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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780307386175
ISBN number: 0307386171
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: June 10, 2008
Publishing house: Anchor
Release Date: June 10, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 2911
Studio: Anchor
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Product Description:
In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties weighs over them. And unbeknownst to both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates in On Chesil Beach a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
Amazon.com Review:
Such is Ian McEwan's genius that, despite rambling nature walks and the naming of birds, his subject matter remains hermetically sealed in the hearts of two people.
It is 1962 when Edward and Florence, 23 and 22 respectively, marry and repair to a hotel on the Dorset coast for their honeymoon. They are both virgins, both apprehensive about what's subsequent and in Florence's case, utterly and blindly terrified and repelled by the little she knows. Through a tense dinner in their room, because Florence has decided that the weather is not fine enough to dine on the terrace, they are attended by two local boys acting as waiters. The cameo appearances of the boys and Edward and Florence's parents and siblings serve only to underline the emotional isolation of the two principals. Florence says of herself: '...she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires....'
They are on the cusp of a rather ordinary marital undertaking in differing states of readiness, willingness and ardor. McEwan says: 'Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness.' Edward, having denied himself even the release of self-pleasuring for a week, in order to be tip-top for Florence, is mentally pawing the ground. His sensitivity keeps him from being obvious, but he is getting anxious. Florence, on the other hand, knows that she is not capable of the kind of arousal that will make any of this easy. She has held Edward off for a year, and now the reckoning is upon her.
McEwan is the master of the defining moment, that place and time when, once it has taken place, nothing will ever be the same after it. It does not go well and Florence flees the room. 'As she understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other.' Edward eventually follows her and they have a poignant and painful conversation where accusations are made, ugly things are said and roads are taken from which, in the case of these two, the way back cannot be found. Late in Edward's life he realizes: 'Love and patience--if only he had them both at once--would surely have seen them both through.' This beautifully told sad story could have been conceived and written only by Ian McEwan. --Valerie Ryan
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Rated by buyers 
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With meticulous precision, Ian McEwan examines the wedding night of an innocent couple, who marry in 1962 and spend their very first night alone together at a hotel on Chesil Beach. In always elegant prose, McEwan displays his great gift for describing the particular and making it universal. In this case, he turns his jeweler's eye on the misunderstandings between a young man and young woman, deeply in love and deeply inhibited. Recommended for anyone who has ever loved or hoped to love.
Rated by buyers 
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This book would have made a good short story. The plot was too weak
and too drawn out for a full length novel. I was disappointed in this
book.
Rated by buyers -
This book says: Your life can change in one moment. One bad decision, one hour of inflated pride or of deflated self-confidence, and your way may be lost, your course derailed, and you may not be smart enough or brave enough to fix it when you should.
This book is poetic, brief, heart-wrenching. You will read it overnight.
McEwan's seamless movement through time - taking you from Point A (a second-by-millisecond play-by-play of the couples very first and foiled endeavor at making love) to Point B (a condensed reflection on the monotony of their regular and separate lives, two decades later) - accentuates the way memories of some painful, scary, awkward, unprecedented seconds (spent trying to navigate romance, sex, and love) last a lifetime, while the memories of the years between such episodes (spent naviating the more predictable terrain of career changes, aging, and self-improvement) blur together and dissolve, lose their shape and form, are boiled down into resumes instead of love letters.
This book says: Don't let pride, fear, or practicality ruin your shot at true love. Just. Don't. Do. It.
Rated by buyers -
I finished this beautiful story in one afternoon. I have read several of Ian McEwan's books and have loved every single one. He has this uncanny knack of drawing you into every agonizing situation, causing you to feel exactly what the character is feeling. Much like Atonement, the last few pages make your stomach turn and a lump gather in your throat. Ian McEwan is writing genius personified, proven again in this wonderful novel.
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I read this book in one sitting. This book takes place in the early 1960's before the time of free love. The tragedy is that two young people know little of the ways of love and sex. Their endeavor to connect on their wedding night is a disaster and haunts them for the rest of their lives, destroying a part of each of them. The young woman, idealizing love but disgusted by the act of it, the bodily fluids, the touching of intimate parts and caresses, rejects her young husband on their honeymoon night. He is appalled, for he thinks that he is loving her, giving her his body and his heart, touching her skin with the intimacy of their love.
She runs away, completely disgusted about 'sex'. He runs after her but their angry words leave both severed from the other. He soothes himself in multiple and unsatisfying relations for the rest of his life. She, being a musician and a composer, composes a piece for him. He never enters a concert hall and the music never reaches the ears to which they were intended.
On Chesil Beach is a rich and tragic story of different expectations, ignorance, and fear. The flip side of fear can be anger since it is safer to express anger than hurt. The hurt that occurs in this book is powerful and lasting. It is both mythical and common happening to many people as they try to connect with others and end up with the wrong expectations and assumptions that lead them apart rather than to an intimacy and love they had hoped for.
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