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taliaissmart 's review for:
Nutshell
by Ian McEwan
DNF @ p.53
I'm torn on this one! I love McEwan's beautiful writing but I just can't get past how little this concept is working for me.
First of all, let me be clear: I love the original Hamlet. Both the character and the play as a whole. Shakespeare brilliantly combines righteousness, revenge, angst, and comic timing to produce a thoroughly fun and affecting work of literature. In McEwan's retelling, there's a disconnect. There are certain things I think McEwan does really well, like showing the narrator's conflicted feelings of love and resentment toward his mother. He writes Claude as the perfect punchable villain.
And yet the narrator (I'm just gonna go ahead and call him Hamlet 2) lacks the biting wit of the classic Shakespearean hero. Oh, he's clever. In fact, he's brilliant to the point of being obnoxious. And although Hamlet 1 has that same quality of self-congratulatory intelligence, he's also able to make fun of his situation even as it tears him apart mentally (or perhaps because he's coming apart at the seams and has nothing to lose). Maybe Hamlet 2 is just too sane. Something's missing.
The main problem I have with Nutshell, though, is not the dissatisfactory portrayal of one of my favorite characters. The flaw that I cannot forgive is McEwan's choice to implement the unique and original narrative device of a fetal protagonist only to then use that protagonist as a personal mouthpiece. The impression I got from Hamlet 2's frequent soliloquies is that McEwan wanted an excuse to talk about his views on current events and his taste in wine, but still wanted the product to be in fictional form. None of Hamlet 2's musings reveal much about his character--unless that character is a thinly veiled, supernaturally overdeveloped fetal version of the author. I just don't understand why McEwan would establish such a potentially interesting frame through which to tell this story if he wasn't going to treat Hamlet 2 as an actual baby. Why bother?
In short, I found the first fifty pages of this novel pretty insufferable and disappointing despite my love of the source material and McEwan's writing.
I'm torn on this one! I love McEwan's beautiful writing but I just can't get past how little this concept is working for me.
First of all, let me be clear: I love the original Hamlet. Both the character and the play as a whole. Shakespeare brilliantly combines righteousness, revenge, angst, and comic timing to produce a thoroughly fun and affecting work of literature. In McEwan's retelling, there's a disconnect. There are certain things I think McEwan does really well, like showing the narrator's conflicted feelings of love and resentment toward his mother. He writes Claude as the perfect punchable villain.
And yet the narrator (I'm just gonna go ahead and call him Hamlet 2) lacks the biting wit of the classic Shakespearean hero. Oh, he's clever. In fact, he's brilliant to the point of being obnoxious. And although Hamlet 1 has that same quality of self-congratulatory intelligence, he's also able to make fun of his situation even as it tears him apart mentally (or perhaps because he's coming apart at the seams and has nothing to lose). Maybe Hamlet 2 is just too sane. Something's missing.
The main problem I have with Nutshell, though, is not the dissatisfactory portrayal of one of my favorite characters. The flaw that I cannot forgive is McEwan's choice to implement the unique and original narrative device of a fetal protagonist only to then use that protagonist as a personal mouthpiece. The impression I got from Hamlet 2's frequent soliloquies is that McEwan wanted an excuse to talk about his views on current events and his taste in wine, but still wanted the product to be in fictional form. None of Hamlet 2's musings reveal much about his character--unless that character is a thinly veiled, supernaturally overdeveloped fetal version of the author. I just don't understand why McEwan would establish such a potentially interesting frame through which to tell this story if he wasn't going to treat Hamlet 2 as an actual baby. Why bother?
In short, I found the first fifty pages of this novel pretty insufferable and disappointing despite my love of the source material and McEwan's writing.