En smakebit på søndag: Atonement

Denne helgen har Ina og jeg startet å lese Atonement av Ian McEwan.

Et epigraf i starten av boken:

"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Forbløffet måtte jeg google - ian mcewan jane austen - og fant en god del antakelser og analyser, men de skal jeg verken lese eller gå inn på akkurat nå, men bakpå boken står det følgende:

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. 

By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will ave crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Atonement ble publisert i 2001, og regnes som en av de beste McEwan har skrevet. Boken ble nominert til Bookerprisen, og filmen som kom i 2007 ble nominert til BAFTA Award og Oscar.