On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan

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Erbland, Kate (7 September 2017). " 'On Chesil Beach' Review: Ian McEwan Adaptation Stars Saoirse Ronan". IndieWire. Penske Business Media . Retrieved 10 September 2017.

On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory? ‘On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory?

Furthermore, Edward desperately wants to have sex (he’s refrained from masturbating – or “self pleasure,” as the euphemism goes – all week), while Florence, intimidated by having read a dry sex manual, is dreading it. But there’s something deeper at play in their inability to say what’s bothering them – and why. As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator This is a short, simple story about a newly married couple called Florence and Edward and how " You can ruin everything by not speaking up" In crucial respects, this novel should not be linked with his early fiction, for those novels were not only shorter than Atonement, they were colder, frequently darker and more sinister. There was almost a clinician’s precision in the bloodlessness of McEwan’s prose. By contrast, On Chesil Beach allows readers to achieve an empathy with both of its 22-year-old characters that perhaps they are incapable of achieving with each other. Their marriage is an accident that became an inevitability, as two people who have little idea how compatible they are do what young people did before the sexual revolution that the novel anticipates: When they reached a certain age, they married whomever they were dating. Svetlana Sterlin (14 October 2020). "On Chesil Beach could have been perfect with these 2 changes". Our Culture Mag . Retrieved 5 August 2021.

Does he even bother with an editor, or do his manuscripts sprout wings and fly independently to the publishing house, where they are lovingly pressed into clever books?

On Chesil Beach - Penguin Books UK

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem.So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan | Waterstones On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan | Waterstones

Ian McEwan's story exists exactly in that hinterland in British courtship between repression and licence, the Lawrence litigation and 'Love Me Do'. It is July of 1962 and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, he an ardent graduate historian, she the tremulous lead violinist in a string quartet with aspirations to Wigmore Hall, both 22, have just got married in Oxford. Their love story and their tragedy grows out of McEwan's opening sentence, which contains within its careful confines almost everything you need to know about what follows: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.' Reading this novel while observing the inexperienced love of two of my companions on this trip made it doubly moving, sweet and relevant. It also made it difficult and disconcerting when the two I furtively observed were my teenage daughter and her boyfriend. I filed away a lot of notes for future talks with my daughter about the importance of open communication in her relationships. It also further emphasized that our own discussions as mother and daughter are just as essential as I have believed them to be. It is clinical and understated from the start: “The wedding... had gone well” and the “weather... not perfect but entirely adequate” and continues in the bedroom with detailed descriptions of physical sensations of skin, muscle, and even individual hairs: “stroking... for more than one and a half minutes” (too precise). Jaremko-Greenwold, Anya (31 May 2018). " "On Chesil Beach" and What Is Expected of Women". FLOOD Magazine. Anthemic Agency . Retrieved 4 June 2018. They are more or less in love and they are getting married because it’s what you do. “This was still the era…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.”The woman suspects there is something wrong with her – she knew nothing about sex, just what she read in a how-to guide. She was terrified and repelled by all the talk of fluids and penetration. He’s anxious and fumbling. He mistakes her moans of disgust for signs of pleasure. In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit

On Chesil Beach - Wikipedia

McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach.

being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now." This deceptively light novella describes the events of Florence and Edward’s disastrous honeymoon night in 1962, interspersed with details of their childhoods and courtship to suggest how those influenced what happened.