liked this book so much I bought two more books by Penelope Lively, a novel and a memoir, before I finished reading this one, And as I was reading the final chapters, I thought it could be best summarised as: what if Marilyn was one of us Flighty, ethreal, beautiful, sunny yet unhappy, unseen for her beauty a wife, an aunt, a sister, a lover Like Glyn I am a historian and 'the destruction of archival material offends my deepest instinct'.
Having spent my life interrogating historical data while searching for explanation one soon discovers there are many universal 'truths' and individual admissions, waiting to be found within the many different perceptions, distortions and interpretations.
Historical research and analysis becomes more of an enquiry with the historian asking more questions than positing answers and so the inherent difficulty of revealing long buried truths is soon apparent.
So it is with this wretched photograph capturing a moment of intimacy where Kath and Nick are illicitly holding hands, This brief episode will throw many people into a real quandary,
So, as a septuagenarian I must ask myself the same question: do I prepare a dossier of Q amp A for my descendants and leave behind explanations of behaviour, and paint a picture 'warts and all' of a parent who did his best in life, but will have disappointed at times.
Judged by contemporaries and later by my heirs I will probably be found wanting in so many different ways, So, should I leave my children the answers to many questions they will be desperate to answer when I'm gone, Or does one leave this world with all the difficult questions one's children would love to ask unanswered, and leave reputations unsullied, If one leaves behind previously unknown and potentially explosive material, as in this story with an intimate photograph, then one is inevitably opening a 'can of worms' and likely disappointment and maybe heartache.
Kath did leave Glyn, her husband, the option of destroying rather than reading some 'truths' but who can resist the challenge of opening an envelope marked 'Don't OpenDestroy.
' Not anyone with any curiosity about the world and their place in it, So we read this story wondering, as the narrative unfolds bringing more casualties into its wake, whether Kath should have destroyed the photograph rather than keep it, This would have saved those closest to her any retrospective angst and some troubled months revisiting episodes from the past and reordering and realigning those memories,
The question of whether people of advancing years, like Glyn and Elaine, should simply accept these things happen in life, What has gone before is now buried in the past, so leave some stones unturned, and move on, This feeling was central to my reading, but younger generations might well view indiscretions and infidelities very differently, Toleration and acceptance to a greater degree are the preserve of the elderly, who are less judgemental,
I was impressed by the author's ability to tell her story by creating so many convincing characters, each with a distinctive voice, and personality traits, although the most interesting and perceptive of them all is Mary, a potter, outside the immediate family, whose task is to draw all the loose strands together which she does neatly at the end.
Penelope Lively is an author of some merit and distinction and her tale unfolds with compelling force, Will this make me change my mind about leaving that personal dossier, Maybe or maybe not. Indiscretions forgivable or not like all secrets should be buried with the dead, I think this is my first Penelope Lively book, And I am so glad that one of my goodreads friends recently discovered her with this book and gave it a great review this prompted my request from my library.
Ms. Lively waswhen this book was first published and she has a lengthy award winning list of previous books before that, I look forward to reading more by this master,
The story line is quite compelling and all revolves around said Photograph, The photograph contains the image of a now deceased woman and her husband accidentally discovers it,
The POV shifts constantly and allows a story to unfold about this dead woman Kath, By the end of the book we have a clearer understanding of Kath and what the passage of time and memories can do to each of our stories, For it is only the stories that remain at the end, . whether written, oral or images,
I raced through it and only had to use a dictionary about a dozen times so I not only had a very enjoyable couple of long weekend afternoon reading sessions but also learned some new vocab.
Winwin! An intriguing story. Kath the wife of Glyn is dead and he discovers a photograph that indicates she was having an affair, Only Kath is a nice person, None of the other characters are likeable, Her husband who was to obsessed in her work, Elaine the garden designer also obsessed with her work and not prone to emotions, Nick her husband a likeable leech on his wife who isbut never grew up and Polly the daughter, Oliver, Nicks ex work partner who took the photograph,
I think the author wanted to show that while someones life may look happy that underneath the exterior all may not be well, In Kaths case she needed a good therapist and someone she could talk to, The ending left us in a bit of limbo and how people hate change and will tolerate many things, Including an idiotic husband. My second experience of Penelope Lively and though I quite liked aspects of this book it was also a confirmation that she's never going to be one of my favourite authors.
The novel has an interesting hook a husband stumbles upon a group photo in which his dead wife is covertly holding hands with her sister's husband, Glyn, the husband, is compelled to reorganise his memories of his wife,
The chief problem for me was how overly neat and tidy the novel is in terms of architectural detail, I like to feel an author's unconsciousness is participating in the novel she writes that we get some brilliant searing flares lighting up the dark, This felt like a novel entirely forged by the rational part of the mind, Almost everything is too conveniently appropriate to the thesis Lively is expounding, Glyn, the husband, for example is a landscape historian Elaine the sister of Kath is a landscape gardener, Thus the two central characters are called upon to do emotionally what they do professionally which felt clumsily contrived to me, Then there's the relentless awfulness of both Glyn and his sisterinlaw Elaine, Lively is writing about the elusive nature of identity and yet creates a couple of rigid clichéd workaholics to do her detective work, A lot more nuance in her creation of
characters and relationships was called for, And just in case we're feeling any sympathy for Glyn or Elaine for Kath's betrayal we find out they also had a brief affair, So we've got still more tidy symmetry now, Paradoxically though the book is rather messy and rambling, Even Kath herself isn't ultimately very interesting or even convincing and her "mysteriousness" is eventually given a very simplistic explanation, There's a feeling everything Kath does she does because the plot needs her to, She's a character without organic autonomy,
Neither did Lively's style of writing win me over, It's chatty and loose and very easy to read, like she's writing for readers of popular fiction, Ultimately, I think this novel proves to me that great novels aren't designed from start to finish on a drawing board, The author should be making new discoveries as she writes, should be uncovering deeper layers of meaning, This, on the other hand, is an overly theorised novel bereft of revelation, Id been hoping to read another Lively soon and then I happened to eavesdrop on an online conversation between two writers, one saying she couldnt stop thinking of this novel and the other saying she kept trying to figure out how Lively “did it”, which by that I took to mean its structure.
I was intrigued enough to immediately request it from the library,
While I do not feel the level of obsession over this novel the two writers felt, I understand it, In fact, obsession is one of its themesthe understandable, though selfish, compulsion to reorder memories after learning a key piece of knowledge not discovered until years later,
Those who should be closest to the hovering, deceased lifeforce of the novel do not see her for who she is: the most perceptive is not a family member but one who doesnt take her for granted and another we hear from much later.
The disparate voices eventually come together in what I keep thinking is a gentle way, though the topic is not a gentle one: perhaps that is due to Livelys prose that seems to understand and encompass all.
Thank you, thank you, Penelope Lively, At a time when I really needed a good writer to tell a good story about real grownups dealing with real situations, this novel came along,
At the outset, landscape historian Glyn is rummaging around for a paper he needs and finds an old photograph kept by his wife, who had died some years before.
In it, she is seen surreptitiously holding hands with his brotherinlaw, Nick, This starts him out on a journey to discover what was going on, and more importantly, to find out whether his memory of his wife is deeply flawed,
In the process, we meet Nick, a perpetual boy living off his successful landscape designer wife, Elaine, Both are drawn so skillfully by Lively that you can be disgusted with Nick's fecklessness and attracted to him at the same time, and you can admire Elaine's courage and work ethic while still seeing the emotional distance she imposes on others.
Floating through it all is enigmatic Kath, Elaine's beautiful sister, who is dead and whose image now has to be reshaped by everyone who knew her,
Like so many good novels about the human condition, this is not a story filled with action or plot twists or sudden shocks it is more like real life, compelling and absorbing and meaningful in quieter and more complicated ways.
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