====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
McEwan, once upon a time, was a good novelist. I think it is not just a coincidence that his novels following his conversion to Euston Manifesto politics are crappy. The latest involves philosophizing about global warming, which he appears to be concerned about, through the medium of a main character, a grossly overweight and disgusting physicist working on technological solutions. Go figure. Here's a snippet from Walter Kirn's review in today's NY Times: What makes “Solar” such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess. This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else. The tip-off is Beard, who’s endowed by his creator with precisely the vices — apathy, slothfulness, gluttony and hypocrisy — that afflict the society the book condemns, threatening to cook the human race in the heat-trapping gases released by its own arrogance. Because a fictional character can exhibit only so much awareness of his own thematic utility, Beard doesn’t notice any of this, merely regarding himself as a colorful eccentric. But readers will see him for what he is: a figure so stuffed with philosophical straw that he can barely simulate lifelike movement. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/books/review/Kirn-t.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
