Ian McEwan
Sabato

After being advised by the kind Flo who sent me "In culo al mondo" via email, I bought myself a Kindle (the cheapest one, sparing no expense...) and stuffed it with about forty ebooks (downloaded for free from various torrents, obviously), and as luck would have it, there were quite a few books by Ian McEwan, one of my favorite writers. Some I've already read, including this "Saturday" from 2005, which I reread with pleasure (unfortunately, I must admit that for me, nothing beats the feel of turning paper pages).

Note: The Moroccan keyboard I have under my fingers lacks accented vowels of the letter "kappa," which I'll have to copy/paste each time, and the keys related to punctuation aren't found in the place indicated by the QWERTY layout, so all the grammar teachers should settle down and suffer in silence or offer themselves as they prefer...

The novel recounts the vicissitudes of an English neurosurgeon in his mid-forties, unfolding over the course of a single day, specifically a Saturday (logical, after all, titles have their own reason for being), a rest day for Henry Perowne (the name of our protagonist Doc), where his family comes into play, composed of two adult children, Daisy, a poet, and Theo, a blues guitar player, along with his wife Rosalind who works in the legal field on one side, and the hospital operating room team on the other, not to forget the shady characters who will come into play from early morning to disrupt the quiet life of our hero.

I'll spare you the plot except for a small detail, that is Theo, a convinced bluesman, who receives lessons before turning eighteen from none other than Jack Bruce, yes, that Jack Bruce, musician, composer, singer, bassist, and multi-instrumentalist from Scotland, known primarily for founding Cream along with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker.

Okay (sorry, but these k's are getting really annoying..), I'll add another crucial detail, which is the following: one of the shady characters, Baxter, suffers from Huntington's disease (I won't explain what it is, but I assure you it's better not to suffer from it), and he will severely test the nerves of the family and the reader. I broke into a cold sweat as I read with suspense, line after line.

The novel and the efforts undertaken by Ian McEwan have been appreciated by almost everyone, except for a nitpicking critic from the The New York Review of Books, John Banville, who buried the novel, accusing it of arrogance and inaccuracy, despite the author spending two years researching neurosurgery and personally following a famous neurosurgeon's work in the operating room at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London.

p.s. I haven't mentioned the Castellan grandfather and poet who gets a nice punch in the nose for inviting Baxter to shove a "whatever it's called" up his rear, and now I've said it...