Ian McEwan's libretto

Foryou_200

I like several of Ian McEwan's novels and especially admired his novel Saturday, which, being among other things a riff on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," updated that novel's m.o. by giving the stream of its narrator's narrative a decidely neuroscientific tint.

In another novel, Amsterdam, his protagonist is a somewhat pompous composer who, toward the end, is caught rather embarrassingly suspecting he is a genius even as he churns out a piece of career-wrecking unoriginality. "Genius," he dared think himself, and it proved otherwise.

I thought at the time the composer was partly a stand-in for the dangers of vanity and overassessment that face any artist. Now I learn that McEwan has written a libretto for an opera, For You, that examines the dangers of sexual jealousy.

Tags

More like this

In the latest N+1, Marco Roth takes a critical look at the rise of the "neuronovel": The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel--the…
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org   Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do! Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question. It…
I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in modernist structure (Saturday is modeled on…
In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books address a similar set of themes. Can science solve…