Saturday

by Ian McEwan
Saturday
book data
7,921 ratings, 3.54 average rating, 1,209 reviews (more data...)
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published
April 11th 2006 (first published 2005) by Anchor

binding
Paperback, 304 pages

characters

setting
The United Kingdom

literary awards
2005 Booker Prize Longlist

isbn
1400076196    (isbn13: 9781400076192)

description
In his triumphant new novel, Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement, follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually ...more




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John Brooks
11/14/07
John Brooks rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in August, 2006
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
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Philip
01/16/08
Philip rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Read in January, 2008
recommended to Philip by: My friend Mark, but I don't hold it against him.
recommends it for: no one
Many of my friends are unaware of my fondess of Rodeo Sports. (This is, I promise, a review of SATURDAY. Just go with me for a moment.) But it's true, perhaps it's my childhood in the American Southwest, or maybe some remnant love of the game seeping into my ancestral subconcious through my grandfather and namesake, the New Mexican sports announcer. Or maybe, I just like the look of those cowboys all squeezed into their denims and chaps.

For whatever reason--and PETA be damned--I ...more
Like this review?   yes   (9 people liked it)
  12 comments

Rose
07/30/08
Rose rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: 1001-books, read-in-2008
Read in August, 2008
recommends it for: doctors, determinists, naturalists, those interested in the human brain
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
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Marigold
04/28/08
Marigold rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2008
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 succ...more
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Siobhan
04/17/08
Siobhan added it

bookshelves: bad-books
Read in January, 2006
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Lori
09/12/07
Lori rated it: 1 of 5 stars

bookshelves: fiction
recommends it for: people who have trouble falling alseep
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
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Bonnie
08/14/08
Bonnie rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: recommended, reviewed-books
Read in October, 2006
Enjoyed this much more than Atonement!
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Lobstergirl
bookshelves: to-be-burned
Read in September, 2008
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
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Jim
03/16/08
Jim rated it: 2 of 5 stars (review of isbn 0385511809)

bookshelves: this-sceptred-isle
Read in March, 2008
recommends it for: Someone who already likes McEwan. Someone new to the author should choose something else.
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
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Howard
03/04/08
Howard rated it: 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Elizabeth
08/06/07
Elizabeth rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in November, 2007
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
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  2 comments

Evan
07/30/07
Evan rated it: 1 of 5 stars

Read in July, 2007
recommends it for: no one
I have to admire McEwan's devotion to his subject matter. the details he employs to help his brain surgeon appear real are great. but the novel is a mess from start to finish otherwise.

Even though the action of the novel takes place in a day, much of the narrative exists outside of the day, recounting the history of the character. The POV is limited 3rd person, except for a mistake about 1/3 of the way in where 1 paragraph jumps into the wife's POV (an argument could be made that it...more
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Reid
12/22/08
Reid rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Read in December, 2008
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
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Nikki
06/10/08
Nikki rated it: 2 of 5 stars

bookshelves: general-misc, literature
Read in June, 2008
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
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Nikki
06/06/08
Nikki rated it: 2 of 5 stars (review of isbn 0385511809)

bookshelves: 1001-books
Read in June, 2008
recommended to Nikki by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
recommends it for: Insomniacs
Huh? Did I miss something? I must have missed something because I don't get why this book is supposedly one I must read before I die. Mr. McEwan is obviously a fine writer; there is a sense of poetry to his prose, a lulling, sleep-inducing, mind-numbing sense of poetry, but a sense of poetry nonetheless. Regardless of Mr. McEwan's talent as a writer, as a novelist, at least in this particular novel, he fails to engage. Much like in Atonement, I feel like I get what he is trying to do litera...more
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Beth
02/18/08
Beth rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2008
recommends it for: If you are a deeper thinker than I, maybe you can explain it to me.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Anuar Kassim
Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2008
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Lain
12/02/07
Lain rated it: 5 of 5 stars

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
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Jonathan
Read in December, 2007
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
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Naomi
05/27/07
Naomi rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in January, 2007
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
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Saturday (Hardcover)
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Saturday (Hardcover)
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Saturday (Gebundene Ausgabe)







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