Ian McEwan, 6/21/48 has written numerous novels, short stories and children's books. He has won many prizes, the most prestigious being the Man-Booker prize for 'Amsterdam'.
Saturday "follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish" [from the back cover]. The man, Henry Perowne, is a neurosurgeon and father of a son and daughter. The daughter is a poet and the son a blues guitarist. So the author includes discussions of neuroscience, literature and music. Some things that caught my eye and ear:
His daughter, Daisy, in an attempt to interest her father in her favorite writers gives him Henry James' 'What Daisy Knew'. McEwan writes: "... poor Maisie soon vanished behind a cloud of words, and at page forty-eight, Perowne, who can be on his feet 7 hours for a difficult procedure, who has his name down for the London marathon, fell away exhausted."
And 100 pages later: "When this civilization falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the few luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquid they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks."
The first is how I and a lot of us 'Tackle' the great books. The second is how to enjoy them ... cascading streams.
".. a record Theo [Perowne's son] brought into the house years ago, Chuck Berry's old pianist, Johnnie Johnson, singing "Tanqueray", a slouching blues of reunion and friendship.
It was a long time comin',
But I knew I would see the day
When you and I could sit down,
And have a drink of Tanqueray."
And towards the end of the novel. "...the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?"
The explanation if it happens will come from a great writer like Ian McEwan.
And on the street, a tile mosaic at an Eighth Ave. local stop: Spring Street in Soho:
