There are many new features in the latest novel of Ian McEwan (Aldershot, United Kingdom, 1948), one of the rare writers who has won the admiration of both readers and critics. The McAcabro label that accompanied him in his early forays into fiction is far away, and he himself has long become one of the most classic British novelists.
Lessons (Spanish and Catalan Anagrama) is one of his most comprehensive works, but above all it is the work in which he includes the most autobiographical material, to the point that much of what happened to his protagonist, Roland Baines, can be described. McEwan, a jazz pianist and journalist in his seventies, was confused by his life. So, the son of a soldier who lived in Libya until the age of 11, was educated in a strict boarding school, was unhappy, and after a conflictual separation, was given custody of his children to his children when he turned fifty. She discovered that her mother had given her up for adoption to David by her lover and then second husband (and the author’s father), while she was married to the first person to die in the Normandy landings. .
“I’ve been asked many times when I’m going to write my memoirs, and in a way that’s it too, because so much of my family life is there,” McEwan explains via video conference from his country home two hours from London. My mother placed an ad in the newspaper, saying she would give her six-month-old baby to someone else, and handed him over to the family who answered her at the train station. It’s a war story, with many babies being born in strange circumstances at the time and discovering their true stories years later. My novel is about how historical events, especially wars, leave their mark on our lives and reveal various joys and shadows. This is happening in Ukraine right now; The conflict changed the lives of many children. The novel, unlike a non-fiction work, allows me to delve into the most intimate emotions.
tough advice
Like his protagonist, McEwan found himself in the midst of a more pronounced seclusion than he usually practiced when writing his novels. I didn’t have to travel, promote, or attend literary festivals. He devoted himself to writing 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and began reenacting important events in his life that taught him lessons about loss or moments of fulfillment. The result is a novel that serves as a balance, a vital journey. «If you affirm that you have learned something at the age of 75, you run the risk of falling into cliché when writing this, and no young person will be of any use to anything I say on this subject. So the only way to approach this is to tell a life story, and that’s what I did. This novel is the only recommendation I can give.
There are two main moments in the novel; Both star women who do not behave as traditionally expected of them. This is the case of a 25-year-old piano teacher who was abusive when Baynes was just 14, and his first wife, a German woman who made the brutal decision to leave her husband of six years. His six-month-old son pursued his literary career independently, which made him one of the most respected writers in his country.
These two founding traumas lead the character’s life to be evoked by historical moments that have marked him, from the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of British imperialism, which McEwan anxiously experienced in Libya when he was 8 years old, to Brexit, the pandemic or epidemic. The attack on the Capitol. It is impossible not to think that McEwan is taking stock of a life filled with the weight of years and asking himself important questions. Still, he lists the responsibilities as follows: “I asked myself to what extent we decide our options in life, to what extent luck intervenes. If your mom and dad had made love five seconds later, you would be different. “Even in the society you grew up in, you are not the only one who chooses your friends.”
Moreover, he adds: “Memory is a wonderful tool, but it is also a tricky one. Lately, I’ve been observing that moments from my childhood come up with a vividness that I didn’t know even when I was 30, and sometimes I can’t remember what happened three years ago. They can deepen the fictions better with all these chiaroscuros.
In some of the author’s most famous novels, The Traveler’s Pleasure, Redemption, and Chesil Beach, a powerful moment of erotic desire determines the fate of its characters. The same situation occurs again in Lessons, which leads the author to reflect on the distrust that has accompanied the issue of male desire in public debates in recent years. “Two or three years ago a young novelist told me that he no longer dared to write about this subject, and I was horrified because it is an important subject.”