A Jeremy, huérfano desde los ocho años, siempre le han fascinado los padres de sus amigos. En la adolescencia, cuando ellos se rebelaban contra sus padres, él era el buen chico que les acompañaba y satisfacía sus deseos. Ahora, a los cuarenta años, su último amor filial son los padres de su esposa, June y Bernard Tremaine, personas de cierta notoriedad, cuya biografía Jeremy ha decidido escribir. Y así, con la historia de la progresiva reconstrucción de la vida e ideas de los Tremaine, lan McEwan ha escrito una de las novelas clave de nuestra época, un inquietante cuadro bajo cuyos colores se transparenta la textura ideológica de nuestro siglo a partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

written in a careful, poetic way that's still very accessible - a real pleasure. ( )

This is very interesting. The narrator is a man who looses his parents early and spends his teens being semi adopted by his friend's parents. He then finds himself with an almost closer relationship to his in-laws than his wife and her siblings. June & Bernard have a complicated relationship, and he spends a significant proportion of the book preparing notes for a memoir of some description. It pops backwards and forwards in time until, in the final portion, we hear about the great event that June believed changed her life and that Bernard dismisses entirely. Maybe because he was otherwise engaged drawing a caterpillar. It strikes me as an essay in how different people can look at the same event, or hear the same story and take vastly different things from it.
I found it poignant that they clearly cared for each other but were unable to live together. The events that we spend a lot of the book building up to was quite shocking, both in the event and their quite disparate reactions to it. The final portion is quite thought provoking, because of the incident with the black dogs, their plans are changed and the house in France is bought. Does the family owe some of their current happiness to an incident that, to some extent, cause a rift between June & Bernard that persisted for the rest of their lives? We are, each of us, a summation of our life experiences and to change any one of them could change the route through life.
I listened to this and, for once, I think this would have been better read, to enable me to pause and reflect on some of the ideas raised. ( )

Der Ich-Erzähler erzählt die Geschichte seiner Schwiegereltern. Es ist die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Ehe, aber auch die Geschichte einer Abkehr vom politischen Ideal des Kommunismus vom Kriegsende 1945 bis zum Fall der Berliner Mauer.

Ian McEwans Roman kommt schwer in die Gänge. Mühsam skizziert er seine Protagonisten und deren psychische Eigenheiten. Sprachlich überzeugt der Autor, inhaltlich bleibt er jedoch einiges schuldig und hat letztlich ein langatmiges Werk geschaffen in dem er über familiäre Beziehungen, Ängste und menschliches Streben sinniert. ( )

What an odd title but it is very apt. The two black dogs changed June's life but you have to wait till the last chapter to find out the complete story. What really happened is up to interpretation but one of the possibilities is quite terrifying and never articulated. June changed her political views and outlook of life because of her experience with the two dogs; her husband Bernard finds this incredulous and thinks that she is just fitting in facts to what she wants to believe. Therein lies one of the major themes of the book - reality vs perception. Compared to McEwan's other books, I like this. His books are always novel, sometimes so much that I don't know what the point is. At least there is a point to this book. ( )