First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. New York. 1975. Random House. 0394494229. 165 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of short stories, focusing on the awakening sensations of first love and its ritual initiations. This collection won the Somerset Maugham Award. A dominant theme of this short story collection is that of adolescence. As McEwan himself put it in an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer." The book is comprised of eight stories. LAST DAY OF SUMMER is an eerily haunting story of a twelve-year-old boy who, having lost his own mother, finds another mother figure in Jenny, a large woman who comes to stay with him. In HOMEMADE, a self-satisfied teenager is confident in his ability to outperform his friend in every 'adult' discipline: drinking, smoking, etc., until he realizes he is still a virgin. BUTTERFLIES is told through the eyes of a socially isolated man who is not remarkable in any positive way. On one of his walks into his town's decaying underbelly, he meets a young girl and walks with her. On arrival at a deserted dry canal, he demands that she touch his penis, and after this sordid encounter, drowns her. In SOLID GEOMETRY, the narrator shuns his wife, in order to read his great-grandfather's eventful diary. CONVERSATION WITH A CUPBOARD MAN takes the form of a confessional by a man who was treated as a baby by his mother until the age of seventeen, when he was thrown out due to his mother remarrying and forced to fend for himself. COCKER AT THE THEATRE is an account of some acting couples who simulate sex, only to be interrupted by a couple who are having sex for real. FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES tells the tale of a narrator and his teenage lover, Sissel, who enjoy a long summer of love making. DISGUISES involves a boy, Henry, taken under the wing of his eccentric aunt, who puts Henry in elaborate costumes for their evening meals. Things turn strange when Henry is faced with a costume consisting of a girl's wig and frock.
Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.
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