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What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
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Ian McEwan returns with his nineteenth(!) novel, What We Can Know . He describes it as “a novel about a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.” In the apocalyptic 22th century, a historian searches for a literary manuscript last seen at a scandalous 2014 dinner party; since then the world has been ravaged by fire, pandemic, nuclear explosions, rising sea levels. Imagine A.S. Byatt’s Possession set in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , and you’ll get an idea—and McEwan brings bravura and extravagance to this terrible vision. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner declared it “a piece of late-career showmanship” from the old master. “It gave me so much pleasure,” he added, “I sometimes felt like laughing.”
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"Ian McEwan returns with his nineteenth(!) novel, What We Can Know . He describes it as “a novel about a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.” In the apocalyptic 22th century, a historian searches for a literary manuscript last seen at a scandalous 2014 dinner party; since then the world has been ravaged by fire, pandemic, nuclear explosions, rising sea levels. Imagine A.S. Byatt’s Possession set in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , and you’ll get an idea—and McEwan brings bravura and extravagance to this terrible vision. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner declared it “a piece of late-career showmanship” from the old master. “It gave me so much pleasure,” he added, “I sometimes felt like laughing.”"
"The year is 2119, and catastrophes (climatic, nuclear) have reshaped the world entirely. On the archipelago that is now Britain, literature scholar Tom Metcalfe is engaged in a 21st century pursuit: hunting for the missing masterpiece of poet Francis Blundy, a birthday poem written in 2014 for his wife, Vivien, and heard only by the six guests at her birthday dinner. In the first half, Tom narrates his search, speculating on the Blundys’ marriage and other shifting alliances. In the second half, the reader is poignantly reminded of the limits of scholarship. The book is egalitarian about genre; it’s a romance, a mystery and a post-apocalyptic domestic drama that makes the stakes of our own precarious epoch deeply personal. And it demonstrates a hopeful counterweight to anxiety about the future – perhaps our epistemic limitations are merely an opportunity for our most tender and human artistic endeavors."
"Narrators David Rintoul and Rachel Bavidge perform with distinct British styles as this speculative novel jumps around in time. Rintoul portrays Tom, who lives in the 22nd century, when the diminished world has experienced climate catastrophes and been ravaged by AI-controlled wars. Rintoul’s professorial tone and diction strongly suggest an interior life of the mind. Bavidge captures Vivien’s 21st-century conflicts, sensuality, and intellect. She’s the wife of famous poet Francis Blundy, whose lost work, “A Corona for Vivien,” provides the subplot of Tom’s search for it a century later. (11 hours)"