The book Nutshell by Ian McEwan – How does an unborn child perceive the world?
What can an unborn child be thinking of? How does it perceive the world? You can find out if you read the excellent book Nutshell, in which the actual plot is not as important as the style of writing.
Don’t look for the narrator among the living!
The narrator in this story is the unborn child, which experiences everything that is happening in the world outside while still in its mother’s womb. It hears conversations, enjoys deluxe wines drunk by his mother, and processes news it listens to and thanks to which it basically knows the world it will be born into. Does it want to be born? Is it afraid? Yes, it knows that it will lose the ground beneath its feet when it is born. And what is more it becomes the unwilling witness to the plotting of a crime that is to be committed against its father, who its mother is cheating on which its uncle! No one would probably want to be born in a situation like this.
And how does the story end? We won’t tell you. But what we can reveal is that this is a very original and deluxe book, which is funny, entertaining and is worth contemplation. Don’t expect a complicated plot or a complicated concept. We certainly recommend it as pleasant reading on a journey or before going to sleep.
Ian McEwan
I am sure we don’t have to introduce this famous British writer, a knight of the Order of the British Empire. His probably most famous book is the Cement Garden, which has also been filmed. The plot tells of a four siblings, who bury their newly deceased mother in the cellar and pour cement over her and continue living in the house as if nothing happened, after their father dies. All this in order to avoid being sent to a children’s home. Two of them enter into an incestuous relationship and a third becomes a transvestite. He is called Ian Macabre due to this and other early works.
