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New from the bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home—a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse—but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.
- Sales Rank: #2206 in Books
- Published on: 2016-09-13
- Released on: 2016-09-13
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Review
“With Nutshell, Ian McEwan has performed an incongruous magic trick ... A smart, funny and utterly captivating novel ... A small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan’s narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can perform.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Compact, captivating ... The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous ... McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant . . . Surprisingly suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“McEwan pulls it off. I bought the premise and never looked back . . . The most talked-about novel of the season.”
—Mary Roach, O, The Oprah Magazine
"As an example of point of view, you can look no farther than these gorgeous pages, which not only prove that brevity is the soul of wit but also offer the reader a voice both distinctive and engaging ... The reader [will be] speeding through every page, each one rife with wordplay, social commentary, hilarity, and suspense ... Hats off to Ian McEwan."
—Mameve Medwed, Boston Globe
About the Author
Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I’ve no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I’m troubled. I’m hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I’m terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in.
I’m immersed in abstractions, and only the proliferating relations between them create the illusion of a known world. When I hear “blue,” which I’ve never seen, I imagine some kind of mental event that’s fairly close to “green”—which I’ve never seen. I count myself an innocent, unburdened by allegiances and obligations, a free spirit, despite my meagre living room. No one to contradict or reprimand me, no name or previous address, no religion, no debts, no enemies. My appointment diary, if it existed, notes only my forthcoming birthday. I am, or I was, despite what the geneticists are now saying, a blank slate. But a slippery, porous slate no schoolroom or cottage roof could find use for, a slate that writes upon itself as it grows by the day and becomes less blank. I count myself an innocent, but it seems I’m party to a plot. My mother, bless her unceasing, loudly squelching heart, seems to be involved.
Seems, Mother? No, it is. You are. You are involved. I’ve known from my beginning. Let me summon it, that moment of creation that arrived with my first concept. Long ago, many weeks ago, my neural groove closed upon itself to become my spine and my many million young neurons, busy as silkworms, spun and wove from their trailing axons the gorgeous golden fabric of my first idea, a notion so simple it partly eludes me now. Was it me? Too self-loving. Was it now? Overly dramatic. Then something antecedent to both, containing both, a single word mediated by a mental sigh or swoon of acceptance, of pure being, something like—this? Too precious. So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my aboriginal notion and here’s the crux—is. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems. My mother is involved in a plot, and therefore I am too, even if my role might be to foil it. Or if I, reluctant fool, come to term too late, then to avenge it.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Nutshell by Ian McEwan: A review
By PlantBirdWoman
"God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."
- from Nutshell
And eventually, luckily for us, there was Ian McEwan, a writer who routinely delivers such lyrical prose that a dedicated reader could weep for pure joy. In Nutshell, he's done it again.
How can one adequately describe this weird and wonderful little novel? The plot is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, but our narrator is an eighth-month fetus, preternaturally aware and attuned to the ways of the world. He resides "upside down in a woman" and is privy to all that the woman is privy to, including the plot devised by her and her lover (her brother-in-law) to kill her husband, our narrator's father. McEwan's tale is essentially a two-hundred page soliloquy by that fetus as he watches in horror as their plan proceeds. It is absurd but dazzlingly imaginative and clever and somehow manages to be both suspenseful and profound. It is philosophical in range, in its view of a world that the narrator has not yet entered but imagines all too perfectly; it is a comedy that is marked by moments of tragedy.
To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.
Thus speaks our narrator/fetus/philosopher.
Our narrator reveals himself to be as much of a ham as a Hamlet. He has developed a well-informed taste for wine and a worldly grasp of current events gained through attentive listening to the educational podcasts preferred by his mother for her insomniac amusement. When he is bored at night, he kicks his mother awake so she will entertain him.
He recoils in horror at the active sex life pursued by his mother in her advanced state of pregnancy and cringes at the assault of her lover's penis pounding close by his soft skull.
He worries about what will happen to him if their murder plans succeed. Will his mother wind up in prison and will he be born there? Or even if her culpability is not discovered, will she give him up to some foster home or orphanage in order to pursue an unfettered life? The plans he hears her discussing certainly don't seem to include a baby.
In despair at his impotence, he considers suicide by strangling himself on his own umbilical cord. ("To be, or not to be...") But there, he realizes, is the rub.
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.
Every sentence of this short novel seems burnished to perfection. For example, the precocious fetus describes his uncle Claude, the murder conspirator, as a man "whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading." Cheaply fading - one understands Claude completely in that phrase. And did I mention that the fetus' father is a poet and publisher of poets, a purveyor of rich and meaningful sentences?
McEwan has shown a preference for short novels. The last one of his that I read was The Children Act, another brief and well-polished gem. One gets the impression that he is not willing to accept anything else than perfection in his prose and so he whittles everything down to the essentials. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but for those of us who find brevity to be the soul of wit and who enjoy a bit of philosophy with our fiction, it is hot and tasty and just right.
There is so much insight contained in this short book. The narrator describes a world where poverty and war, "with climate change held in reserve," is driving millions from their homes, vast movements of angry or desolate or hopeful people, "crammed at borders against the razor-wire gates, drowning in thousands to share in the fortunes of the West." His description of faith-based violence and the inanity of identity politics seems a perfect diagnosis of much of what ails modern society.
In this 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death, there have been a plethora of rewrites of his plots and themes. A number of them have been successful, some less so. None of them - at least of the ones that I've read - have attained the conspicuous brilliance of McEwan's effort and his beautiful prose. It is a unique bravura performance.
63 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Tales from the unborn
By TChris
The only likable character in Nutshell is a fetus. Fortunately, he’s an exceptionally bright fetus with a rich vocabulary. His mother and father separated after his conception. His father, a poet, has a relationship of some sort with a student. His mother is sleeping with his father’s brother. His mother and brother have a murderous intent, which provides Nutshell’s plot.
In prose that celebrates the richness of the English language, Ian McEwan tells the story from the unborn child’s point of view. The narrator has traditional notions of how parents should behave and is distressed that his own are not up to the task, but while residing in his mother’s womb, he cannot help but love her. Unfortunately for him, occasional kicks when his mother is misbehaving are an ineffective method of influencing her behavior. Yet even a fetus is not without resources.
As always, McEwan’s prose is a treat to be savored. Nutshell also showcases his wit. The narrator has extensive insight into the ways of the world, thanks to the knowledge he has absorbed as his mother listens to talk radio and self-improvement tapes. In addition to parenting, the fetal narrator shares his wry opinions about hope and faith and hatred, as well as current events, culture, sex, and the merits of the wines that his mother consumes.
An inspector with Columbo-like mannerisms adds to the humor. Nutshell is a short novel, not as substantial or dramatic as most of McEwan’s other books, but brevity assures that every word counts in a fun novel that works its way to a satisfying conclusion that manages to be both surprising and inevitable.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A gripping suspenseful plot, told from the perspective of an incredible, observant fetus.
By RobertK
Original, inventive. You need to suspend reason to get into the brilliant mind and perceptions of the fetal narrator of the book, but the plot he discovers and his involvement are gripping. I couldn't put the book down.
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