If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If not this way, how? If not now, when?

What I learned from this book: the meaning of Israel.

"For the Russians, a longing for home was not an unreasonable hope, even probable: a yearning to go back, a call. For the Jews, the regret for their houses was not a hope but a despair, buried till then under more urgent and serious sosrrows, but latent always. Their homes no longer existed: they had been swept away, burned by the war or by slaughter, bloodied by squads of hunters of men; tomb houses, of which it was best not to think, houses of ashes. Why go on living, why fight? For what house, what country, what future?"

Despair is what drives Levi's partisans to fight. They fight because there is nothing else for them to do, nowhere else for them to go, no one else to strike out against. And as they fight, they move gradually south, towards Italy and that mythical place called Palestine, that place where Jews can finally be free of persecution.

The tragedy is that thanks to hindsight, we know what happened to Israel and Palestine. There was no peaceful utopia waiting for the Jews "beyond the sea, in fairy-tale land, where milk and honey flow."

And what really makes this book special is the end. Bittersweet. Symbolic. Beautiful.

Saturday

A day in the life of a neurosurgeon? Sounds interesting enough. A day in the life of a neurosurgeon, which just happens to be the day when a curious chain of events culminates in the protagonist performing an emergency operation upon the man who threatened to slit the throat of his wife and rape his daughter? Is it sounding better, or just trashier?

This book works thanks to the detail. I'm not sure if it's McEwan (I must reread Atonement and some of his other books; Enduring Love is on the pile) or just the persona he took on for this novel, but the protagonist Henry Perowne hyperanalyses every single instant in his life. And endlessly self-justifies. It may just be my unreasonable but deep-rooted dislike for all neurosurgeons speaking here, but do I really want to be reading three pages about some rich guy explaining why he doesn't feel bad about spending a lot of money on a fancy car? Seriously, who's he trying to convince?

When On Chesil Beach was published, I read a review that criticised, in passing, the implausibility of Saturday's ending. Since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head. Not only does the ending now seem totally ludicrous, but many other things do too. The characters, for example. While they possess a realism that withstands a passing glance, most of them possess an aura of Mary-Sueness. Henry Perowne spending five or so pages to explain that he loves his middle-aged wife and has no desire for a younger woman does nothing to dispel this impression. The budding poet daughter, the up-and-coming guitarist son, the intelligent, beautiful wife, snatched from the jaws of blindness, the massive house, the French chateau, the squash, the irritable father-in-law. Everything is bathed in an almost soap-operatic glow of perfect-but-slightly-damaged-so-that-it-has-character upper-class Englishness.

Whatever its faults, everything is saved by McEwan's beautiful prose. I swear he could write a novel about a bootlace and make it un-putdownable. Meticulous, erudite, flowing, perfect. There is no particular stylistic feature of his work. He just writes normally, but really really really well. And he writes about interesting things: the Iraq war, evolution, Islam and Alzheimer's disease, among other topics. There are some really great bits about literature and poetry, too.

I've just spent about forty minutes looking through all the pages I dog-eared as being particularly outstanding examples of his prose, and there are so many to choose from. This particular one doesn't sparkle as much as some, but I think it shows his way of combining beautiful writing with concepts that make interesting reading.

"For all the recent advances, it's still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells actually encodes information, how it holds experiences, memories, dreams nad intentions. He doesn't doubt that in years to come, the coding mechanism will be known, though it might not be in his lifetime. Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, 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? He can't begin to imagine as satisfactory account, but he knows it will come, the secret will be revealed - over decades, as long as the scientists and the institutions remain in place, the explanations will refine themselves into an irrefutable truth aboutr consciousness. Ir's already happening... and the journey will be completed, Henry's certain of it. That's the only kind of faith he has. There's grandeur in this view of life."

Exams are over = I can start posting again.

EVERYONE! I HAVE - I HAVE A QUESTION:

When you read to yourself, by which I mean, not aloud, do you speak the words in your head? Does the punctuation affect how you speak the aforementioned words? Does it change, as it were, your mental intonation?

It does mine. And hence why I have never understood why people have trouble with most punctuation. I can understand the problems with apostrophes. Even hyphens, to a large extent. The difference between single and double quotation marks is something with which I grapple daily and have decided is a case for inventing one's own convention. But FULL STOPS, commas, ellipses, dashes, and even the dreaded semi-colon: what's the deal, world? Is it really that hard? Can't you just listen to the words in your head and work out which punctuation mark to use?

Evidently not. And evidently I am some kind of grammar snob who reads too much. Incidentally, I remember a time when I didn't know how to use the semi-colon, but I seemed to develop the ability spontaneously. But anyway. Punctuational musings aside and ON TO THE BOOK!

I had to re-rate this book from four stars to three. Somehow I didn't find it so funny the second time. The humour seemed forced, and formulaic (the Oxford comma has its place, by the way). Perhaps linguistics has spoiled me. One year of rabid left-wing hippy pot-smoking release-yonder-children-from-the-shackles-of-modern-education descriptivist linguistics lecturers has cured me (almost) completely of any lingering signs of prescriptivism (for all you who remain unconvinced, Stephen Fry and Language Hat will tell you why descriptivists have more fun).

In any case, I've seen curses rained upon Lynne Truss for her 'smug', 'self-righteous' 'linguistic snobbism', but she's a sweetie at heart, I believe. For all her grouchy, unconvinced attempts to paint herself as a not-too-prescriptive-prescriptivist (if that even makes sense), she's just a language lover (to hyphen or not to hyphen?) at heart. Observe:

"... it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between "who's" and "whose", and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either. [hear, hear! MS Word, are you listening?] And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft [sic]. I know that language moves on. It has to... But I can't help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight."

And no, it's not just the Cherry Orchard reference that makes my heart go boompity-boomp. No matter how many linguistics lecturers I have, no matter how many blog posts written by celebrities advocating descriptivism I read, I will still share Ms Truss's sentiments. It's the same feeling of sadness I feel when I contemplate the word 'awesome' and how it can never really encompass all that it used to. The same feeling of tragic loss I feel when I realise that the phrase 'the stuff of magic' is actually kind of funny these days. The same half-smothered regret that is inspired within my soul as I cast around desperately for a synonym for 'random' that doesn't make me sound like an idiotic teen.

It's just nostalgia, pure and simple. Now let us alone, descriptivists.