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Epicurus.com - Amsterdam: A Novel
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Anchor
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385494243
ISBN: 0385494246
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1999-11-02
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 1999-11-02
Studio: Anchor
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Editorial Reviews:
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On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer; Vernon is editor of the quality broadsheet The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, foreign secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.
In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life.
In Amsterdam, a contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty, we have Ian McEwan at his wisest and most wickedly disarming. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious climax of a novel brimming with surprises.
Winner of the 1998 Booker Prize
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: POOR MOLLY
Comment: Not Ian's best story but worth the read and price of the book. His writing continues to be top-notch and his characterizations are superb and his prose and observations are highly literary. I feel that poor Molly is the main victim in the whole scenario. Also enjoyed the relationships between the journalists and the polticians, and others in the public sector. Enjoyable and masterfully written - I liked it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost, but not quite
Comment: Ian McEwan is an enigma. There is no question that he has highly developed literary skills, formidable powers of observation, eclectic life experience and the ability to undertake high-quality research. But some of his writing defies comprehension: ATONEMENT is a pretentious, precious and prolix mess despite subject matter of high interest to intelligent readers. It was the first book of his that I read, based on the clamorous approbation the book and film received. I did not enjoy it and gave it a low rating in my review for Amazon (I included in my review one nine-line sentence of his that rambled excruciatingly, as an example of his `skill').
So I read AMSTERDAM with an initial sense of caution, an unwillingness to be persuaded that he could write accessibly and interestingly, rather than displaying his knowledge and taste.
AMSTERDAM is 90% excellent, written with clarity and economy at a high level of literary skill (I have never liked or approved of modifying adverbs used before the verb being modified, but this is a minor criticism and many, many writers do it). So now I know that he can write well.
But . . . but . . . there is a crucial problem with AMSTERDAM that causes McEwan to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the last 10% of the book: a conclusion that fails Coleridge's key test, the `willing suspension of disbelief.' I simply could not accept the ending, at any reasonable level, and it ruined what had, up till then, been a highly enjoyable, witty and insightful work. Like many other reviewers, I was astounded to learn that McEwan won the Booker for this oeuvre.
Having read two of McEwan's books I would consider reading another but I regret that I cannot, realistically, join the throngs who consider him the Second Literary Coming.
Customer Rating:
Summary: enjoyable, but not McEwan's best
Comment: This book read like a short story, and perhaps should have been such. I enjoyed it as a fun, quick, dark comedy, but it's probably not something I'll return to. I'm actually a little surprised that it won the Booker Prize.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Cutting Your Nose Off to Spite your Face!
Comment: This is a little sneaker of a story. I've never read Ian McEwan's work and it took a couple of chapters to get into the rhythm of the story, but it was worth it. I had no idea what to expect when I started, but it certainly wasn't what I received! In a word, IT WAS GREAT! Read this book before plotting revenge on an ex-friend or lover and remember well the old stand-by, "What goes around, comes around!"
Customer Rating:
Summary: classic tragedy: the structure mirrors the tale
Comment: This is not a comic novel, though certainly witty; nor by any means is it well characterized as a "clever romp." There is no mystery, no real surprise, and the end is entirely in the beginning. Perhaps in no other fine recent English-language fiction is this so much the case. We're given a remarkably successful modern-dress tragedy of hubris and its reward. No strongly empathetic characters capture our sympathy or distract us from the theme; indeed the one character (Molly) who might turn the novel away from its inexorable descent is presented only posthumously, and then only in the impressions of fatally flawed protagonists Vernon and Clive. I'm certainly reminded of Lawrence, especially "Women in Love", which is a thorny read in much the same way. For all its brevity and clarity, this is a very difficult novel, and truly unique. The aficionados of certain conventional patterns in fiction (genre crime story, sentimental novel, and such) will probably dislike it. I suspect strongly that the novel's structure is intended to mirror the protagonist Clive's "Millenium Symphony", even including the too-predictable conclusion that seems to be missing that last bang-up variation sure to make it a "success". That's brave novelistic technique indeed, even for a "novel of ideas." "Amsterdam" is brilliant but distancing: a work to respect, not really to love. I'd recommend it to careful readers who seek something quite unlike the usual good read.
There are some truly ridiculous reviews here. The one which takes McEwan to task for misrepresenting Dutch law and medicine seems to have gained overwhelming approval. Would that reviewer expect an accurate and sympathetic portrayal of Athenian society from Euripides? Would he expect to learn English political history from the "histories" of Shakespeare?
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