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I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.
McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 
I just finished, Atonement. I thought it was very well-written. Since Woolf is my favorite writer, it was not hard to pick up McEwan’s Woolf-esque style, and then I laughed when he started to reference her in the book.
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I think that’s a good comparison, even though I don’t know Woolf really well. The character of Emily (Briony and Cecily’s mother) reminds me of Mrs Dalloway (I could be making this up; it’s been six years since I read that). Both writers seem to uncover the seething mass of thoughts and feelings beneath the English middle class facade; both get to the experience of being alive.
And Saturday struck me as an even more Woolfish work.
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Only the evening with the writers is sold out. They will both still be speaking during the day sessions, all of which are free.
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