 | By: Penelope Lively Binding: Paperback Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0141021195 ISBN-13: 9780141021195 Released: 03 Aug 2006 RRP: Average Rating:  |
Only Lively knows how successful this was in removing writer's block & other ills of the professional. We have a selection of the good results. The one I liked was 'Transatlantic' which tells the story of a women, Carol, who has made here home in America & is visiting, with her England Harvard Professor husband. They make a journey to meet in their home an aunt & here husband which have retired to the country. The reader comes to realise that this couple a frozen into the conservative English attitudes which Carol has left. There is no longer any empathy between the past & the present as it were. The move to America has cut off Carol from her past. Lively makes the embarrassment of the meeting palpable for Carol, thought her husband the reader is led to feel simple switches into the polite courtesies of New England on meeting strange people.
I was left not quite sure about the moral to be drawn, except perhaps that Lively had made the right decision not to make her home in the USA if she wanted to continue to draw on her biography formed in England.
Penelope Lively begins with an introduction to the real circumstances, & ends with an afterward as to the actual outcome. She surmises some directing factor in her childhood that has been constant in her life - that she was programmed to become addicted to reading & writing, to prefer thoughtful, argumentative men & to want children. Unlike her mother who was happy enough to give complete custody to her father during their divorce when Penelope was 12.
'What If' she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? Penelope Lively's first chapter describes an escape by boat to Capetown as a smalll child & the resultant changes.
'What If' she had gone to the Arts Balll with an older man dressed in jeans & shirt as a heady rite of passage - but suppose, in those pre-pill days, she had become pregnant, & faced social disgrace as a single mother, or death through a backstreet abortion.
'What If' she was a student on an archaeological dig & didn't believe she would live long because of the threat of the "bomb' in the 1970's. Is this comparable to the threat we feel today of the "bomb"?
'What If" she had not met the Englishman who became her beloved husband, but instead went on to postgraduate school in America & married an American?
'What If', her writing had not been appreciated & her writings had not become novels? Penelope Lively was a lonely child & delved into reading which brought her to her writing.
Penelope Lively goes on "When you're making climactic decisions, they do alll cluster in younger life. Most of my crucial decisions seem to have been taken before the age of 25," she reflects. "I have always been fascinated by the business of choice & contingency, the way in which we think we make choices but we're directed by contingent events, from the little things like the car that won't start, to the large directives of history. Choice & contingency land you where you are, & the whole process seems so precarious, you look back at those moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction." This book is everybody's daydreams made real. What might have been.. What If? Highly Recommended. prisrob
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