. Review: (4 stars- 5 stars reserved for Conrad, Dreiser, Trollope, Cheever, Carver, Kerouac . . .) How life can change is a moment. The profound impact of a chance meeting and another becomes obsessed with you. The heroic struggle where the survivors are left feeling guilty for merely surviving. How some events and relationships pry into parts of life and bite and fester and irritate until we either face them our wait for them to conquer us. Read "Enduring Love" and then ask yourself how you would respond to similar prediciments. In fact ask yourself while reading the story. For the reviewer who didn't read many "chunks" of the book, I did likewise with your review.
Rating:  Summary: ENDURING LOVE nominated for AUDIE AWARD! Review: ENDURING LOVE has received an AUDIE nomination as "Best Abridged Fiction" audiobook of the year by the APA (Audio Publishers Association) in its annual AUDIE competition.
Rating:  Summary: Extraordinary and compelling Review: Intellectually this is the most satisfying contemporary novel I've come across. Plotwise the piece is not perfect, but the eloquence of the underlying theme more than makes up for the minor narrative blemishes. The book is bound to be controversial because it makes a forceful (though never heavy-handed) case for reason and logic in the face of the unpredictable and often profoundly dangerous and unfair vagaries of emotion. It gives a very compelling literary form to some of the thorny issues raised by our scientifically informed understanding of human nature. Very, very highly recommended.
Rating:  Summary: Plodding and over didactic Review: Parts of this book are very well done - certainly most of the first scene is. But overall this book is weak for two reasons. First, it simply spouts too much theory and scientific philosophy - all or most of which seems to have been culled from popular science books and magazines. It's fine, it's reasonable, but you can find better in the New Scientist or Scientific American. This goes for the main phenomenon of the book: the psychological complaint from which the Jed character suffers. Second, the style is tremendously bland, as if color and wit are somehow beneath this author. Overall, it's a plodding and unstylish read, with too much borrowed material. There are plenty of better novels around.
Rating:  Summary: twisted like a snake Review: I so enjoyed this book. After the initial two chapters, the ones that caught my breath, I fell into the story--eventually becoming like the narrator's wife, believing he was a complete crank. I had lots of evidence, all dutifully tallied in the margin. Boy, was I in for a surprise. I liked the faux scientific lingo of it all. And I loved the ending--in which I was left with so many theological questions. How can we love a God who will not answer back?
Rating:  Summary: His best book Review: From begining to end a treat to read. It may be disliked by our american friends but here in Britain we rate this book as a modern classic.
Rating:  Summary: Disappointing Review: I purchased this book with an air of expectation and indeed it started off very well. But the menace implied just didn't eventuate, and I must admit I skipped big chunks of the text. Overall I was very disappointed.
Rating:  Summary: Hot Air or Helium? The McEwan Balloon Review: "Enduring Love" opens with a chapter so crafty (and complete as a story), that the rest of the novel must inevitably disappoint, following a kind of thermodynamic law of literature. Chapters two through twenty four (plus appendices) comprise a very long epilogue, reversing McEwan's usual trick of making the first two-thirds of a book a prologue of red herrings, whopping you with a left-field climax irrelevant to the buildup. And the trick usually works. Joe Rose is a scientific journalist (orating with the suspect eloquence of a novelist with a stack of scientific journals on his writing desk) who, after stumbling onto ground zero of a ballooning tragedy, finds himself the victim of a stalker in subsequent chapters. After the revelatory effulgence of chapter one, chapter two, of rather less candle power, at least boasts the kind of grisly set piece that McEwan glories in: a corpse, in this case driven into the earth, feet-first, like a fence post: "The skeletal structure had collapsed internally to produce a head on a thickened stick." If you are a person of independent means, the book is worth buying for that sentence alone. If you are not, however, luckily lounging about on a cushion of unearned money, and must count your pennies instead, I'm afraid the book isn't worth it. Weak for resting the weight of its argument on a series of unlikely, yet pivotal (and television-grade) misunderstandings, the novel is further debilitated by evidence of a worrying trend, the post post-modern tic (shared famously by Martin Amis of late) of larding fiction with indigestible bits of "hard science", dithering on for long-winded and unilluminating passages that fall short of epiphany, yet manage to invoke the pimply faux authority of a school paper. If one wants to be filled with wonder for hard facts, rather than for brilliant fiction, one should better purchase a book by a scientist playing at being a writer, rather than the obverse, which is bound to be far less sincere. The book itself, like the punning gerund of its title, is not quite meaningfully clever.
Rating:  Summary: Too bad Parry didn't shoot Clarissa!! Review: I picked this book up in England last month, where it was #1 on the bestseller-list. I must say I was somewhat disappointed. Although it was beautifully written and a compelling read, it's hard to believe that, given their deep, trusting, soul-mate relationship, Clarissa would be so doubting of Joe's plight, and that she would show so little remorse when the truth came to light. Like some other reviewers, I found Joe to be a bit of a pompous intellectual.
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