Yes, you're the only one.
The book by that name that won the Booker Prize? I'd always thought the Booker Prize was something of a joke, at least based on reading Angela Carter's and Doris Lessing's comments on it. Isn't McEwan...er, I dunno, pretentious isn't the right word....pseudo-profound, maybe? He's like some horrible fusion of Tom Wolfe with Peter Hoeg circa Borderliners.
Don't tease Labs, Frowner. Let him shiver in isolation.
I dug it. Although, yes, a lot of the more interesting meta-textual stuff in literature can be used by people who can't write a third act.
Novelists suffer from bad conscience.
Yeah, I went along with the end of Atonement, but this one seemed over the line.
Fuck your heterodox opinions!
Oh, right. I was getting them confused.
The end of Atonement was terrible, and obvious.
Gahh, I tried to read Atonement last spring, and couldn't make it through. I felt like he was trying to control every single detail of every single thing I might be imagining, and wanted to scream at him, Stop using so many adjectives!
I stand by my 4 -- but we had this conversation last night.
I loathed Atonement sufficiently that I was not moved to read Amsterdam.
That Saturday book was pretty terrible, too.
I didn't finish Atonement either.
I remember very little about Amsterdam except being irritated that I spent time reading it.
Validation! I only tried to read Atonement because so many people rave about it.
Fuck you people I respectfully disagree. Atonement was transcendent.
The Concrete Garden is like nothing else. Grippingly horrifying. I listened to it on tape. Can't really say whether it was any good or bad, but gave me hours of consistent, clenching gaaaahh.
THIS WOULD BE MORE EFFICIENT IF WE ALL TALKED ABOUT AMSTERDAM.
Wow, I wondered if I should read Atonement because it seemed to be thought well of. That certainly answers that question!
18: Which is just what one looks for in a novel. Me, I find that a visit to the abattoir does just about the same thing, and you can pick up half a pound of freshly-made sausage on your way out.
19: NO ONE'S READ IT AND YOUR POST ISN'T GOING TO CHANGE THAT.
19: OPINIONATED LABS is trying to get all prescriptivist on us again.
My implicit comment to Amsterdam is the same as rfts's 12.
The all-caps arms race has stalled out. Ogged, add blinking text as an html option so we can escalate some more.
I didn't know there was anyone else out there who didn't like Atonement. I no longer feel so alone.
I do not, however, like Paul Auster.
Austerlitz is my least favorite Sebald.
Australia is my least favorite antipode.
The Emigrants. The most subtle, and uses his word + image shtick less annoyingly than in some of his other books.
Seybold is my least favorite technical conference host.
Diebold is my least favorite manufacturer of evil voting machines.
29: Hooray! Why not? (To take all the fun and wit out of the thread, I will now ask a serious question)
What about Titanic? Anyone like that film? Boats are fun.
Why not?
Because I don't need demonstrations to enjoy narrative semiotics.
I have a similar question. If I generally get pissed off at the forced cleverness of both metatextual books and campus novels, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, am I an idiot?
18 gets it right.
I had a high school English class that included two strange novels of teen and preteen sexuality set in 1980s Britain - The Cement GArden and Graham Swift's Waterland. I liked them both. Then came I to looking for other books by those authors, and I find that those novels are supposed to be wildly unrepresentative of their work, so I'm stuck.
I'm surprised people have such strong opinions about Amsterdam. I found it helpful and easy to use.
Sure, the plot was nonexistent, but I don't think you should hold that against it.
And I'm not sure why you would bring up McEwan....
are we talking about the same book?
My mom just gave me a book called Photography after Sebald.
I like The Rings of Saturn because it has a higher Thomas Browne content than any of his other books that I've read, unless it doesn't.
The walking-tour conceit of Rings of Saturn maybe made it work best for me ... it's the one I give people when I'm trying to Sebald them.
I read McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers a while back, and it was a disturbing little book. But this is back when "disturbing" wasn't so cliched.
(Will people who omit accents in foreign words when writing blog comments be up against the wall when the revolution come, or will they be doing the shooting? Because I really need to know.)
I really liked Atonement. Saturday I found embarrassingly awful.
For no particular reason I have memorized the first line of Die Ringe des Saturn.
43, 44 -- I'm with IA on this. I liked Atonement, hated Saturday. Comfort of Strangers was also made into a very good movie, including the best performance from Christopher Walken that I have ever seen. Oh, and Enduring Love has one of the most memorable opening chapters you will ever read.
But this makes me realize that I've never read Amsterdam.
Didn't miss anything; It's shit with its lazy stereotype of the Netherlands as a country in which it's possible to get somebody legally euthanised in an afternoon. And this is supposed to be one of the best contemporary British writers?
48: Yes, when I'm passing through the Netherlands and need to euthanize someone, I always go in on swing shift (but not on a Friday, of course. )