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March 25, 2005

OUR LAST McEWAN LINK. PROMISE.

We're mostly done linking to Saturday coverage, but this one is worth checking out.  Writing for The Nation, Lee Siegel has a long and thoughtful take on Saturday, giving it not just the Nation-lefty treatment but also placing it in the context of McEwan's previous work.  (We agree with her assessment of Atonement as McEwan's "pièce de résistance.")

Saturday is a commentary on how politics gets invented from the stuff of emotion the way mind is created out of the brain. Read (and written) in the light of events following the Iraq invasion, this carefully ambiguous tale about the "brightly wrought illusion" of unstable selves amounts to a cool, temperate, humane protest against belligerent certainty. Indeed, ambiguity is inscribed in the novel's very title. Saturday is the holiest day of the week for some people and just an ordinary day for others, a crucial discrepancy in a book haunted by religious conflict.

Posted by TEV at 12:20 AM |

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A really interesting discussion of Saturday (so much more satisfying than the other reviews I've read). Thanks for linking that. But, by the by, Lee's a he:

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/archives20050101.shtml#94032

Posted by: BT | March 28, 2005 at 10:26 AM

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