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    Nutshell
    Nutshell
    Nutshell
    Audiobook5 hours

    Nutshell

    Written by Ian McEwan

    Narrated by Rory Kinnear

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the bestselling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 13, 2016
    ISBN9781501936579
    Nutshell
    Author

    Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan (Aldershot, Reino Unido, 1948) se licenció en Literatura Inglesa en la Universidad de Sussex y es uno de los miembros más destacados de su muy brillante generación. En Anagrama se han publicado sus dos libros de relatos, Primer amor, últimos ritos (Premio Somerset Maugham) y Entre las sábanas, las novelas El placer del viajero, Niños en el tiempo (Premio Whitbread y Premio Fémina), El inocente, Los perros negros, Amor perdurable, Amsterdam (Premio Booker), Expiación (que ha obtenido, entre otros premios, el WH Smith Literary Award, el People’s Booker y el Commonwealth Eurasia), Sábado (Premio James Tait Black), En las nubes, Chesil Beach (National Book Award), Solar (Premio Wodehouse), Operación Dulce, La ley del menor, Cáscara de nuez, Máquinas como yo, La cucaracha y Lecciones y el breve ensayo El espacio de la imaginación. McEwan ha sido galardonado con el Premio Shakespeare. Foto © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

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    Reviews for Nutshell

    4/5

    688 ratings80 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be engaging, beautifully written, and immersive. The concept and characters are enjoyable, and the narration is superb. The book is disquieting and unsettling, but it brings joy to the readers. Overall, it is a great audio book that is worth listening to.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Interesting and odd book narrated by a fetus
    • 3/5
      The book is certainly original, narrated from the perspective of a foetus. Apart from this, the premise wasn't clearly established. Why did Claude hate his brother, and Trudy her husband, John, so much that they wanted to kill him? Claude doesn't lack money since he appears to be a fairly successful property developer. And Trudy doesn't need to kill John to be with Claude. Also, this book wasn't written in the crisp Ian McEwan style that is a signature of many of his books.
    • 5/5
      A combination of superb, elegant, and, of all things, hilarious prose performed brilliantly. “Nutshell” is surely one of the English language’s very best audio books - really.
    • 5/5
      Listened to the whole book in one day. Great concept, very engaging. No complaints here.
    • 4/5
      Totally immersive. Beautifully written. Like all his books, disquieting unsettling but a joy to involve
    • 5/5
      As a former doula, this narrator was a best ever! Couldn’t stop listening.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed the concept, narration, and characters very much. Read it yourself if you want to know more.
    • 4/5
      Really well-written of course, but also really unpleasant to read. Ugly story, unlikeable characters, including the narrator. Inventive POV, also a compact book which I appreciate. Wonderful words and sentences. But ugh...
    • 4/5
      This book is an inspired take-off on Hamlet, with nods to other Shakespeare plays, from the point of view of an unborn child. Set in London in 2015, the unnamed narrator hears his mother, Trudy, and uncle, Claude, plotting to kill his father, John Cairncross, a poet. The story follows these nefarious plans and their denouement, while the narrator tries to figure out how to prevent the murder.

      Trudy and Claude are despicable villains. They do not care one whit for the unborn child – they drink and engage in sex about twice an hour (I exaggerate only slightly). The narrator worries what will happen to him after birth. He is articulate and knowledgeable about the world. He engages in philosophical musing and witty observations. The author parodies the “typical” murder mystery.

      The wordplay in this book is delightful: “I’ve no taste for comedy, no inclination to exercise, even if I had the space, no delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason. These admirable radio talks and bulletins, the excellent podcasts that moved me, seem at best hot air, at worst a vaporous stench. The brave polity I’m soon to join, the noble congregation of humanity, its customs, gods and angels, its fiery ideas and brilliant ferment, no longer thrill me. A weight bears down heavily on the canopy that wraps my little frame. There’s hardly enough of me to form one small animal, still less to express a man.”

      I have to love a protagonist who has been listening to poetry, classic literature, news, and podcasts in utero. It is obviously not for anyone looking for a realistic story, but if you enjoy Shakespeare, you will find something to appreciate here. I found it clever and creative.
    • 2/5
      Tiresome, pedantic and whiny. A cranky infant adopting a world-weary tone, sneering at social justice and insulting “inferior” cultures.
    • 3/5
      Three stars, but only because it's McEwan, and he can build up his sentences and wrap emotions around them. On the other hand, I though the main idea of the unborn child point of view wore off with each page, no, to be honest - it got increasingly irritating with time, it is difficult to explain but I think the sentiment is mutual to quite a few readers. Also: the end!? What was that?
    • 4/5
      Amazing writing! Considering the perspective of the unborn child leads me to wonder how much of a mother's disposition is actually shared with her child.
    • 1/5

      I have to say, that blurb does sound sort of interesting, doesn't it? Something a bit different and unique. Something original.


      But I found it quite an irritating read to be honest. The narrator, the baby in the womb, was just so erudite and knew so much about the world at large that I was constantly wondering where he got his information from. Yes, yes he listens to innumerable podcasts about so many different topics, but still. That irritated me.


      Also the whole murder plot was so stupid and ridiculous. The characters were irritating and the whole book felt like a clever short story that had been stretched out too far.


      I guess you could say that this book did very little for me.


      Some of the writing is quite wonderful, but for me personally as a reader, clever writing only gets you so far. I want characters and plot. This had a plot, Hamlet in the womb, but it was half-arsed. It had characters, but they were thinly drawn, after all our narrator could only reveal what he overheard. Or what he imagined, and those imaginings were really really annoying to me, why do I care what an annoying character makes up? It felt like the author was trying to broaden the viewpoint of his foetus while still having him inside the womb. Did not work for me.

    • 3/5
      There are still some parts that are Freudian silly, but this had some genuinely interesting, if confining, concepts. A solid 3.5 stars from me.
    • 4/5
      4.5

      This was a book to enjoy sentence by sentence, not to mention its incredible POV - highly creative and leveraged in a wonderfully entertaining way.

      Hamlet like you've never read!
    • 5/5
      A clever, perfectly conceived twist on Hamlet, narrated by a child in the womb. Really strange concept that works surprisingly well.
    • 4/5
      Narrator's perspective and McEwan's beautiful and sophisticated language use really made this a delight.
    • 4/5
      An unusual novella from the perspective of the unborn child of a woman embroiled in a Hamlet conspiracy. The plot, full of suspense, lacks that significant twist I eagerly expected. But it's highly readable quick read and at times humorous.
    • 4/5
      When I heard that the narrator of Nutshell was an unborn fetus, I had to read it. The fetus is quite an erudite little fellow, having absorbed much knowledge from the podcasts his mother listens to. Accordingly, his first person voice is mature, it’s not like reading someone talking in baby talk.

      The fetus is almost full-term when he figures out that his mother and uncle are having an affair and are planning to kill his father. He loves his mother but his loves father as well. He must try and find a way to put a stop to his mother and uncle’s plot. But how can he do that from inside his mother’s belly?

      This is a very short book so it’s hard to say more about it without giving anything away. It’s definitely worth the read to see how the author accomplishes the unusual concept of a book told from a fetus’s point of view. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Odd

      When my book club pals suggested we read Nutshell, the selling point was "you won't believe the point of view." Our club has read books that tell stories from the point of view of a dog, a dead girl, a drunk, and a madman, so sure, I was game to read this book. The other selling point was the author was Ian McEwan whom we love with a deep readers' passion for his elegant, breathtakingly beautiful story Atonement. We were all in for the ride.

      I suspect the point of view for Nutshell was decided on a dare from other writers, over drinks. "Bet ya can't find a new point of view no one has ever done before." And McEwan, being the talented award-winning author he is, said, "Hold my beer." He tells a story of marital discord from the point of view of a fetus. Yes, a fetus. He has done far more with this story than readers might expect simply because he is a masterful storyteller. There are a few cheats, places in the story in which the main character knows things he could not. And this fetus has McEwan's vocabulary. I had to look up the meaning of lambent (glowing), cludgie (bathroom), and exequy (funeral rites). Thanks for that. But as a book lover, I had to suspend my disbelief with both hands, high overhead, page by page to the bitter end.

      This is my least favorite McEwan book. The literary critics will no doubt hail it as brilliant, groundbreaking, mind-expanding prose. Which will inevitably lead to imitators, heaven protect us. Just as Anne Rice revived interest in vampire stories, should we expect more stories told from in utero? Or will the millennial authors go one step further with stories told from the perspective of inanimate objects, possibly a murder weapon or a pen? Please, no more explorations of life from a womb. Let's all agree it's been done and move on.

      I admire McEwan's talent so much I will read his next book, and try to forget about this one for reminding me with every page that the writer was at work.
    • 3/5
      A bit of a silly plot really when you stand back from it. It could have been based on a Roald Dahl short story - in a way very reminiscent of that author's "Lamb to the slaughter". McEwan had worked it up beyond its real capabilities.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful, well-conceived, well-written book. Unique, in that it follows the planning of a murder from the PoV of a fetus inside the mother's womb, with the co-conspirators being the mother and the paternal uncle, and the victim, the father. Refreshing good read!
    • 5/5
      "I could be bounded in a nutshell -- " said Hamlet. His avatar in this very funny modern version is instead bounded in utero, but this does not prevent him from keeping track of what is going on around him, or from commenting on it. Trudy, the mother of the fetus in question, is engaged in an affair with Claude, brother of Trudy's husband John and the uncle of the fetus. Trudy and Claude are planning to murder John, so that they will inherit his very valuable London townhouse. The story takes off from there, from the point of view of fetus It is very funny: he has strong views on many subjects, including wine, student fragility, and most particularly the behavior of his mother. And he experiences many things, including drunkenness, instability, and sex from a unique perspective. The book plays games with language, with Shakespeare, and with many of the current views of London's educated cosmopolitan class. I was delighted, and will probably go back and read some of the McEwan novels I haven't yet read.
    • 5/5
      His mother Trudy is sleeping with his uncle Claude and yet it still took this oafish reader time to work out who the young prince narrating this murderous tale was supposed to be.

      I loved this. I loved every literary reference, every sex scene and every bit of sarcastic dialog. I read too many perfectly ordinary novels not to be tickled by an extended description of a fetus throttling himself umbilically to avoid the pain of this mortal coil.
    • 4/5
      Masterful semantic gymnastics amid amniotic fluid. The author rambled at times, but astutely pin-pricked reality at other times. Worth reading for its prose, and for its hauntingly fragile protagonist.
    • 4/5
      You know what's all the rage and maybe getting a little overdone? Psychological thrillers. You know what's never been done? Narrating a tale of lovers grown apart, murder, new love, and betrayal from the perspective of a fetus. I don't know where this idea came from, and I don't need to. It was unique and very well written. A tale of this sort needed an experienced writer, which we got in McEwan. The best books are those that end and leave you wanting more and this was one of them.
    • 1/5
      Love triangle. I did not relate to the characters, who could have done with a more even distribution of sympathetic traits. The plot with a fetus as storyteller was mostly weird. Did not finish.
    • 4/5
      Témoin involontaire et impuissant du drame qui se joue autour de lui, le narrateur de cette relecture du ”Hamlet” de Shakespeare est un fœtus au 8e mois de grossesse. Sa mère et son oncle, qui sont amants, s’apprêtent à tuer leur époux et frère, également père de l’enfant à naître. Une histoire qui démarre sur une idée étonnante et originale, dans un style délicieusement caustique, mais qui tient mal la longueur et s’enlise par manque d’enjeu. Car que peut faire un fœtus, aussi intelligent et lucide soit-il, pour éviter un meurtre ?
    • 4/5
      To write a synopsis of this novel feels ridiculous - a modern day telling of Hamlet from the perspective of an unborn baby. Yes, the writing is a bit pretentious (it is McEwan, after all). But, if you can manage a bit of whimsy or briefly suspend disbelief, there is a lot to enjoy here. For one, it is absolutely hilarious, like Family Guy with an intellectual bent. The human nature on display is also believable and sad. I think a wide range of readers would enjoy this one.
    • 5/5
      This is very unique story, not so much from the plot which is a take off the Hamlet story, but because the perspective. The narrator, whose name we never know because he hasn’t been born, is a baby in the womb. I found it fascinating to see how the baby, who obviously can’t see his mother or any of the other characters but only hear them speak, is making up slowly what goes on outside the womb. He starts putting together the plot between his mother and her lover, who turns out to be his father’s brother, to kill his father.
      And this is where the parallel between Nutshell and Hamlet lies. It took me a while to realize this, but Trudy, his mother is actually Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. Claude, his uncle, is the parallel of Claudius, Hamlet’s own uncle. His father is named John although the ghost in Hamlet is not mentioned by name. Further, they kill his father with a poison that he ingests in a smoothie; not by pouring the poison in his ear. Also, the narrator goes into long monologues, akin to Hamlet’s.