Nutshell by Ian McEwan

I feel like I just keep reading Ian McEwan books because I want to understand why people love him so much. Actually, I don't think I've ever met anyone who loves him, maybe I mean why people praise him so much. Anyways, this one was especially distressing for me because I have an unnatural fear of pregnancy and pregnant women (and it's told from the point of view of a fetus). I'm not sure I liked it, it was original and certainly clever, but McEwan's style just isn't for me. It's bliss for anyone who hates Freud's developmental models (like me), since it's a fully mentally and psychologically developed (yet utterly innocent) narrator, who knows all about the Oedipal complex, but has never seen his mother's face. The unconscious can hardly remain unconscious if it's conscious, if that makes sense. I love that the narrator is already a cynical alcoholic in the womb. However, I thought the ending made no logical sense, and though I'm profoundly grateful to McEwan for not inflicting any of his terrifying scenes of sex and violence (or at least relatively little), I kind of expected it to be more twisted. I really enjoyed the wordplay and games of allusions, and loved the currents of love and hate running through the novel, but it really irked me how politically engaged it was (which is a personal objection) and I'm just not sure what to think of it at the end. Probably my favourite part was that the narrator stands in the same relation to the real world as we do to Shakespeare's plays and characters, for example, he doesn't know what to think about his father, and has to revise his opinion completely when he hears something new about him, the same way a really good actor will make us completely revise our opinion of a certain character. The dark of the womb becomes the darkness of the imaginative space Shakespeare's plays occupy in our heads, before we see them performed.