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Nov 05, 2011

Shovelmonkey1 rated it:

Hello everybody,
I'm Henry Perowne and welcome to a day in my life... a Saturday to be precise. I'm a good natured sort of chap, if I were famous I'd probably be saddled with the tag of "thinking women's crumpet", but personally I take myself much to seriously to acknowledge that kind of thing. I'm a successful neurosurgeon who enjoys long, descriptive and adjective laden games of squash with my erudite and debonair colleagues. Today, for once in my incredibly lucky and wealthy li More...

3 comments like (34 people liked it)

Nov 14, 2007

John rated it:

I would not qualify "Saturday" as McEwan's best work. I think the argument begins and ends with "Atonement" in terms of sheer literary achievement.

But "Saturday" is McEwan's most immediate work; the one that feels most like a significant and honest byproduct of both the time and place from which it emerged and the man from whose mind materialized. To be clear, I adore "Atonement" and, for all its heart-wrenching and visceral exploration of ob More...

3 comments like (31 people liked it)

Aug 21, 2011

Manny rated it:

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26 comments like (18 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2011

Paul rated it:

*******Note : SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!! This review is for people who have read Saturday or people who will never read Saturday!********

Reading Saturday is like running a weird obstacle race. At first it’s all manicured lawns and rhododendrons, and then it’s hideous piles of donkey droppings, and that’s how it goes – daffodils, donkey droppings, vistas of beauty, donkey droppings. And I’m not sure that was the intended effect. What a weird novel – here we have one of the stupid More...

9 comments like (8 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2008

Rose rated it:

No spoilers here.

This book explores the events of Henry Perowne's Saturday, which I can kind of see as a metaphor for a person's life. You start out with nothing but potential, events happen, and each day ends with its own sort of oblivion - sleep.

As with Atonement, McEwan's prose in this book was simply delicious. At the end of this review are some of my favorite passages that I just needed to type out for my own memory's sake.

But I also think that readi More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

This is a "day in the life" kind of novel: the story of a single Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, a middle-aged London neurosurgeon. The day is both ordinary and extraordinary; we get a lot of rather mundane detail about Henry, his family, and his life. Yet the day is significant, not only because of the explosive encounter between Henry and a complete stranger, but because it's set in February 2003, on the day of a massive anti-war protest. The impending Iraq war is thus a su More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lori rated it:

Ok. I usually force myself to finish each novel I start. (with the two exceptions so far being Catch 22 and Atlas Shrugged).. I do this (1) to at least get my moneys worth, and (2) because I know somewhere in there, there must be a part worth waiting for.

This book fell into the (2) catagory. It was an impossible bore throughout most of the novel, with one interesting fight in an alley due to a fender bender.... until you hit the last 50 pages. For me, hitting those last chapters was More...

2 comments like (13 people liked it)

Apr 28, 2008

Marigold rated it:

I loved this book! This is not a book for you if you’re looking for entertainment only, or light reading. This is a book full of layers, metaphors, parallels, & issues to think about. The thing that most reached out & grabbed me was the idea of a man going about his daily life (whether you find his daily life mundane or overly privileged or whatever), when unexpected events occur & change everything. That’s always sort of a scary theme for me! On the surface it’s the story of Henry, a successful More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 13, 2009

Siobhan added it

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2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2008

Bonnie rated it:

Enjoyed this much more than Atonement!

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 27, 2009

Lobstergirl rated it:

Godawful.

"Saturday" was ponderous, labored, rhetorically thick and therefore perhaps to my mind pretentious, or do I mean pompous? It was like a big bloated beer gut, but a beer gut bloated - indeed, rendered distended, turgid, and tumescent - by the finest chardonnays, Gewurztraminers, and Sauvignon Blancs, sipped (quaffed?) while listening to Bach Partitas. It was bereft of conciseness, brevity, midgetude, terseness, laconism, abbreviation, and pith, its rather meaningles More...

8 comments like (34 people liked it)

Apr 03, 2008

Jim rated it:

I think McEwan took the approach James Joyce used in Ulysses, that is, to detail the events of a day, in a narrative driven by a character's thoughts. Ulysses is a stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Saturday isn't in that league. (It's probably unfair to compare a novelist with James Joyce, but literary publicists do it all the time. McEwan has received plenty of positive comparisons with the likes of Dickens and Hardy, even Shakespeare.)

There is some beautiful writing here, and t More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 04, 2008

Howard rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 19, 2010

Maciek rated it:

Short version: GOD IT WAS BORING.

Long version: You know the anecdote that a succesful novelist could publish his shopping list and people would buy it? That's the case with Saturday. A chronicle of 24 hours from the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, the novel is full of his ruminations, reminiscences, all described in painful, tedious detail. McEwan fails to build an actual plot; instead you'll be sure to hear every single event, no matter how irrelevant and drawn out (there's an 1 More...

6 comments like (11 people liked it)

Nov 15, 2011

Esteban rated it:

"...it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained."

Literature still has something to say to science.

Against the backdrop of the pending invasion of Iraq, a very rational and orderly neurosurgeon is menaced by a very irrational hooligan. Poetry comes to the rescue.

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Amanda rated it:

I took this book out of desperation. There seems to be so little good fiction out there at the moment. I wish I hadn’t. I began to hope that Saturday would become Sunday very quickly as I started to read.

I think McEwan gets by on his literary accolades alone. Apparently he won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. He has also written 8 other novels. I would dare another publisher to take him on under a pseudonym – and to succeed.

McEwan, as always, dwells on the damage and darkness of life. More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 17, 2010

Julie rated it:

This is the most introspective of McEwan's novels. It's a 24-hour period in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. What sets out to be a sleepy Saturday full of errands (a squash game, a trip to the grocer, a visit with his mother) turns into the inner dialogue of a man coping with unsettling turns of events.

This is definitely a post-Nine Eleven narrative, comprised of Henry's thoughts about the political climate and observations of the anti-war rallies taking place. Other underlyi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 22, 2008

Reid rated it:

Atonement was a great novel, a pretty good movie as well. But Saturday is tighter, a more personal novel, more focused and perhaps more human. I originally got interested in this book as it was compared to Proust and I wanted to get the gist without slogging through thousands of pages to get that done. The action is almost entirely in Perowne's head, which really gave me a glimpse into McEwan himself. I suppose I think it's impossible to get outside one's own thoughts, I think that might be More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 12, 2008

Nikki rated it:

Like my (upcoming) review of Perdido Street Station, this was written as I went along. My mum told me to read this book just so that I've read something of McEwan's work, to get an idea of the East Anglia style -- I was once planning to do the same writing course.

The first ten pages bored me. Blah, blah, blah, mostly medical procedure, a doctor's life is so busy, blahblahblah -- a scenario I know well as a doctor's daughter, that doesn't really seem to merit ten pages to me. It got o More...

10 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 23, 2008

Beth rated it:

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0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2008

Anuar rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 02, 2007

Lain rated it:

Rare is the author who can write a compelling story in clear prose. Rarer still is the author who can create fine and distinct layers of meaning while maintaining that clear narrative. Ian McEwan is one of those authors.

In the tradition of "Mrs. Dalloway," "Saturday" traces the ordinary activities of an ordinary man, neurologist Henry Preowne. Against the backdrop of a huge anti-war march in London, Henry goes about his daily activities -- a squash game, checking More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 15, 2007

Jonathan rated it:

SPOILER ALERT

Something about this beautifully written book really spoke to me. The book's protagonist, British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, is like many of us in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks in sensing that his life, even if personally untouched by terrorism, would never be the same again. As his nation prepares to go to war in Iraq, Henry can't escape the feeling that our already limited ability as humans to control our own destinies has been diminished. (A sentiment that Mc More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 28, 2007

Naomi rated it:

Saturday sets out to overcome the banal fact that the details of every individual's daily work, the minutiae of their job, are virtually impenetrable to anyone else - spouse, child, best-friend or co-worker. Still more difficult to convey is the interior monologue that goes with work, the thoughts and emotions that are never expressed. In an interesting bid to overcome this incommunicability McEwan lays out before us a day in Henry's life. There is certainly an imaginative spark in the impulse, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 08, 2007

Keith rated it:

McEwan was lauded for supposedly having his finger on the pulse of the post-9/11 nation with Saturday. Note my use of the word "supposedly."

It's a day-in-the-life story where that day happens to be post-9/11 (I think a few years removed, so it's not like this is a day-after story). Right from the start he watches a plane land that looks like it's on fire and obviously that will call up some bad memories. But the story's association with the post-9/11 world is very tangentia More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Apr 29, 2008

Avital rated it:

This book seems more realistic than most fiction books, since it enters into an abundance of every-day details. One Saturday in the life of a neurosurgeon, the main character, is not only full of potentially disastrous happenings, but it also spreads toward the past and the future through memories and plans. Dr. Perowne makes many observations about politics, war and illness. He doesn’t commit himself to a strong opinion, since he sees various facets in every issue, including the war in Iraq. I More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 22, 2011

Alan rated it:

as usual expertly written - so why 2 stars? Because it is stupidly unbelievable - the hero is not only a great brain surgeon but an excellent squash player and a good cook, with a beautiful wife who loves him, a son who is a marvellous bass player (tutored by Jack Bruce!), and a daughter who is not only a good poet (and just out of her teenage years), but an award winning one too. The parents too are distinguished. There are maybe families like this around but I've never met them or known anyone More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 14, 2008

Gerald rated it:

This book drew me in. His writing has style and voice, and to me that's almost more important than story.

The main character is a brain surgeon and I was fascinated by the descriptions in the operating theater. And I usually have an aversion to those kinds of descriptions. But, wow, peeling a woman's face off her skull and then going in through the nose? Don't try that at home.

Now, here's my dilemma with this book. A little more than halfway through, the story spirals into More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 13, 2011

Nicola rated it:

I actually really liked this one at the start and thought I'd be giving it at least 4 stars. It quickly got old and boring, though. The writing is nice to read for about fifty pages but after that it feels stiff and is quite a chore get through. Henry is and all right character but far too perfect, just like his family and relationship and career. It was just a bit bland and unlikable. Would I be interested in reading more of McEwan's work? Definitely; he can certainly write, this story just did More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 18, 2008

jeremy rated it:

there is no doubt that mcewan is a talented, careful writer. after completing one of his novels, however, the tell-tale cathartic surge seems notably absent. the conflicting moralities mcewan often urges us to explore are compelling enough, but there is not the fulfilling, satiating effect one finds elsewhere. the elements of well-written literature are all present, yet somehow the parts never equal a sum. there is a reservation, detachment, or imposed distance to his writing that leaves i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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