3 black dogs

"Each scene in Black Dogs is brilliantly lit, and has a characteristically strange fascination as Ian McEwan juxtaposes 'huge and tiny currents' to show the ways in which individuals react to history." The New York Review of Books Do you agree with this quote?

Black Dogs is set in Berlin, Poland, France. Based around the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel travels back in time to Europe after World War II. Huge political events intervene to affect the lives of one family. Do you think this combination of the historical, philosophical and the personal works well together in the novel?

June and Bernard loved each other, but couldn't live a life together. June admits this and ponders how millions of people can be expected to get along when two people can't. Does this novel ultimately present a bleak view of life?

Biblioteca Camp de l’Arpa-Caterina Albert

Black Dogs Ian MacEwan Data comentari: 12 de gener 2017 Hora: 19h

IAN MACEWAN Ian MacEwan was born in Hampshire, Great Britain, on 21 June 1948, He spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father, a major in the army, was posted. His family returned to England in 1960 and he was educated at Woolverstone Hall School, the University of Sussex, and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson's pioneering creative writing course.

His first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity. His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), his first novels, were both adapted into films and the somewhat menacing nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre". These were followed

by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the Prix Fémina Etranger; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992).

Enduring Love (1997) describes the relationship between a science writer and a stalker and was made into a successful film in 2004. In 1998, he won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his novella Amsterdam. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received great acclaim and Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002.

It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 2007, the critically acclaimed film Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide.

His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. Solar, a semi-humorous novel about a scientist who hopes to save the planet from the threat of climate change, was published in 2010. The film version of McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth, made by the same company that adapted ‘Atonement’, is currently being made.

McEwan was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2008 he was named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year and The Times included him in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem Prize.

BLACK DOGS Black Dogs is set in France and Poland in the period following the Nazi era in Europe but it also reflects on how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society. On one level, the novel is a fictional family memoir about love, faith and history, and the complex relationship between a husband and wife whose lives and beliefs epitomize the struggle between political engagement and a private search for ultimate meaning. The narrator is preparing the memoirs of his dying mother-inlaw and is especially interested in the details of a terrifying encounter with black dogs more than 40 years ago, which changed the direction of her life and that of her husband and children. But the book is also a meditation on Europe's past and future, with the fear, evil, irrationality and threatening mood of the period epitomized by the terrifying ‘Black Dogs’ of the book’s title.

As critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times: ‘Ian MacEwan’s narratives are small and focused, but resonate far into the night’.