My summer obsession

Saturday by Ian Mc Ewan

Glenda J.

The departure of hell from its mere impossibility can take even longer than the following
factors: the popular diffusion of the work of Freud; the weakening of the enigmas of the
vanguard caused by their increasingly docile epigones; the successful dressing of the text by
the explanatory currents of high critical modernity: from new criticism to total structuralism.
Thats the Ulysses from Joyce.

Joyce's Ulysses is published when the author turns forty in 1922. Immediately the reading
public begins to consume texts difficult to read and difficult to publish.

Literature receives the attack of several schools of thought after this publication, with the
intention of making it flourish, to revitalize it. Thanks to these processes Ulysses has ceased
to be an irremovable work, a collection of disguised literary references. The nucleus of its
creation survives to the novelty of its procedures: the epiphany of the ordinary as the erotic
fibre of the good life.

Saturday of Ian McEwan tells what on February 15, 2003 - the day of the great protest
against the invasion of Iraq - happens to the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne that day. In the
background, with much more power than the city or the protests, his family appears: the
lawyer wife who works for a newspaper, the daughter who studies a doctorate in France
and, in the shadow of the teachings of her father-in-law poet, stands for Publish your first
book; The son who plays blues, the mother plunged into the mists of Alzheimer's. The
Perowne as a group show the profile that defines the characters of the best McEwan: they
are all handsome, their intelligence is the result of academic life and good family, they are
successful in all aspects of life and, above all, they are deeply good people.

In fact, the narrative of the novel - as in Amsterdam or Atonement - forces its characters to
leave for an instant the ease of their lives to prove the root of their ethical temper. Not only
in the confrontation of the hall that slides as an acceptable subject in the pauses of the
intense work of those who succeed - but in a radical way, affecting the very possibility of
their goodness, their generosity, their loves.

Dr. Perowne's path, which begins when he awakens at dawn and sees a plane with a burning
engine, is bordering the routine of marital sex and a squash game with a colleague of the
hospital, the exceptionality of the largest public demonstration in history Of Britain and the
slightest misfortune of a clash that seems without major consequences to culminate in the
moment in which an expected family reunion turns into a nightmare .. The man with whom
collided Perowne has entered his house and puts a knife in on his wifes neck. The threat of
Saturday is not a suicide plane, but a crack in the insides. The placidity of the twenty-first
century and its "expansive circle of morality" have a high price.
The climax is as exciting as it is obvious, and shows the lesson that McEwan decided not to
rake from Joyce. From Atonement, the author had shown that his powers as narrator are the
most acute and are among the most extensive of the English language: he is able to narrate
a neurosurgery with the same fascinating balance between precision and compassion with
which he gives life to the mere act of going to the fishmonger. Thus, although the
smoothness of his prose does not suffer when Perowne's ability overcomes his aggressor and
then save him from death crystallizes, this extraordinary moment is far less fascinating than
the sum of its slight causes.

Perhaps McEwan is right and the moment of ethical vigour seems to find even the most
fortunate event as necessary to preserve the daily life and its pleasures. Saturday is a
narrative and highly joyful reflection on the possibilities and prices of our bounded freedom,
and on the possible happiness under the new circumstances of its fatality as an economic
and educational product, as much as biological and political.

McEwan's characters naturally expelled towards the simple and good life and carried by the
harmony of the bourgeois way of life, concentrate a predominant narrative: absolute
predictability.

Saturday's characters represent a stream of consciousness - honouring Joyce-with dazzling

sentences and British tenacity.