Details:
- author: Ian McEwan
- full title: Lessons
- narrator: Simon McBurney
- genre: literary fiction
- topics: #lifestory, #family
- publisher: Recorded Books
- publish date: 13.09.2022
- timing: 17.33.00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙💙
- narration: 💙💙💙💙💙
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| Goodreads |
My Thoughts:
In Lessons, Ian McEwan tells the life story of Roland Baines. Eleven-year-old Roland was sent to boarding school. He has piano lessons with a strict teacher, Miriam Cornell, whom he will remember for the rest of his life. Later, when he marries Alisa, she soon leaves him alone with their infant son.
Alisa is later a successful novelist. It seems she got there because she abandoned her family. Ronald is a talented pianist, poet, and even a tennis teacher. But he was never really successful at any of those things because he struggled as a single parent. One question lingers in the air. Can you achieve success if you have children or a family?
This novel is quite an ambitious work. It starts pretty slowly. Further on, there is really a lot of material, events, people, and details. And this could get confusing, especially at the beginning. But everything connects towards the end.
The title refers to piano lessons, but this novel can also be a brief history lesson. We can read about quite some global events from the past, for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chernobyl radiation in the 80s, the Cuban missile crisis, recent pandemics, and others. Some of those global events affected and changed the lives of the characters.
Overall, this novel is an impressive achievement by Ian McEwan, but unfortunately, it’s not a book that is very readable. It’s pretty slow, and sometimes you would really need it to move faster. I would say that for many readers, it will be overwhelming. I felt it too. That it is too broad, and there are too many events captured in this novel.
I had a copy of ebook and audiobook. Both formats are very good. For those who will find this novel too long and overwhelming, an audiobook format is definetly better choice. It is easier to get through.
About the Author:
Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.
