Ian McEwan, "What We Can Know"

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Ian McEwan, "What We Can Know" (2025)

 

California Review of Books

 

본문에서

 

She had heard her husband's set piece too often, sometimes at breakfast. The guests' indulgent silence embarrassed her. Francis believed he had made an unanswerable case. At times like this, and she couldn't help it, she was irritated by his certitude, his entiltlement, his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, and such a fool. (p. 33)

 

The tension lasted months. The armies clashed, there were gains here, losses there, and then, prompted by hair-trigger artificial intelligence choosing the pre-emptive option, missiles were lauched, two from each side. They were of 'limited' yield, but over a million killed instantly, they were enough to cause each side to draw back in horror and diplomatic peace missions to rush in to take advantage of the lull. (p. 104)

 

We celebrate our skilled engineers for creating simple new phones out of complex old ones. (p. 110)

 

The American critic Edmund Wilson's journal reveals how disappointed he was by college dinners at high table, where serious discussion was politely avoided. (p. 203)

 

He described how his mother on two occasions became lucid again, completely herself, asking concerned questions about the family, whose names she recalled without difficulty. Then, after a few minutes, she sank away from them again. ... He had been there for the second bout of lucidity. It came two days before she died. ... Neurologically it was a mystery. Those memories were clearly there but inaccessible to the sufferers. (p. 227)

 

Instead, he thought it might be a deeply embedded inclination within human nature, sustained over hundreds of generations, to find supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. But, 'Now, at last, thunder is not an angry god.' (p. 230)

 

No hiding in a mist of poetics, no symbolic figures, no buried meanings. What I've hoped for is the clarity Albert Camus proposed for troubled times. I should be among the last to say it, but there are occasions when prose must eclipse poetry. (p. 295)