Amsterdam

by Ian McEwan Narrated by Luis David García Márquez

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Winner of the 1998 Booker Prize, Amsterdam begins with the funeral of a woman which is attended by 3 of her former lovers. The lives of the men become intertwined to ultimately fatal results as they face personal jealousy, failures in their careers, and a pact between two with disastrous consequences. This is a thrilling and sometimes comical analysis of morality that you won’t want to put down.

Molly Lane ha muerto a los cuarenta y seis años de edad. Era una mujer muy libre, muy seductora, y en su entierro se encuentran presentes los cuatro hombres más importantes de su vida: Clive Linley, músico famoso; Vernon Halliday, periodista y director de uno de los grandes periódicos del país; George Lane, su poderoso y multimillonario marido, y Julian Garmony, un notorio político de derechas, actual ministro de Asuntos Exteriores y candidato a primer ministro. Clive y Vernon son amigos desde los lejanos y felices años sesenta, y ambos fueron amantes de Molly cuando todos ellos eran jóvenes, idealistas y pobres. George, el marido, entró mucho más tarde en la vida de la fascinante mujer y jamás pudo poseerla del todo, excepto en el terrible período final, de descenso a los infiernos de la pérdida de memoria y la desintegración mental, en el que se convirtió en su implacable cuidador y carcelero. Y con respecto a Garmony, representante de la derecha más pura y dura y de todo lo que Vernon, Clive y Molly odiaron durante toda su vida, ni el periodista ni el músico pueden explicarse qué era lo que Molly veía en él, qué extraña relación les unía. Pero lo descubrirán pocos días más tarde cuando George, el marido, le ofrece a Vernon unas espectaculares fotos del futuro primer ministro vestido con unas excitantes ropas de mujer. Fotos tomadas precisamente por Molly y que serán el disparo de salida de esta feroz, cínica, mordiente fábula moral. «A pesar de la negrura de su tema, o precisamente por ello, Amsterdam es una novela extremadamente divertida. lan McEwan satiriza nuestra sociedad contemporánea con una brillantez e inteligencia pocas veces igualada...» (Alain de Botton, The lndependent). «Su novela más divertida, pero también la más letal hasta la fecha... Amsterdam es una severa crítica de la naturaleza humana, con especiales referencias a la generación de los años sesenta. McEwan es uno de los escritores ingleses más originales, a pesar de que no parece interesado en la escritura experimental. Su prosa es precisa y reveladora, y todo lo que describe se nos aparece nuevo, sorprendente, luminoso, como un cuadro familiar recientemente limpiado y restaurado» (Gabriele Annan, The New York Review of Books). «Una fábula moral extremadamente inmoral, contada con irónica distancia, y un argumento impecable, lleno de suspense, que despliega su elegante estructura para placer del lector. Me recuerda a las mejores obras de Chesterton y de Huxley, y también encuentro en ella ecos de Henry James» (A.S. Byatt, The Literary Review). «Una obra maravillosamente orquestada por un artista mayor de la literatura» (Phil Baker, Times Literary Supplement).

Editorial Reviews

Daphne Merkin

Mr. McEwan writes a distinctively unadorned prose that speeds the reader along, but slows every so often for a layered, luxuriant image.
—The New Yorker

Wall Street Journal

A study of the fragility of life — with its capacity for joy, genius, loss and betrayal. ..a captivating pleasure.

William H. Pritchard

....[T]he narrative voice in Amsterdam is clipped, assured with a strongly sardonic edge....highly plotted....the dispatching of characters...in the book's final chapters constitute[s] striking effects...entertaining...
—The New York Times Book Review

Michiko Kakutani

A dark tour de force...perfectly fashioned.
— The New York Times

Erica Sanders

...[W]ickedly deft....stylishly entertaining...flawlessly executed.
—People Magazine

Michael Dirda

Brilliant...as sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year.
— The Washington Post

Nick Meyer

Ian McEwan's Amsterdam is at once far-reaching and tightly self-contained, a fin de siècle phantasmagoria that wraps up as neatly as a weekly sitcom.
-- New York Magazine

Gabriele Annan

Whatever McEwan writes about comes up fresh, luminous, and surprising...Amsterdam is funnier than anything he has written before.
-- The New York Review of Books

Ben Greenman

Like other...McEwan novels, Amsterdam is a good thing in a small package: pungent, philosophical and beautifully written.
-- Time Out New York

Boston Globe

Beautifully spare prose, wicked observation, and dark comic brio.

Library Journal

Two lovers of feisty Molly Lane, both influential men, make a pact upon her death that leads to tragedy.

Sara Nelson

January 1999

Amsterdam -- which recently won the esteemed Booker Prize in Britain -- is vintage Ian McEwan in its depiction of the machinations of a certain elite British population, the kind of overeducated, self-righteous folk who stand around cocktail parties ruminating about morality versus expediency, duty versus desire. The premise here is the death -- by rare and sudden disease -- of one Molly Lane, a food writer (once for Paris Vogue) and general free spirit beloved by many men in addition to her rather dour and colorless (but very rich) husband, George. Two of her former lovers are the lifelong friends Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday, who have reunited at the funeral, both to mourn Molly and to torture George and any other man who seems to exert some claim on the popular deceased; they knew her best and they loved her best, they're sure.

But Molly's passing -- and the revelations that arise from it -- illuminate the cracks in Vernon and Clive's relationship. For although the two have agreed that should one of them ever find himself in Molly's sort of situation -- in other words, brain dead but technically alive -- the other would help him end it all, they begin to differ on how to handle some particularly racy photographs Molly left for them. Molly, it seems, had had an intimate relationship with Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, whom both Clive and Vernon abhor -- or at least she knew him well enough to have ended up the owner of some very compromising pictures of Garmony in full drag. Vernon, a newspaper publisher, wants to run the photos that he imagines will destroy Garmony's career while solidifying his own. Clive, a composer, strongly disapproves of his friend's plan, seeing it as a betrayal of the generous, loving Molly, whom Garmony apparently trusted in the first place. Is Clive more moral than Vernon? Or is Clive -- who is shown to be so self- and work-obsessed that he doesn't bother to report a crime he witnesses -- as corrupt in his very own way?

Those familiar with McEwan's earlier books, especially last year's superb Enduring Love, will recognize this moral conundrum as the type of situation around which the author usually constructs his novels. Of course Vernon goes on to publish the pictures, and of course -- this being a McEwan novel -- that's when the real fun begins. In fact, it is Vernon (now dubbed "vermin" by the tabloid wits) who is ruined, thanks to a grandstand gesture on the part of Garmony's wife, whose way with a sound bite rivals Hillary Clinton at her Monicagate best. Worse, Clive and Vernon are now so estranged that one (or both) of them just might feel justified to act on that euthanasia pact....

There's a lot of plot here, particularly for a less-than-200-page novel that is meant to be read in one sitting. But any longtime McEwan fan can tell you that it's rarely the story alone that keeps you turning pages; where McEwan shines is in his perfect, witty take on a class of people he clearly knows and loves and hates. About Clive's self-conscious, artiste-infested world, for instance, he writes: "He had a number of friends who played the genius card when it suited, failing to show up for this or that in the belief that whatever local upset it caused, it could only increase respect for the compelling nature of their high calling." About the editorial underlings who professed to disagree with Vernon's attention-getting Garmony headline: "Secretly they all wanted him to go ahead, as long as their principled dissent was minuted. Vernon was winning the argument because everyone...now saw they could have it both ways -- their paper saved, their consciences unstained."

Clearly the characters and situations here are easily recognizable; most readers can probably imagine themselves in similar, if lower-profile, ethical dilemmas. But unlike McEwan's other protagonists, virtually no one here -- except, perhaps, for Molly, and she's dead -- is even slightly likable. The protagonists are backstabbing, the widower priggish, the Foreign Secretary virtually invisible without his lingerie -- yet in McEwan's vision they all seem equally responsible for the moral breakdown of society. This is a single-mindedly mean worldview that recalls the work of fellow lit-Brit Martin Amis more than McEwan's own usually nuanced style. It's as if he's suggesting that there's no solution to the overhyped, media-worshipping problem world we've created -- no solution, that is, except death.

Still, when read as the good taut thriller it is, Amsterdam is indeed hard to put down. A sly slip of a novel, it is a topical but never tabloidish equal-opportunity skewerer of media, marriage (did I mention that most of the married characters here routinely and matter-of-factly take lovers?), and artistic pretension of every stripe. That it won the Booker Prize may be as much a function of the judges' high regard for McEwan's entire body of work as it is praise for this specific novel. Whatever the case, in Amsterdam there's no shortage of the wit or clear-eyed wisdom we've come to expect from this most engaging chronicler of contemporary life.

Sara Nelson, the former executive editor of The Book Report, is the book columnist for Glamour. She also contributes to Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and Salon.

The Wall Street Journal

A study of the fragility of life -- with its capacity for joy, genius, loss and betrayal. ..a captivating pleasure.

The Boston Globe

Beautifully spare prose, wicked observation, and dark comic brio.

Weekly Editors Entertainment

Last year's Booker prize winner is a sharp novel of two men who meet at the funeral of a woman they both loved.

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of this year's Booker Prize, McEwan's latest (Black Dogs; Enduring Love) is a smartly written tale that devolves slowly into tricks and soapy vapors.

When she dies of a sudden, rapidly degenerative illness, London glamour photographer Molly Lane is married to rich British publisher George Lane, although numerous erstwhile lovers still live and stir in the controversial Molly's wake. These high-visibility figures include internationally famed composer Clive Linley, racing now to complete his overdue magnum opus, a new symphony for the millennium; his close friend Vernon Halliday, the liberal, ambitious, idealistic editor of a London newspaper that's struggling hard to keep its readership; and right-winger Thatcherite Julian Garmony, now Britain's foreign secretary.

The daily lives of these three high-profilers-though mostly of Clive and Vernon, who receive the main focus-are nothing if not interesting in the capable hands of McEwan, who shows himself more than plentifully knowledgeable in the details of journalism and music, describing with a Masterpiece Theater color and exactness the torments of composition and the rigors of keeping a big newspaper in business. The machinery of plot gradually takes over, though, when George finds, in Molly's left-behind things, three wildly incriminating sex-photos of the foreign secretary-and makes them available to Vernon Halliday, for whom the idea of bringing down the conservative Garmony (who's considering a run for PM) by publishing the pictures is irresistible. This plan of massive public humiliation, however, offends Clive Linley, who thinks of it as a deep betrayal of the dead Molly, and bitterness rises like a serpentin the Clive-Vernon friendship, hardly put to rest when Vernon learns of something morally dubious that Clive's just done-and that could, in fact, be made a nifty tool of revenge. And so things progress via trick, counter-trick, and backfire, in a novelistic try for a big ending that just gets littler instead. Middle-brow fiction British style, strong on the surface, vapid at the center. . .

From the Publisher

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE

"A dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A well-oiled machine.... Ruthless and amusing." —The New York Times Book Review

"Beautifully spare prose, wicked observation, and dark comic brio." —The Boston Globe

"At once far-reaching and tightly self-contained, a fin de siécle phantasmagoria." —New York

"Ian McEwan has proven himself to be one of Britain's most distinct voices and one of its most versatile talents.... Chilling and darkly comic." —Chicago Tribune

"By far his best work to date ... an energizing tightrope between feeling and lack of feeling, between humanity's capacity to support and save and its equally ubiquitous penchant for detachment and cruelty." —The San Diego Union-Tribune

"You won't find a more enjoyable novel ... masterfully wrought, sure to delight a reader with even half a sense of humor." —The Atlant Journal-Constitution

"McEwan writes the sort of witty repartee and scathing retort we wished we thought of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, McEwan's portrayal of the mutually parasitic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic." —The Christian Science Monitor

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159894854
Publisher:	Anagrama
Publication date:	04/20/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Language:	Spanish

Read an Excerpt

It wasn't his intention to walk away at this point, for he wanted to hear Pullman's reply, but just then two loud groups cut in from left and right, one to pay respects to George, the other to honor the poet, and in a swirl of repositioning Clive found himself freed and walking away. Hart Pullman and the teenage Molly. Sickened, he pushed his way back through the crowd and arrived in a small clearing and stood there, mercifully ignored, looking around at the friends and acquaintances absorbed in conversation. He felt himself to be the only one who really missed Molly. Perhaps if he'd married her he would have been worse than George, and wouldn't even have tolerated this gathering. Nor her helplessness. Tipping from the little squarish brown plastic bottle thirty sleeping pills into his palm. The pestle and mortar, a tumbler of scotch. Three tablespoons of yellow-white sludge. She looked at him when she took it, as if she knew. With his left hand he cupped her chin to catch the spill. He held her while she slept, and then all through the night.

Nobody else was missing her. He looked around at his fellow mourners now, many of them his own age, Molly's age, to within a year or two. How prosperous, how influential, how they had flourished under a government they had despised for almost seventeen years. Talking 'bout my generation. Such energy, such luck. Nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state's own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents' tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals. When the ladder crumbled behindthem, when the state withdrew her tit and became a scold, they were already safe, they consolidated and settled down to forming this or that--taste, opinion, fortunes.

He heard a woman call out merrily, "I can't feel my hands or feet and I'm going!" As he turned, he saw a young man behind him who had been about to touch his shoulder. He was in his mid-twenties and bald, or shorn, and wore a gray suit with no overcoat.

"Mr. Linley. I'm sorry to intrude on your thoughts," the man said, drawing his hand away.

Clive assumed he was a musician, or someone come to collect his autograph, and shrank his face into its mask of patience. "That's all right."

"I was wondering if you'd have time to come across and talk to the foreign secretary. He's keen to meet you."

Clive pursed his lips. He didn't want to be introduced to Julian Garmony, but neither did he want to go to the bother of snubbing him. No escape. "You show the way," he said, and was led past standing clumps of his friends, some of whom guessed where he was going and tried to lure him from his guide.

"Hey, Linley. No talking to the enemy!"

The enemy indeed. What had attracted her? Garmony was a strange-looking fellow: large head, with wavy black hair that was all his own, a terrible pallor, thin unsensual lips. He had made a life in the political marketplace with an unexceptional stall of xenophobic and punitive opinions. Vernon's explanation had always been simple: high-ranking bastard, hot in the sack. But she could have found that anywhere. There must also have been the hidden talent that had got him to where he was and even now was driving him to challenge the PM for his job.

The aide delivered Clive into a horseshoe grouped around Garmony, who appeared to be making a speech or telling a story. He broke off to slip his hand into Clive's and murmur intensely, as though they were alone, "I've been wanting to meet you for years."

"How do you do."

Garmony spoke up for the benefit of the company, two of whom were young men with the pleasant, openly dishonest look of gossip columnists. The minister was performing and Clive was a kind of prop. "My wife knows a few of your piano pieces by heart."

Again. Clive wondered. Was he as domesticated and tame a talent as some of his younger critics claimed--the thinking man's Gorecki?

"She must be good," he said.

It had been a while since he had met a politician close up, and what he had forgotten was the eye movements, the restless patrol for new listeners or defectors, or the proximity of some figure of higher status, or some other main chance that might slip by.

Garmony was looking around now, securing his audience. "She was brilliant. Goldsmiths, then the Guildhall. A fabulous career ahead of her . . ." He paused for comic effect. "Then she met me and chose medicine."

Only the aide and another staffer, a woman, tittered. The journalists were unmoved. Perhaps they had heard it all before.

The foreign secretary's eyes had settled back on Clive. "There was another thing. I wanted to congratulate you on your commission. The Millennial Symphony. D'you know, that decision went right up to cabinet level?"

"So I heard. And you voted for me."

Clive had allowed himself a note of weariness, but Garmony reacted as though he had been effusively thanked. "Well, it was the least I could do. Some of my colleagues wanted this pop star chap, the ex-Beatle. Anyway, how is it coming along? Almost done?"

"Almost."

His extremities had been numb for half an hour but it was only now that Clive felt the chill finally envelop his core. In the warmth of his studio he would be in shirtsleeves, working on the final pages of this symphony, whose premiere was only weeks away. He had already missed two deadlines and he longed to be home.

He put out his hand to Garmony. "It was very nice to meet you. I have to be getting along."

But the minister did not take his hand and was speaking over him, for there was still a little more to be wrung from the famous composer's presence.

"Do you know, I've often thought that it's the freedom of artists like yourself to pursue your work that makes my own job worthwhile . . ."

More followed in similar style as Clive gazed on, no sign of his growing distaste showing in his expression. Garmony, too, was his generation. High office had eroded his ability to talk levelly with a stranger. Perhaps that was what he offered her in bed, the thrill of the impersonal. A man twitching in front of mirrors. But surely she preferred emotional warmth. Lie still, look at me, really look at me. Perhaps it was nothing more than a mistake, Molly and Garmony. Either way, Clive now found it unbearable.

The Foreign Secretary reached his conclusion "These are the traditions that make us what we are."

"I was wondering," Clive said to Molly's ex-lover, "whether you're still in favor of hanging."

Garmony was well able to deal with this sudden shift, but his eyes hardened.

"I think most people are aware of my position on that. Meanwhile, I'm happy to accept the view of Parliament and the collective responsibility of the cabinet." He had squared up, and he was also turning on the charm. The two journalists edged a little closer with their notebooks.

"I see you once said in a speech that Nelson Mandela deserved to be hanged."

Garmony, who was due to visit South Africa the following month, smiled calmly. The speech had recently been dug up, rather scurrilously, by Vernon's paper. "I don't think you can reasonably nail people to things they said as hot-head undergraduates." He paused to chuckle. "Almost thirty years ago. I bet you said or thought some pretty shocking things yourself."

"I certainly did," Clive said. "Which is my point. If you'd had your way then, there wouldn't be much chance for second thoughts now."

Garmony inclined his head briefly in acknowledgment. "Fair enough point. But in the real world, Mr. Linley, no justice system can ever be free of human error."

Then the foreign secretary did an extraordinary thing that quite destroyed Clive's theory about the effects of public office and that in retrospect he was forced to admire. Garmony reached out and, with his forefinger and thumb, caught hold of the lapel of Clive's overcoat and, drawing him close, spoke in a voice that no one else could hear.

"The very last time I saw Molly she told me you were impotent and always had been."

"Complete nonsense. She never said that."

"Of course you're bound to deny it. Thing is, we could discuss it out loud in front of the gentlemen over there, or you could get off my case and make a pleasant farewell. That is to say, fuck off."

The delivery was rapid and urgent, and as soon as it was over Garmony leaned back, beaming as he pumped the composer's hand, and called out to the aide, "Mr. Linley has kindly accepted an invitation to dinner." This last may have been an agreed code, for the young man stepped across promptly to usher Clive away while Garmony turned his back on him to say to the journalists, "A great man, Clive Linley. To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilized existence, don't you think?"

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