[ book tip by Tunde Eugenia Haulik ] Saturday is a novel about time. Time and its fragmentations, time and its relation to human lives and relationships, timing that influences human fate, the relativity of it, its elusiveness, and cruelty. This is a novel that begins Saturday at dawn, and ends with Saturday night. A life story: hundreds of important, ridiculous, sad and unkind thoughts pass through the mind of Henry Perowne. McEwan slices time up with the precision of a neuron surgeon, exactly the profession of the protagonist, Henry.

The trajectory of a ball or the descent of an airplane in flames takes up as much narrative time as the fast-moving, sometimes violent scenes do. McEwan frames his story into the 24 hours of a Saturday, a Saturday like any other, yet a day that profoundly changes how Henry Perowne relates to the world around him. His worldview is shaken; his values and convictions are put under scrutiny and are revaluated.
McEwan poses very important questions about how we live our lives, how we love those that we love and take for granted.

It is a slow novel; it leaves time to contemplate to join Henry in his stream of consciousness. McEwan rewrites the Modernist tradition of the stream of consciousness novels by juxtaposing fast and unsettling events with the slow and constant flow of Henry's thoughts: a clash between a human being's inner world and outer reality.

It is also a great book about contemporary London and its everyday scenes. A homage to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

[ book info ] McEwan, Ian: Saturday. (original language: English) Vintage, London, 2006 . ISBN: 0099469685.