Nutshell (McEwan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A narrator who speaks to us from his mother’s womb—spouting off about philosophy, politics, and the state of the world. And one other little matter: he frets over his mother’s plans to murder his father. If you can accept the outlandish premise, you’ll find Ian McEwan’s newest book a brilliant, thrilling, often hilarious ride.  READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


Ian McEwan has performed an incongruous magic trick, mashing up the premises of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Amy Heckerling's 1989 movie, Look Who's Talking, to create a smart, funny and utterly captivating novel…Nutshell is a small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan's narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can be perform. The restrictions created by the narrator's situation…seem to have stimulated a surge of inventiveness on Mr. McEwan's part, as he mischievously concocts a monologue…that plays on Hamlet, even as it explores some of his own favorite themes (the corruption of innocence, the vulnerability of children and the sudden skid of ordinary life into horror).... It's preposterous, of course, that a fetus should be thinking such earthshaking thoughts, but Mr. McEwan writes here with such assurance and élan that the reader never for a moment questions his sleight of hand.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight of a book.... It is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.
Guardian (UK)
 

In Nutshell, McEwan is a pentathlete at the top of his game, doing several very different things equally well. Current literary culture rarely awards gold medals for comedy, but this is one performance—agile, muscular, swift—you should not miss.
Sunday Times (UK)
 

A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly. Witty and gently tragic, this short, bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
 

There is far more going on in this fiercely intelligent novel than first meets the eye. At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating, it is one of McEwan's hardest to categorize works, and all the more interesting for it.
London Times (UK)
 

McEwan has thrown in Gone Girl intrigue with The Girl on the Train suspense and given us his take on how toxic a marriage can get when spliced with a Shakespearean cast. Who knew McEwan could mix high and low literary genres to create such a bizarrely readable mash-up?
Independent (UK)


(Starred revicew.) McEwan’s latest novel is short, smart, and narrated by an unborn baby.... Packed with humor and tinged with suspense, this gem resembles a sonnet the narrator recalls hearing his father recite: brief, dense, bitter, suggestive of unrequited and unmanageable longing, surprising, and surprisingly affecting.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred revicew.) [McEwan's most ]rovocative work to date.... [A]n expansive meditation on stability and identity from a confined perspective. —Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Library Journal


(Starred revicew.) McEwan can be counted on to make the implausible plausible and the outrageous reasonable, and his talent in that regard is put to its consummate test in his latest novel.... [An] ingenious tour de force.... As soon as words gets out, any new novel by this best-selling, Booker Prize–winning novelist causes a reader frenzy.
Booklist


Speaking from the womb of his 28-year-old mother, this slim entertainment’s precocious narrator tells of sex and booze and something rotten in London.... Catching those allusions [to Hamlet] can be a fun sort of parlor game, but what they add up to, if anything, is unclear. Clever, likable, and yet unsatisfying, this tale too often bears out the narrator’s early claim: "I take in everything, even the trivia—of which there is much."
Kirkus Reviews