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"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years. Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively's life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain's twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey-including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands"--… (meer)
Years ago Penelope Lively surprised me with "Moon tiger", a misleading autobiographical exploration of the past of a rather eccentric woman. It seemed to me that Lively had made it her trademark in literature to explore the vigour and reality of the past, because the theme is also dealt with in other books. She wrote this booklet at the age of 80, in her own modest style, as a "view from old day". She muses about the passing of time (getting faster as you get older), the inconveniences and challenges of aging, the benefits of 'becoming slightly invisible', and especially the blessing of memory, as an instrument for travelling through the past. Lively recalls personal memories, quite jumpy and random; she dwells for a long time on the bliss of reading (“it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling…”) and brings a nice ode to books. But above all she opens a perspective on old age as a kind of liberating phase in life: “I think there is a sea-change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that your are still in. Spring was never so vibrant, autumn never so richly gold.” Maybe Lively opens a lot of open doors, and offers no more than some musings that will mainly be enjoyed by the fans, but oh well, she does so with style. And last but not least, she reminds us of her most important lesson in life: that the past really exists, is real in our lives, if only in the form of a few ancient earthenware plates with leaping fish on it: “The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.” ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
JACK - in memory
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
The world is full of widows - several among my closer friends. We have each know that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage - forty-one years for me : alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no-one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience - everywhere, always - so get on with it and don't behave as if you're uniquely afflicted.
[Aged 16, at the London Library] "for some obscure reason I ordered Hakluyt's Voyages Round the World. It arrived on a trolley, in several volumes, and I sat stolidly reading for a week, unable to admit to a mistake."
Autobiographical memory is random, non-sequential, capricious, and without it we are undone.
Memory has acquired some merciful ability to close up, to diminish the worst passages of [more] recent life. For me, the awful summer and autumn of Jack's illness - the hospital months, the last weeks at home - are now not time but a series of images I cannot lose.
If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.
Sixty years or so of fiction reading now, for me. A torrent of story poured in, much of it forgotten entirely, a good deal half remembered, some so significant that I go back again and again. I have had fitful relationships with some writers….I can’t abide Barbara Pym—enjoyed her once.
Laatste woorden
Ontwarringsbericht
Uitgevers redacteuren
Auteur van flaptekst/aanprijzing
Oorspronkelijke taal
Gangbare DDC/MDS
Canonieke LCC
▾Verwijzingen
Verwijzingen naar dit werk in externe bronnen.
Wikipedia in het Engels
Geen
▾Boekbeschrijvingen
"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years. Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively's life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain's twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey-including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands"--
Google Books — Bezig met laden...
(4.03)
3
Lively recalls personal memories, quite jumpy and random; she dwells for a long time on the bliss of reading (“it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling…”) and brings a nice ode to books. But above all she opens a perspective on old age as a kind of liberating phase in life: “I think there is a sea-change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that your are still in. Spring was never so vibrant, autumn never so richly gold.”
Maybe Lively opens a lot of open doors, and offers no more than some musings that will mainly be enjoyed by the fans, but oh well, she does so with style. And last but not least, she reminds us of her most important lesson in life: that the past really exists, is real in our lives, if only in the form of a few ancient earthenware plates with leaping fish on it: “The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.” (