The Cement Garden is a 1978 novel by Ian McEwan. It was adapted into a 1993 film of the same name, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson. A quote from the script (as spoken by Gainsbourg in the film) is featured in the introduction to the...
"The patio" is a term used by estate agents to describe any collection of paving stones that is loosely attached to a house. Builders like patios because they give an illusion of order to a new house. They push all the muck they should...
THE CEMENT GARDEN Directed and written by: Andrew Birkin Starring: Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sinead Cusack Playing at: Copley Place Unrated (nudity, adult themes, incest) "The Cement Garden" is never lacking in nerve. Based on Ian McEwan's 1978...
Privacy is one of the imaginative poles of a story [The Cement Garden] whose ambiguities tease and fascinate me the more I reflect on it. McEwan's imagination moves between extremes of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, and he offers a series of charged phrases, images and atmospheres which give his story a mythic direction. Both domestic privacy and its opposite—society—are present in the young narrator's observation "I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community...
["The Cement Garden"] is really a kind of extended dream, although there's nothing dreamy about the precision and clarity of the writing. Its narrator, Jack, is a 15-year-old English boy so sunk in self-loathing that there are long stretches when he can't even be bothered to bathe or brush his teeth. Jack's father is a crabbed, oppressive man …; his mother is not much more than a shadow, and their neighborhood is a wasteland of abandoned prefabs. Life here seems smo...
