Atonement

When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is
finally published, we will only exist as inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

Ian McEvan, Atonement (2001)

I have not written for a good couple of weeks, since the new disappointment
at the Spanish elections, half because I have been pretty busy at work and
half because I have no easy access to the internet during the Holy Week.

Nevertheless, I had time to read and I got round to finish Atonement by Ian McEwan at Easter. It is a truly moving story.

I’ll wait for you was elemental. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.

Reading Atonement has shown me that I still have a long way to go to become a good novelist. And that it is very unlikely that I ever be a great writer. However, that doesn't mean that I should give up writing. Gift, dedication, patience and luck are all necessary. In Briony's words:

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists/. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

Love and freedom.