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Moon Tiger
The elderly Claudia Hampton, a best-selling author of popular history, lies alone in a London hospital bed. Memories of her life still glow in her fading consciousness, but she imagines writing a history of the world. Instead, Moon Tiger is her own history, the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends. At its center — forever frozen in time, the still point of her turning world — is the cruelly truncated affair with Tom, a British tank commander whom Claudia knew as a reporter in Egypt during World War II.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
Penelope Lively
120 books869 followersPenelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.
Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began.
She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.
Penelope Lively lives in London. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998.
Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began.
She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.
Penelope Lively lives in London. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998.
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March 16, 2023
Update March 2023: The Booker Prize just put out a beutiful interview with the author for her 90th Birthday. Here is the YouTube link
2nd prize Favourite books 2021
I never seem to learn that I should not leave too much time between the moment I finish a novel and the moment I write my review. I would avoid staring at the computer without any idea about what to write. Now I will end up with: I loved this book so much, I do not know exactly why. Ok, it is not entirely true, I think I know why but I cannot put it into words. The language of this book was amazing. it really spoke to me.
Moon Tiger is the kind of novel that divides opinion, mainly because of the narrator who might be considered an opinionated, egotistic and unlikable character. I loved her. I found her fresh and fascinating.
The novel starts with Claudia, old and terminally ill in a hospital. She decides to use the time left to search through her memories and write a history of the world.
„A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not. Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents. (...)There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world(...)The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. (...) Self-centred? Probably. Aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation??”
The story jumps in time from the hospital bed to Claudia’s most important moments of her life. She was a powerful and opinionated woman, not caring what others thought of her. She was a controversial historian, and defied conventions in her personal life. However, by doing what she wanted she managed to hurt a few people, especially her family. We follow her close and strange relationship with her brother, her stay in Egypt during WW2, her most important love encounters and the relationship with her daughter.
There are three narrative voices in this novel: 1st person narration of Claudia, 3rd person omniscient narration from Claudia POV and 3rd person omniscient narration from another character’s POV repeating some scenes previously narrated by Claudia. I am not exactly sure what was the aim of repeating some scenes from two different POVs but it worked for me although there wasn’t too much added to the story.
I have been trying to understand the title. The narrator mentions it in the following paragraph:
„She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.” I wander is she refers to life burning away without anything being left behind, only the ash. She mentions that she will remain present for a while in the some people’s memories and that she will be then forgotten so my idea has some plausibility.
The best part of the novel was Claudia’s time spent in Egypt, the way war and the country was presented and also the love story she experienced there. I could see that the author lived there and she really knew Egypt well. The ending felt less well thought than the rest of the book. I could not understand the need to include some episodes from Claudia’s life; some new characters did not fit well with the rest of the novel. Also, a plot twist happens that I really did not like and thought it shouldn't be in this novel. I will chose to forget about it because I am tired of reading about the subject in too many novels.
The more I read, the less I seem to find books that really speak to me. Moon Tiger was one of those, flawed but perfect for me when I read it. I will leave you below with some of the passages that I loved.
“Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.”
“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”
“I arrived in Egypt alone in 1940; I was alone when I left in 1944. When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine – ours – is the only evidence.”
“Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.”
2nd prize Favourite books 2021
I never seem to learn that I should not leave too much time between the moment I finish a novel and the moment I write my review. I would avoid staring at the computer without any idea about what to write. Now I will end up with: I loved this book so much, I do not know exactly why. Ok, it is not entirely true, I think I know why but I cannot put it into words. The language of this book was amazing. it really spoke to me.
Moon Tiger is the kind of novel that divides opinion, mainly because of the narrator who might be considered an opinionated, egotistic and unlikable character. I loved her. I found her fresh and fascinating.
The novel starts with Claudia, old and terminally ill in a hospital. She decides to use the time left to search through her memories and write a history of the world.
„A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not. Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents. (...)There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world(...)The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. (...) Self-centred? Probably. Aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation??”
The story jumps in time from the hospital bed to Claudia’s most important moments of her life. She was a powerful and opinionated woman, not caring what others thought of her. She was a controversial historian, and defied conventions in her personal life. However, by doing what she wanted she managed to hurt a few people, especially her family. We follow her close and strange relationship with her brother, her stay in Egypt during WW2, her most important love encounters and the relationship with her daughter.
There are three narrative voices in this novel: 1st person narration of Claudia, 3rd person omniscient narration from Claudia POV and 3rd person omniscient narration from another character’s POV repeating some scenes previously narrated by Claudia. I am not exactly sure what was the aim of repeating some scenes from two different POVs but it worked for me although there wasn’t too much added to the story.
I have been trying to understand the title. The narrator mentions it in the following paragraph:
„She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.” I wander is she refers to life burning away without anything being left behind, only the ash. She mentions that she will remain present for a while in the some people’s memories and that she will be then forgotten so my idea has some plausibility.
The best part of the novel was Claudia’s time spent in Egypt, the way war and the country was presented and also the love story she experienced there. I could see that the author lived there and she really knew Egypt well. The ending felt less well thought than the rest of the book. I could not understand the need to include some episodes from Claudia’s life; some new characters did not fit well with the rest of the novel. Also, a plot twist happens that I really did not like and thought it shouldn't be in this novel. I will chose to forget about it because I am tired of reading about the subject in too many novels.
The more I read, the less I seem to find books that really speak to me. Moon Tiger was one of those, flawed but perfect for me when I read it. I will leave you below with some of the passages that I loved.
“Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.”
“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.”
“I arrived in Egypt alone in 1940; I was alone when I left in 1944. When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine – ours – is the only evidence.”
“Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.”
November 10, 2023
[U]nless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
We are like waves in a vast ocean moving forward to break upon the shore and vanish, yet the ocean remains. Each wave has it’s own narrative, each person a starring role in the story of their own lives, yet all of us are a collective ocean of minor and major roles coming and going from the larger narrative of human history. Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger examines ‘the intimate debris of people’s lives’ through a sweeping century of history at its calms and most tumultuous moments while also being highly personal and private through the lens of Claudia Hampton and her close acquaintances. Though Moon Tiger was dismissed as the ‘housewife’s choice’ upon reception of the Booker Prize in 1987, do not let this misogynistic slight discourage you; this novel has teeth and bites with a walloping dose of grit through a mosaic masterwork of love, loss, war, incest and the fragile ties between people that bind and break. Moon Tiger moves with the ebb and flow of history, deftly sashaying across the lifespan of Claudia Hampton in a kaleidoscopic narrative that highlights the friction of lives passing and ricocheting with one another as well the human will in conflict with the horrors of history.
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
As the novel opens, Claudia is dying slowly of stomach cancer and reflecting back over her life. She ‘does seem to have been someone’ as her doctor muses reading her charts--Claudia the historian, writer, mother, etc.--but Lively isn’t concerned with the accomplishments and signposts of a life, but rather the stories that surround them. Claudia will likely come across as thorny, and perhaps even unlikeable, to most readers but there is a real charm to be found in her fierce independence and will, and, as one finds with most people, the more you get immersed in her life the more you come to an understanding and sympathy for her. The stories that serve as scars and impetus for personality quirks are the gateways to empathy as well as the immortal residue of lives that linger on in the memories of those closest to us. ‘We all survive in the heads of others,’ says Claudia, and our stories live on because ‘words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.’ Claudia reflects early on about a photograph of a village street in which the photographer let the exposure go for sixty minutes. The result is that those who passed down the street during this time do not appear in the photograph due to the exposure length. ‘A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world,’ Claudia says of it, ‘Gone, passed through and away.’ Stories, then, are the way we grapple with the reality of our impermanence and assuage the pain caused by the impermanence of those we love.
‘The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.’
While Moon Tiger is a novel of love--be it love found and lost or love neglected--it is also a love story to language and the way it shapes history. Many of the characters are occupied with preserving history: Claudia as a historian of questionable academic accuracy; Jaspar and his work on a war-glorifying television series; or Tom’s war diary where he needs to ‘get yesterday down while I still have the taste of it.’ Claudia tells us that ‘once it is all written down we know what really happened,’ because we use language to assess and process life while also digesting it in narrative form as if to secure our role in the immortality of history.
We are ‘a people obsessed with mortality’ and the fascination and fear of death subconsciously makes its way into many of our actions and relationships. Claudia’s callus impression and treatment of Lisa is linked to the child she did not have. ‘Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that?’ Tom says to Claudia. ‘It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’ Our relationships and holds we keep on others assures us a tiny piece of us will go on without us. We are constantly trying to dig our heels into history in hopes of not being washed away by it. Most notable is Claudia’s relationship with her brother Gordon. ‘Incest is closely related to narcissism,’ Claudia muses. The incestual realtionship is a key to understanding Claudia, who openly admits to being self-centered (‘aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation?’), as it reflects the desire to love oneself and one’s existence. ‘We looked at one another and saw ourselves translated...we were an aristocracy of two,’ she says. It’s a way of joining her childhood past to her present, embracing all the past Claudias and past Gordons and their youthful camaraderie, like fortifying the lifeline. The incestual aspects also nudge towards the idea of nobility, keeping the crown and power within a noble bloodline as if in hopes of an immortality. While it is never made factually clear if there was ever actualization to the incestual tendedencies, there is a dance sequence between the two in which Lively joyfully toys with such overtly sexual language that even the most prudish reader will pick up that something is sexually implicit in the metaphor.
‘’Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing.’
A tidy summary Moon Tiger’s plot would be a massive disservice to the novel. Unadorned by style and voice, Moon Tiger doesn’t sound relatively fresh, we follow the life from cradle to grave--her affairs, budding romance with a dashing soldier, successes, failures, etc--all played out on the stage of historical context. ‘There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world,’ Claudia admits as she sets up the rather meta-narrative of the novel:
Another refreshing and engaging stylistic choice are the multiple voices that help the story spiral around in a whirlwind of overlapping and incongruous perspectives. We witness the same event from several vantage points and have to conclude for ourselves what is ‘truth’. Lively utilizes this narrative structure to examine the dramatic ironies of life, probing the psychology of secrets we take to the soil with us, the lies we tell, and examines how much of the hurt we inflict on others is due to misunderstanding or acting on half-understood information. Lively’s prose is very fluid and adapts into multiple unique and distinctive voices that function effortlessly and adds authenticity to the style instead of condemning it to gimmickry.
I began Moon Tiger on a plane trip across the Atlantic. It seemed the perfect context to begin the novel as I was hoping to force myself to ignore the contexts of time to avoid jet-lag on a trip that felt more like fiction than reality. This became the first of an international bookclub between my partner and I, reading it back and forth to each other over Skype as we were still living separated by the ocean (this book is particularly exciting to read aloud as it offers multiple voices to switch between). There is something to be said about the power of good literature here: it binds people. Look at this wonderful community of readers on Goodreads, coming together over shared love for novels despite distance, culture, age, social standings, etc. Like the characters in the novel, we are all finding way to plant ourselves in the world, in the lives of others, and opening our hearts to allow others to grow within us like a seed of memory. We write about the books, about our experience reading the books, wrapping our personal narratives with the novel’s own, and with the larger community of readers. Shared love for a book becomes a way to share love. That is something very important we need to continue to embrace in a world where we are all marching towards an inevitable end. Love each other, remember those you love, share your stories. Much like Claudia’s assertion, we understand history through the written word. We are all chroniclers of the new horizons, the poets and historians of the present. We cannot stop death, but at least we can live on regardless. Moon Tiger is an extraordinary book with a fascinating, strong and fiercely independent female lead (though she does come with a certain amount of white privilege that is impossible to ignore) and no one who reads her story will forget her. Words live on, and so we write.
5/5
‘Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no, You are not absent so long as you are in my head. That, of course, is not what you meant; you were thinking of the extinction of the flesh. But it is true; I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.’
We are like waves in a vast ocean moving forward to break upon the shore and vanish, yet the ocean remains. Each wave has it’s own narrative, each person a starring role in the story of their own lives, yet all of us are a collective ocean of minor and major roles coming and going from the larger narrative of human history. Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger examines ‘the intimate debris of people’s lives’ through a sweeping century of history at its calms and most tumultuous moments while also being highly personal and private through the lens of Claudia Hampton and her close acquaintances. Though Moon Tiger was dismissed as the ‘housewife’s choice’ upon reception of the Booker Prize in 1987, do not let this misogynistic slight discourage you; this novel has teeth and bites with a walloping dose of grit through a mosaic masterwork of love, loss, war, incest and the fragile ties between people that bind and break. Moon Tiger moves with the ebb and flow of history, deftly sashaying across the lifespan of Claudia Hampton in a kaleidoscopic narrative that highlights the friction of lives passing and ricocheting with one another as well the human will in conflict with the horrors of history.
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
As the novel opens, Claudia is dying slowly of stomach cancer and reflecting back over her life. She ‘does seem to have been someone’ as her doctor muses reading her charts--Claudia the historian, writer, mother, etc.--but Lively isn’t concerned with the accomplishments and signposts of a life, but rather the stories that surround them. Claudia will likely come across as thorny, and perhaps even unlikeable, to most readers but there is a real charm to be found in her fierce independence and will, and, as one finds with most people, the more you get immersed in her life the more you come to an understanding and sympathy for her. The stories that serve as scars and impetus for personality quirks are the gateways to empathy as well as the immortal residue of lives that linger on in the memories of those closest to us. ‘We all survive in the heads of others,’ says Claudia, and our stories live on because ‘words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.’ Claudia reflects early on about a photograph of a village street in which the photographer let the exposure go for sixty minutes. The result is that those who passed down the street during this time do not appear in the photograph due to the exposure length. ‘A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world,’ Claudia says of it, ‘Gone, passed through and away.’ Stories, then, are the way we grapple with the reality of our impermanence and assuage the pain caused by the impermanence of those we love.
‘The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.’
While Moon Tiger is a novel of love--be it love found and lost or love neglected--it is also a love story to language and the way it shapes history. Many of the characters are occupied with preserving history: Claudia as a historian of questionable academic accuracy; Jaspar and his work on a war-glorifying television series; or Tom’s war diary where he needs to ‘get yesterday down while I still have the taste of it.’ Claudia tells us that ‘once it is all written down we know what really happened,’ because we use language to assess and process life while also digesting it in narrative form as if to secure our role in the immortality of history.
When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy.Language and memory commingle, ‘you keep the dead with you forever and deny the possibility of your own annihilation,’ as if composing the narrative filled with anecdotes of the dead place the storyteller on a God-like pedestal of creation in hopes of retaining the immortality of the Creator’s role.
We are ‘a people obsessed with mortality’ and the fascination and fear of death subconsciously makes its way into many of our actions and relationships. Claudia’s callus impression and treatment of Lisa is linked to the child she did not have. ‘Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that?’ Tom says to Claudia. ‘It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’ Our relationships and holds we keep on others assures us a tiny piece of us will go on without us. We are constantly trying to dig our heels into history in hopes of not being washed away by it. Most notable is Claudia’s relationship with her brother Gordon. ‘Incest is closely related to narcissism,’ Claudia muses. The incestual realtionship is a key to understanding Claudia, who openly admits to being self-centered (‘aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation?’), as it reflects the desire to love oneself and one’s existence. ‘We looked at one another and saw ourselves translated...we were an aristocracy of two,’ she says. It’s a way of joining her childhood past to her present, embracing all the past Claudias and past Gordons and their youthful camaraderie, like fortifying the lifeline. The incestual aspects also nudge towards the idea of nobility, keeping the crown and power within a noble bloodline as if in hopes of an immortality. While it is never made factually clear if there was ever actualization to the incestual tendedencies, there is a dance sequence between the two in which Lively joyfully toys with such overtly sexual language that even the most prudish reader will pick up that something is sexually implicit in the metaphor.
‘’Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing.’
A tidy summary Moon Tiger’s plot would be a massive disservice to the novel. Unadorned by style and voice, Moon Tiger doesn’t sound relatively fresh, we follow the life from cradle to grave--her affairs, budding romance with a dashing soldier, successes, failures, etc--all played out on the stage of historical context. ‘There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world,’ Claudia admits as she sets up the rather meta-narrative of the novel:
The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.Lively’s refreshing pace with it’s mosaic technique avoids linear chronology and, quite rightly so, favours an introspective emotional climactic discovery and delivery over a natural climax of plot. It also allows for a refracted image of each character, seeing them in different times and ages with each flip of the page which enables us to sift through their lives in a way to best pinpoint what makes them Them and examine aspects of personality in isolated incident instead of focusing on overall development (rest assured to those who prefer character development over character study, the principal cast are blissfully well developed over the course of the novel) and cause and effect of personality. ‘In my head, Jaspar is fragmented: there are many Jaspars, disordered, without chronology. As there are many Gordons, many Claudias.’ The effect also allows the progression of the novel to assess aspects of Claudia in a way that makes cause and effect more like a mystery to unravel--had the novel been linear certain emotional reveals would have carried little weight. Though Laszlo enters Claudia’s world in her forties, not introducing the character until the final segments of the novel builds for a redemptive conclusion to her poor mother skills personality plotlines.
Another refreshing and engaging stylistic choice are the multiple voices that help the story spiral around in a whirlwind of overlapping and incongruous perspectives. We witness the same event from several vantage points and have to conclude for ourselves what is ‘truth’. Lively utilizes this narrative structure to examine the dramatic ironies of life, probing the psychology of secrets we take to the soil with us, the lies we tell, and examines how much of the hurt we inflict on others is due to misunderstanding or acting on half-understood information. Lively’s prose is very fluid and adapts into multiple unique and distinctive voices that function effortlessly and adds authenticity to the style instead of condemning it to gimmickry.
I began Moon Tiger on a plane trip across the Atlantic. It seemed the perfect context to begin the novel as I was hoping to force myself to ignore the contexts of time to avoid jet-lag on a trip that felt more like fiction than reality. This became the first of an international bookclub between my partner and I, reading it back and forth to each other over Skype as we were still living separated by the ocean (this book is particularly exciting to read aloud as it offers multiple voices to switch between). There is something to be said about the power of good literature here: it binds people. Look at this wonderful community of readers on Goodreads, coming together over shared love for novels despite distance, culture, age, social standings, etc. Like the characters in the novel, we are all finding way to plant ourselves in the world, in the lives of others, and opening our hearts to allow others to grow within us like a seed of memory. We write about the books, about our experience reading the books, wrapping our personal narratives with the novel’s own, and with the larger community of readers. Shared love for a book becomes a way to share love. That is something very important we need to continue to embrace in a world where we are all marching towards an inevitable end. Love each other, remember those you love, share your stories. Much like Claudia’s assertion, we understand history through the written word. We are all chroniclers of the new horizons, the poets and historians of the present. We cannot stop death, but at least we can live on regardless. Moon Tiger is an extraordinary book with a fascinating, strong and fiercely independent female lead (though she does come with a certain amount of white privilege that is impossible to ignore) and no one who reads her story will forget her. Words live on, and so we write.
5/5
‘Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no, You are not absent so long as you are in my head. That, of course, is not what you meant; you were thinking of the extinction of the flesh. But it is true; I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.’
June 10, 2023
Tiger tiger burning bright
The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.
How can a novel in which the protagonist is lying in a hospital room awaiting death be so voraciously vivid?
Lately watching Fortunes of war (with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh based on Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies, the desert scenes in Egypt joined with reading excerpts from the memoir of the British soldier-poet Keith Douglas on El Alamein (in November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of the Second World War by Peter Englund), I was reminded of this brilliant novel, Penelope Lively’s, effervescent, soaringly lyrical prose still burning incandescently in my memory, like the green coil that embodies the eventful life of Claudia Hampton, the protagonist:
She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.
(Evelyn Axell, Tiger Woman (Autoportrait), 1964)
This book left me awestruck as it had simply everything I enjoy and admire in a novel (who said a reader needs a likeable protagonist when you can have the arrogant, eloquent and astonishingly smart Claudia Hampton instead?). Endlessly quotable, it is a sensuous feast of iridescent sentences, incisive insights and erudite reflections on history and science, the power of language, the complexity of family relationships and the indomitability of love and dreams.
I created a new shelf for this kind of intense books to remind myself of the need to revisit them, inspired by a friend’s comment pinpointing Javier Marias’ work as ‘high voltage’ literature.
Thank you again Paul, for making me aware of this sublime writer.
The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.
How can a novel in which the protagonist is lying in a hospital room awaiting death be so voraciously vivid?
Lately watching Fortunes of war (with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh based on Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies, the desert scenes in Egypt joined with reading excerpts from the memoir of the British soldier-poet Keith Douglas on El Alamein (in November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of the Second World War by Peter Englund), I was reminded of this brilliant novel, Penelope Lively’s, effervescent, soaringly lyrical prose still burning incandescently in my memory, like the green coil that embodies the eventful life of Claudia Hampton, the protagonist:
She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.
(Evelyn Axell, Tiger Woman (Autoportrait), 1964)
This book left me awestruck as it had simply everything I enjoy and admire in a novel (who said a reader needs a likeable protagonist when you can have the arrogant, eloquent and astonishingly smart Claudia Hampton instead?). Endlessly quotable, it is a sensuous feast of iridescent sentences, incisive insights and erudite reflections on history and science, the power of language, the complexity of family relationships and the indomitability of love and dreams.
I created a new shelf for this kind of intense books to remind myself of the need to revisit them, inspired by a friend’s comment pinpointing Javier Marias’ work as ‘high voltage’ literature.
Thank you again Paul, for making me aware of this sublime writer.
July 8, 2020
“The voice of history, of course, is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others, naturally. My story is tangled with the stories of others – Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other person above all; their voices must be heard also, thus shall I abide by the conventions of history. I shall respect the laws of evidence. Of truth, whatever that may be. But truth is tied to words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.”
If you were to read an account of the settling of America by the founding fathers, this ‘history’ would be completely different from the one that would have been written by the Native Americans, had our ancestors allowed such a narrative to be considered. If you were to ask me or my mother about my childhood, you would very likely hear two distinct versions of that tale. One might focus on pain and frustration, perhaps unfairly so, while the other would express joy and sacrifice. Which story is the ‘right’ story? They would likely both be correct in their own fashion, but what we learn as ‘truth’ depends on what we read and with whom we converse.
“There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.”
If I had a list of unlikable characters that I admired despite all faults, Claudia Hampton would be ranked near the very top (she has her fair share, at least according to others and even herself!). This slim novel will be esteemed as one of my prized possessions. When I turned the last page, I very nearly began all over again. I simply loved everything about it – the structure, the voice, the setting, and the prose. I wanted to climb out of my life and into another!
We meet Claudia as she lies in the hospital during her final days of a ravaging disease. She is an historian and a journalist. She proclaims to all that she is writing a history of the world. A history through her eyes, not just about the world but her relation to that world. She readily admits this version could be biased, yet it is the story that she wants to tell. It is her truth, as she experienced it. I couldn’t help but think, however, that if we were more open with one another and shared more of ourselves in the moment, then we wouldn’t necessarily be compelled to finally ‘tell all’ on our deathbeds, would we? Of course, the human mind doesn’t always work that way. We can be closed off, private. We have a myriad of reasons for not revealing ourselves to one another. As a result, what others see is a different version than the one we may carry in our hearts.
“You are not, as you think, omniscient. You do not know everything; you certainly do not know me. You judge and pronounce; you are never wrong. I do not argue with you; I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not know.”
The narrative is sometimes told in the first person and then may quickly jump to the third person. The perspective is usually focused on Claudia, but at times it is shifted to another’s point of view – her daughter, her brother, her sister-in-law. These shifts are done briefly but allow Lively to emphasize her point that there are in fact varying ‘histories’ attached to each person depending on whose lens we are looking through. Furthermore, shifts in time are frequent as well. I never found this to be at all confusing. As Claudia declares, one’s memories don’t flow chronologically; they are constantly jumping around in time from moment to moment.
“The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.”
A segment of this novel takes place in Cairo during World War II. The author’s note indicates that she was born there and spent her childhood in that city during the war. This is evident in her remarkably evocative writing. I wanted to spend more time there. She speaks of memories, smells, sights and all those things that one attaches to a certain place.
“I have seen Cairo since the war years and that time seemed to shimmer as a mirage over the present. The Hiltons and the Sheratons were real enough, the teeming jerry-built dun-coloured traffic-ridden deafening city, but in my head was that other potent place, conjured up by the smell of dung and paraffin, the felt-shod tittuping sound of a donkey’s hooves, kites floating in a Wedgwood blue sky, the baroque gaiety of Arabic script.”
There’s so much more I could say about this novel, but I’m at a loss to really try to do it justice. I can hardly believe that a whole life is packed into just over 200 pages, yet it was. Penelope Lively’s artistry is captivating. Gosh, I’m even smitten with her name! I don’t know if everything she’s written is this brilliant, but I’m on a quest to find out. I immediately ordered another of her books upon finishing this one.
“When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine- ours – is the only evidence.”
If you were to read an account of the settling of America by the founding fathers, this ‘history’ would be completely different from the one that would have been written by the Native Americans, had our ancestors allowed such a narrative to be considered. If you were to ask me or my mother about my childhood, you would very likely hear two distinct versions of that tale. One might focus on pain and frustration, perhaps unfairly so, while the other would express joy and sacrifice. Which story is the ‘right’ story? They would likely both be correct in their own fashion, but what we learn as ‘truth’ depends on what we read and with whom we converse.
“There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.”
If I had a list of unlikable characters that I admired despite all faults, Claudia Hampton would be ranked near the very top (she has her fair share, at least according to others and even herself!). This slim novel will be esteemed as one of my prized possessions. When I turned the last page, I very nearly began all over again. I simply loved everything about it – the structure, the voice, the setting, and the prose. I wanted to climb out of my life and into another!
We meet Claudia as she lies in the hospital during her final days of a ravaging disease. She is an historian and a journalist. She proclaims to all that she is writing a history of the world. A history through her eyes, not just about the world but her relation to that world. She readily admits this version could be biased, yet it is the story that she wants to tell. It is her truth, as she experienced it. I couldn’t help but think, however, that if we were more open with one another and shared more of ourselves in the moment, then we wouldn’t necessarily be compelled to finally ‘tell all’ on our deathbeds, would we? Of course, the human mind doesn’t always work that way. We can be closed off, private. We have a myriad of reasons for not revealing ourselves to one another. As a result, what others see is a different version than the one we may carry in our hearts.
“You are not, as you think, omniscient. You do not know everything; you certainly do not know me. You judge and pronounce; you are never wrong. I do not argue with you; I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not know.”
The narrative is sometimes told in the first person and then may quickly jump to the third person. The perspective is usually focused on Claudia, but at times it is shifted to another’s point of view – her daughter, her brother, her sister-in-law. These shifts are done briefly but allow Lively to emphasize her point that there are in fact varying ‘histories’ attached to each person depending on whose lens we are looking through. Furthermore, shifts in time are frequent as well. I never found this to be at all confusing. As Claudia declares, one’s memories don’t flow chronologically; they are constantly jumping around in time from moment to moment.
“The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.”
A segment of this novel takes place in Cairo during World War II. The author’s note indicates that she was born there and spent her childhood in that city during the war. This is evident in her remarkably evocative writing. I wanted to spend more time there. She speaks of memories, smells, sights and all those things that one attaches to a certain place.
“I have seen Cairo since the war years and that time seemed to shimmer as a mirage over the present. The Hiltons and the Sheratons were real enough, the teeming jerry-built dun-coloured traffic-ridden deafening city, but in my head was that other potent place, conjured up by the smell of dung and paraffin, the felt-shod tittuping sound of a donkey’s hooves, kites floating in a Wedgwood blue sky, the baroque gaiety of Arabic script.”
There’s so much more I could say about this novel, but I’m at a loss to really try to do it justice. I can hardly believe that a whole life is packed into just over 200 pages, yet it was. Penelope Lively’s artistry is captivating. Gosh, I’m even smitten with her name! I don’t know if everything she’s written is this brilliant, but I’m on a quest to find out. I immediately ordered another of her books upon finishing this one.
“When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head – no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine- ours – is the only evidence.”
October 20, 2017
The narrator announces this is to be a history of the world. What she means, we soon learn, is that it will be a history of the world as experienced by her. We have all been exposed at certain times of our life to moments of history which mysteriously remain an essential part of who we are. Perhaps a childhood visit to Hampton Court, a passage in a school history book about Cleopatra, a documentary about an archaeologist hell-bent on finding the remains of Troy – moments that are like portals allowing us to connect to a larger history. We haunt history and history haunts us, at least certain moments of it. You could say we read for the same reason.
Claudia, a historian and journalist, self-centred, vain and not hugely likeable to begin with, is dying in a hospice bed when we meet her. (The moon tiger is a mosquito coil that slowly burns down into grey dust.) What she recounts is a kaleidoscopic history of all the memorable moments in her life. This turns out to be a personal history of most of the 20th century, including a dazzling account of Egypt during WW2. It’s an elegantly structured novel which obeys a similar unchronological logic as the vagaries of memory itself. Some recollections obviously important, like falling in love; others less easily yielding of their significance. This is one of the very clever elements of this book – her mixing of the epiphanies with the seemingly banal and then showing how the banal often has its own alchemy and acquires resonant meaning.
At the heart of the novel is perhaps the idea that one form of hell is to feel we will leave the world misrepresented - we all learn in arguments with our spouses or mothers how infuriating this feeling can be! It’s as if Claudia is preparing her defence before meeting with God on Judgement day.
A terrific achievement and thanks Julie for sending Ms Lively my way.
Claudia, a historian and journalist, self-centred, vain and not hugely likeable to begin with, is dying in a hospice bed when we meet her. (The moon tiger is a mosquito coil that slowly burns down into grey dust.) What she recounts is a kaleidoscopic history of all the memorable moments in her life. This turns out to be a personal history of most of the 20th century, including a dazzling account of Egypt during WW2. It’s an elegantly structured novel which obeys a similar unchronological logic as the vagaries of memory itself. Some recollections obviously important, like falling in love; others less easily yielding of their significance. This is one of the very clever elements of this book – her mixing of the epiphanies with the seemingly banal and then showing how the banal often has its own alchemy and acquires resonant meaning.
At the heart of the novel is perhaps the idea that one form of hell is to feel we will leave the world misrepresented - we all learn in arguments with our spouses or mothers how infuriating this feeling can be! It’s as if Claudia is preparing her defence before meeting with God on Judgement day.
A terrific achievement and thanks Julie for sending Ms Lively my way.
November 13, 2017
A very personal take on history
If I ever met Ms. Penelope Lively, it'd go one of two ways: I'd embarrass myself, falling over her with syrupy praise, thanking her with babbling, awkward effusiveness for creating such a masterpiece OR I'd tell her with the bitterness of a withered crone that reading this book dampened every hope I had of writing something even close to its equal in impact, beauty or originality. She has raised the literary bar, HIGH.
It's a double edged sword when you're a writer, and you read something you wish you'd written yourself.
This book is all about history: the biological history of the world, the history of textbooks, the history of our ancestors. We bring our history with us knowingly or not; how we interpret it, remember it, and change as a result of it is very individual.
This novel starts off with Claudia, an old woman on her deathbed, who announces she is writing a history of the world. A famous historian in her younger life, it still preoccupies her in old age - the way the countless stories of what came before informs each person’s present.
History may be pared down to ‘facts’ in books, but the truth of it, the life of it, varies, depending who is doing the telling. Lively demonstrates this so well by writing certain scenes several times over, from alternating points of view. Not only the experience is different but the memory also varies from person to person, showing history to be fluid and subjective, a tricky thing indeed.
Because she knows she's dying, Claudia is concerned with what her history will be. She can’t help but wonder how she will be remembered after she is gone, with the distinct possibility of being misrepresented or summed up derivatively when the truth is far more complex.
Her story is anything but simple. She tells it collage style, in non-chronological order, focusing on the important people in her life, and a mixture of both pivotal and mundane moments. She's not that likeable. She's beautiful (another vivacious redhead to add to the collection!), wickedly intelligent, and quite an empowered feminist figure. But she's vain, often unkind, and pretty inadequate as a parent. Her story, despite being told in fragments, is one of the most believable, multi-dimensional life stories I have read.
The irony is, no one will be able to re-tell what happened in Claudia’s life just right. All we have from the past are approximations at best. Life cannot be captured, in all its facets, on the page. But the joy is, we keep trying.
4.5 stars
This was going to be a raving, unhesitating 5 star review for me until... (WARNING: spoilers and a bit of a rant ahead!)
If I ever met Ms. Penelope Lively, it'd go one of two ways: I'd embarrass myself, falling over her with syrupy praise, thanking her with babbling, awkward effusiveness for creating such a masterpiece OR I'd tell her with the bitterness of a withered crone that reading this book dampened every hope I had of writing something even close to its equal in impact, beauty or originality. She has raised the literary bar, HIGH.
It's a double edged sword when you're a writer, and you read something you wish you'd written yourself.
This book is all about history: the biological history of the world, the history of textbooks, the history of our ancestors. We bring our history with us knowingly or not; how we interpret it, remember it, and change as a result of it is very individual.
This novel starts off with Claudia, an old woman on her deathbed, who announces she is writing a history of the world. A famous historian in her younger life, it still preoccupies her in old age - the way the countless stories of what came before informs each person’s present.
History may be pared down to ‘facts’ in books, but the truth of it, the life of it, varies, depending who is doing the telling. Lively demonstrates this so well by writing certain scenes several times over, from alternating points of view. Not only the experience is different but the memory also varies from person to person, showing history to be fluid and subjective, a tricky thing indeed.
Because she knows she's dying, Claudia is concerned with what her history will be. She can’t help but wonder how she will be remembered after she is gone, with the distinct possibility of being misrepresented or summed up derivatively when the truth is far more complex.
Her story is anything but simple. She tells it collage style, in non-chronological order, focusing on the important people in her life, and a mixture of both pivotal and mundane moments. She's not that likeable. She's beautiful (another vivacious redhead to add to the collection!), wickedly intelligent, and quite an empowered feminist figure. But she's vain, often unkind, and pretty inadequate as a parent. Her story, despite being told in fragments, is one of the most believable, multi-dimensional life stories I have read.
The irony is, no one will be able to re-tell what happened in Claudia’s life just right. All we have from the past are approximations at best. Life cannot be captured, in all its facets, on the page. But the joy is, we keep trying.
4.5 stars
This was going to be a raving, unhesitating 5 star review for me until... (WARNING: spoilers and a bit of a rant ahead!)
March 26, 2019
I liked this when it wasn't posturing. But I felt it postured a lot. And largely fell short of its admirable ambitions. I generally felt Lively is probably a more conservative novelist at heart and this was her attempt at pushing back her boundaries, the literary equivalent of an habitually conventional woman suddenly dyeing her hair jet black and wearing stilettos to the supermarket. It's like the work of a writer who has just read and been shaken out of her comfort zone by Virginia Woolf.
Tiger Moon is largely narrated by Claudia as she lies dying in a nursing home, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third. Now and again it strays off into the head of one of the other characters but generally these only reinforce Claudia's perspective and struck me as consistently clumsy. It's an attempt on her part to identify and organise into a last will and testament all the pivotal moments in her life in the context of history.
A strange and off-putting element of this book for me was how relentlessly we're told Claudia is beautiful -often the other voices are called in with the sole purpose of confirming this obsessive notion of Claudia's (and Lively's). It began to grate on my nerves, like witnessing a friend post self-pleasuring selfies every day on social media. I soon began to see her not as a beautiful woman but as a woman who desperately wants to be beautiful. In other words, insecure and given to the more shallow cries of her nature. In fact, I began to wonder if Claudia wasn't a bit delusional. She's not as clever as she seems to think she is either. This presents itself as a novel of ideas but they are largely ideas we've heard before and which have been expressed more eloquently, dramatized more effectively. Essentially, the war between subjective truth and objective hearsay. But a big problem here for me was that, as I said, Claudia often comes across as defensively delusional. This might have been interesting had Lively realised she had an unreliable narrator on her hands but I felt Lively bought into Claudia's testimony as lucid argument instead of the smokescreens of an unhappy woman who throughout life makes a point of rendering herself unlikeable to other women. She has no female friend throughout the book and is contemptuous of her mother, sister-in-law and even her own daughter. Only men, it seems, can animate her. The clue to her hardened crust and exaggerated vanity might be the incestuous relationship she has with her brother but Lively throws this detail into the narrative as if it's merely another exotic feather of Claudia's plumage.
Then there's the material itself which for me is sometimes clumsily or randomly chosen and rendered. Claudia is a popular historian but has no field of expertise. Bafflingly she writes a book about the Mexicans and the Aztecs. There's no inkling of what leads her to choose this rather obscure subject. Neither did it make any sense to me in the context of the novel. In fact, I never believed in her as historian. Just seemed a laziness on Lively's part, choosing the vocation that most neatly fits the novel's theme. Towards the end we get a new character, Lazlo and the less said about him the better. Though he enables Claudia to bring Hungary and the cold war into the narrative. Then there's a large section of the love of her life's war diary. It's very well written but again seems somehow out of place. Claudia is wilfully obnoxious throughout the novel. She prides herself on being supercilious and dismissive. The implication is that she was likeable until her lover died in the war. As if but for his death she might have lived happily ever afterward. Another idea I was far from buying.
So the history of the world Claudia sets out to write ends up being shorn down to the Aztec wars, the second world war in Egypt, and the Russian invasion of Hungary. Certainly an eccentric choice of representational events for any history of the world. I liked a lot the way Lively writes but my feeling was she's no groundbreaker as a novelist and this is kind of Virginia Woolf lite. Claudia seemed too much like some kind of fantasy alter ego to me. I'd be interested to read a less ambitious novel by her, one in which she's less enamoured with trying to be clever and more emotionally honest. About 3.7 stars.
Tiger Moon is largely narrated by Claudia as she lies dying in a nursing home, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third. Now and again it strays off into the head of one of the other characters but generally these only reinforce Claudia's perspective and struck me as consistently clumsy. It's an attempt on her part to identify and organise into a last will and testament all the pivotal moments in her life in the context of history.
A strange and off-putting element of this book for me was how relentlessly we're told Claudia is beautiful -often the other voices are called in with the sole purpose of confirming this obsessive notion of Claudia's (and Lively's). It began to grate on my nerves, like witnessing a friend post self-pleasuring selfies every day on social media. I soon began to see her not as a beautiful woman but as a woman who desperately wants to be beautiful. In other words, insecure and given to the more shallow cries of her nature. In fact, I began to wonder if Claudia wasn't a bit delusional. She's not as clever as she seems to think she is either. This presents itself as a novel of ideas but they are largely ideas we've heard before and which have been expressed more eloquently, dramatized more effectively. Essentially, the war between subjective truth and objective hearsay. But a big problem here for me was that, as I said, Claudia often comes across as defensively delusional. This might have been interesting had Lively realised she had an unreliable narrator on her hands but I felt Lively bought into Claudia's testimony as lucid argument instead of the smokescreens of an unhappy woman who throughout life makes a point of rendering herself unlikeable to other women. She has no female friend throughout the book and is contemptuous of her mother, sister-in-law and even her own daughter. Only men, it seems, can animate her. The clue to her hardened crust and exaggerated vanity might be the incestuous relationship she has with her brother but Lively throws this detail into the narrative as if it's merely another exotic feather of Claudia's plumage.
Then there's the material itself which for me is sometimes clumsily or randomly chosen and rendered. Claudia is a popular historian but has no field of expertise. Bafflingly she writes a book about the Mexicans and the Aztecs. There's no inkling of what leads her to choose this rather obscure subject. Neither did it make any sense to me in the context of the novel. In fact, I never believed in her as historian. Just seemed a laziness on Lively's part, choosing the vocation that most neatly fits the novel's theme. Towards the end we get a new character, Lazlo and the less said about him the better. Though he enables Claudia to bring Hungary and the cold war into the narrative. Then there's a large section of the love of her life's war diary. It's very well written but again seems somehow out of place. Claudia is wilfully obnoxious throughout the novel. She prides herself on being supercilious and dismissive. The implication is that she was likeable until her lover died in the war. As if but for his death she might have lived happily ever afterward. Another idea I was far from buying.
So the history of the world Claudia sets out to write ends up being shorn down to the Aztec wars, the second world war in Egypt, and the Russian invasion of Hungary. Certainly an eccentric choice of representational events for any history of the world. I liked a lot the way Lively writes but my feeling was she's no groundbreaker as a novelist and this is kind of Virginia Woolf lite. Claudia seemed too much like some kind of fantasy alter ego to me. I'd be interested to read a less ambitious novel by her, one in which she's less enamoured with trying to be clever and more emotionally honest. About 3.7 stars.
January 14, 2015
Claudia Hampton speaks to me of wars fought in distant lands, of the ever-persistent forward march of humanity in the quest for collective betterment, of stories unknowingly buried forever in the catacombs of time and never unearthed, of the people we carry in our hearts wherever we go, of the history of the world intertwined with our own. Claudia tries to make sense of the cacophony of voices inside her head and outside, of conflicting opinions colliding violently creating sparks that burn down empires, turn to rubble the foundation of regimes. Claudia tells me a story of the past melded with the present.
Claudia's history of the world isn't one-sided. She accedes, to all the players involved, their right to speak for themselves, to say that which has been coldly snubbed by the opinionated historian of the past. Claudia does not look at past events through the lenses of established notions, of opinions passed off as indisputable facts. Larger than life heroes are reduced to the status of mere mortals in her eyes, violent uprisings become a trigger for devastating tragedies instead of turning points in the history of a nation's struggle for liberty. Images of a world war become indiscernible from the images of her lover who dies fighting in it and the entailing heartbreak she could never purge from her memories no matter how hard she tried. The unyielding bond she shares with her brother Gordon, her rival, her biggest critic, her most devoted admirer, and in the end her lover, remains intact even after he is no longer there to provoke her, to argue with her relentlessly, to urge her on towards becoming a more refined version of herself.
Claudia never became what others wanted her to be, stubbornly trudging along a path forged by none but herself. She loved the daughter born out of wedlock dearly, but from afar, without the grand show of affection expected of any mother. And as she lies in that hospital bed, her life force slowly ebbing away, a frail old woman of 76, misunderstood by the ones dearest to her, my heart weeps for the grief that she kept carefully hidden from everyone, a secret she carried to her grave. But I bid her farewell with a smile, soothed by the knowledge that her life was, after all, a life well-lived.
Claudia's history of the world isn't one-sided. She accedes, to all the players involved, their right to speak for themselves, to say that which has been coldly snubbed by the opinionated historian of the past. Claudia does not look at past events through the lenses of established notions, of opinions passed off as indisputable facts. Larger than life heroes are reduced to the status of mere mortals in her eyes, violent uprisings become a trigger for devastating tragedies instead of turning points in the history of a nation's struggle for liberty. Images of a world war become indiscernible from the images of her lover who dies fighting in it and the entailing heartbreak she could never purge from her memories no matter how hard she tried. The unyielding bond she shares with her brother Gordon, her rival, her biggest critic, her most devoted admirer, and in the end her lover, remains intact even after he is no longer there to provoke her, to argue with her relentlessly, to urge her on towards becoming a more refined version of herself.
"For there are moments, out here in this place and at this time, when she feels that she is untethered, no longer hitched to past or future or to a known universe but adrift in the cosmos."
Claudia never became what others wanted her to be, stubbornly trudging along a path forged by none but herself. She loved the daughter born out of wedlock dearly, but from afar, without the grand show of affection expected of any mother. And as she lies in that hospital bed, her life force slowly ebbing away, a frail old woman of 76, misunderstood by the ones dearest to her, my heart weeps for the grief that she kept carefully hidden from everyone, a secret she carried to her grave. But I bid her farewell with a smile, soothed by the knowledge that her life was, after all, a life well-lived.
September 3, 2018
Utterly compelling historical novel that plays with time and perspective in fascinating ways. Claudia Hampton sets out to tell the history of the world. And she does exactly that. Only it's her own private world she describes, with all its secrets. Lively does a masterful job of shifting perspectives on various scenes, telling it first from one character's perspective, then another's, and on shifting and jumbling Claudia's sense of time, because as an old woman looking back on her life, she sees the past not as chronology but as a jumbled up mess of stories and moods. Still there is a strong story arc here, along with a vivid sense of place. Having lived in Egypt myself, I especially appreciated the descriptions of wartime Cairo.
Lively's prose is always true to her name. This is the first book I've read by her, but it will certainly not be the last. This is a terrific novel.
Lively's prose is always true to her name. This is the first book I've read by her, but it will certainly not be the last. This is a terrific novel.
February 13, 2013
I am verklempt. I am besotted. I've come undone.
November 12, 2021
5★
I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’”
Thus we met Claudia Hampton, once an imposing figure, now reduced to a hospital bed at the end of her life.
“‘Was she someone?’ enquires the nurse. Her shoes squeak on the shiny floor; the doctor’s shoes crunch. ‘I mean, the things she comes out with …’ And the doctor glances at his notes and says that yes, she does seem to have been someone, evidently she’s written books and newspaper articles and … um … been in the Middle East at one time … typhoid, malaria … unmarried (one miscarriage, one child he sees but does not say) … yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.”
Yes! No probably about it. She certainly was someone, and she knew it. Now, she is mostly dozing and remembering her people and her life with varying degrees of fondness and horror and sorrow. But she’s still planning to write her history of the world.
“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.”
I find this hard to discuss, since it isn’t just about history or who she was and what she did, but how the author has shown her to us. Claudia’s story is told sometimes in the third person, sometimes the first, and the narrative also switches tenses.
In her hospital room, the action and conversation is in the present tense (again, sometimes first person, sometimes third). Inside some of her private reminiscences, the third person voice is recounting the past in the present tense, as if we are revisiting it with her. I don’t know how it works, but it does.
“I wasn’t thinking of - - - but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be not ‘me’ but ‘she’. An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom. This is how I have felt – how surely anyone must feel – contemplating those poised moments of the past: the night before the storming of the Bastille, the summer of 1914 in the valley of the Somme, the autumn days in Warwickshire before Edgehill.”
I don’t think we are all that imaginative, but she finds it hard to believe people are that ignorant or uninterested. She annoyed people.
“The teachers all disliked me. ‘I’m afraid,’ wrote someone on a school report, ‘that Claudia’s intelligence may well prove a stumbling-block unless she learns how to control her enthusiasms and channel her talents.’”
She was more than a match for almost anyone she ever met – except for her older brother, Gordon.
“We confronted each other like mirrors, flinging back reflections in endless recession. We spoke to each other in code. Other people became, for a while, for a couple of contemptuous years, a proletariat. We were an aristocracy of two.”
She grew up collecting fossils with her brother, which gave her an interesting outlook on history.
“Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Palaeolithic at all, but make a film of it . . . first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and. . . on to the white cliffs of Dover … An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster and Royal Crescent and gaols and schools and homes and railway stations.”
Mountains are often likened to cathedrals, but here she ‘grows’ them. Claudia is a person for whom were invented those over-used phrases ‘a force of nature’ and ‘a force to be reckoned with’. She could charm anyone into doing her bidding, and could outwit most. Now, she’s reduced to living in her head, remembering life in Cairo.
“I know how I felt – richer, happier, more alive than ever before or ever since. It is feeling that survives; feeling and the place.”
Now she feels diminished, as the good-natured patronising continues.
“‘How did you sleep?’ enquires the nurse.
‘Indifferently,’ says Claudia. ‘I had a nightmare. In which I now realise I was present at one of the more gruesome moments of the early sixteenth century. The flight of the Spaniards from the Aztec capital of Tlacopan.’
‘Gracious,’ murmurs the nurse, shaking pillows. ‘I’ll put the back rest up for you, shall I?’”
She is no longer a beautiful, commanding presence, no longer a sprightly flirt.
“The strata of faces. Mine, now, is an appalling caricature of what it once was. I can see, just, that firm jaw-line and those handsome eyes and a hint of the pale smooth complexion that so nicely set off my hair. But the whole thing is crumpled and sagged and folded, like an expensive garment ruined by the laundry. The eyes have sunk almost to vanishing point, the skin is webbed, reptilian pouches hang from the jaw; the hair is so thin that the pink scalp shines through it.”
Her love of history, her writing, her books, her time in Egypt, all are covered here so thoroughly that I kept feeling she must have been real, must have been “somebody”. Surely her books or something of her life survives, or so I’d like to think.
This won not only the 1987 Man Booker Prize, it was among the ‘Golden Five’, the shortlist selected in 2018 for the Golden Man Booker to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the prize. (The winner was The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which I have yet to read).
She probably would have terrified me, but I loved her story!
I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’”
Thus we met Claudia Hampton, once an imposing figure, now reduced to a hospital bed at the end of her life.
“‘Was she someone?’ enquires the nurse. Her shoes squeak on the shiny floor; the doctor’s shoes crunch. ‘I mean, the things she comes out with …’ And the doctor glances at his notes and says that yes, she does seem to have been someone, evidently she’s written books and newspaper articles and … um … been in the Middle East at one time … typhoid, malaria … unmarried (one miscarriage, one child he sees but does not say) … yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.”
Yes! No probably about it. She certainly was someone, and she knew it. Now, she is mostly dozing and remembering her people and her life with varying degrees of fondness and horror and sorrow. But she’s still planning to write her history of the world.
“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.”
I find this hard to discuss, since it isn’t just about history or who she was and what she did, but how the author has shown her to us. Claudia’s story is told sometimes in the third person, sometimes the first, and the narrative also switches tenses.
In her hospital room, the action and conversation is in the present tense (again, sometimes first person, sometimes third). Inside some of her private reminiscences, the third person voice is recounting the past in the present tense, as if we are revisiting it with her. I don’t know how it works, but it does.
“I wasn’t thinking of - - - but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be not ‘me’ but ‘she’. An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom. This is how I have felt – how surely anyone must feel – contemplating those poised moments of the past: the night before the storming of the Bastille, the summer of 1914 in the valley of the Somme, the autumn days in Warwickshire before Edgehill.”
I don’t think we are all that imaginative, but she finds it hard to believe people are that ignorant or uninterested. She annoyed people.
“The teachers all disliked me. ‘I’m afraid,’ wrote someone on a school report, ‘that Claudia’s intelligence may well prove a stumbling-block unless she learns how to control her enthusiasms and channel her talents.’”
She was more than a match for almost anyone she ever met – except for her older brother, Gordon.
“We confronted each other like mirrors, flinging back reflections in endless recession. We spoke to each other in code. Other people became, for a while, for a couple of contemptuous years, a proletariat. We were an aristocracy of two.”
She grew up collecting fossils with her brother, which gave her an interesting outlook on history.
“Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Palaeolithic at all, but make a film of it . . . first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and. . . on to the white cliffs of Dover … An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster and Royal Crescent and gaols and schools and homes and railway stations.”
Mountains are often likened to cathedrals, but here she ‘grows’ them. Claudia is a person for whom were invented those over-used phrases ‘a force of nature’ and ‘a force to be reckoned with’. She could charm anyone into doing her bidding, and could outwit most. Now, she’s reduced to living in her head, remembering life in Cairo.
“I know how I felt – richer, happier, more alive than ever before or ever since. It is feeling that survives; feeling and the place.”
Now she feels diminished, as the good-natured patronising continues.
“‘How did you sleep?’ enquires the nurse.
‘Indifferently,’ says Claudia. ‘I had a nightmare. In which I now realise I was present at one of the more gruesome moments of the early sixteenth century. The flight of the Spaniards from the Aztec capital of Tlacopan.’
‘Gracious,’ murmurs the nurse, shaking pillows. ‘I’ll put the back rest up for you, shall I?’”
She is no longer a beautiful, commanding presence, no longer a sprightly flirt.
“The strata of faces. Mine, now, is an appalling caricature of what it once was. I can see, just, that firm jaw-line and those handsome eyes and a hint of the pale smooth complexion that so nicely set off my hair. But the whole thing is crumpled and sagged and folded, like an expensive garment ruined by the laundry. The eyes have sunk almost to vanishing point, the skin is webbed, reptilian pouches hang from the jaw; the hair is so thin that the pink scalp shines through it.”
Her love of history, her writing, her books, her time in Egypt, all are covered here so thoroughly that I kept feeling she must have been real, must have been “somebody”. Surely her books or something of her life survives, or so I’d like to think.
This won not only the 1987 Man Booker Prize, it was among the ‘Golden Five’, the shortlist selected in 2018 for the Golden Man Booker to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the prize. (The winner was The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which I have yet to read).
She probably would have terrified me, but I loved her story!
July 13, 2020
I've just finished this novel and I'm a mess. Moon Tiger was almost too much to take.
The way Lively used language blew me away. I can't compare it to anything else I'd read before. Some of the scenes from Egypt reminded me of The English Patient, but this novel was published some years before Ondaatje's Booker prize winner.
And, of course, there's the indomitable Claudia Hampton, intelligent, beautiful, argumentative, bullheaded, opinionated, independent, complicated, and infuriating. Oh, how I loved her. She beguiled me.
I loved everything about this novel -incredible characters, the plot - much as it was, the little details, the original structure and the discussion of history - the chronological factual kind, the written and unwritten history, people's personal histories, how our own history/genealogy influences everything, oh, there is so much in this little novel, I'm truly astonished., I've no words ...
This novel will linger for a long time, it left a deep impression, invisible and hard to describe, but it's inside me. I'll treasure it.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a masterpiece. Thank you, Ms Lively.
The way Lively used language blew me away. I can't compare it to anything else I'd read before. Some of the scenes from Egypt reminded me of The English Patient, but this novel was published some years before Ondaatje's Booker prize winner.
And, of course, there's the indomitable Claudia Hampton, intelligent, beautiful, argumentative, bullheaded, opinionated, independent, complicated, and infuriating. Oh, how I loved her. She beguiled me.
I loved everything about this novel -incredible characters, the plot - much as it was, the little details, the original structure and the discussion of history - the chronological factual kind, the written and unwritten history, people's personal histories, how our own history/genealogy influences everything, oh, there is so much in this little novel, I'm truly astonished., I've no words ...
This novel will linger for a long time, it left a deep impression, invisible and hard to describe, but it's inside me. I'll treasure it.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a masterpiece. Thank you, Ms Lively.
May 23, 2021
“Fue hace mucho tiempo y ayer mismo.”Moon Tiger es una novela sobre la memoria que la autora, en una sabia mezcla de primera y tercera persona, enreda hábilmente con una posible historia universal que Claudia, la protagonista, escritora de heterodoxos libros de historia, cree estar concibiendo en su lecho de muerte mientras rememora su vida durante el despiadado siglo XX. De la una y de la otra van apareciendo momentos en una secuencia temporal que solo responde a las caprichosas asociaciones de la mente de su protagonista.
“La cronología me irrita. Yo no tengo una cronología en mi cabeza. Estoy hecha de miles de Claudias que giran, se mezclan y se separan como chispas del sol en el agua.”Y es que Moon Tiger también es un libro sobre la identidad, sobre lo que somos, sobre por qué lo somos, sobre la construcción mental que nos hacemos de nosotros mismos y de nuestra historia, sobre lo que seremos “horrendamente tergiversados, en las mentes de unos pocos que nos sobrevivan”, sobre lo que ya no somos ni podremos ser jamás, no solo como personas individuales sino también como personas de nuestro tiempo.
“La mentalidad de la IV Dinastía es tan irrecuperable como la de nuestra propia infancia.”También Moon Tiger es un libro sobre el poder de la palabra “que preserva lo que es efímero, que da forma a los sueños y fija las chispas de luz”. Claudia se ha ganado la vida con ellas, las siente como una necesidad esencial del ser humano en su relación con el mundo.
“Nunca deja de maravillarme que las palabras duren más que nada, que se las lleve el viento, que hibernen y vuelvan a despertarse, que se refugien a modo de parásitos en los huéspedes más inverosímiles, que sobrevivan, que sobrevivan, que sobrevivan.”Pero, sobre todo, Moon Tiger es la emotiva historia de Claudia Hampton, una mujer incómoda para su época, fuerte, segura de sí misma, independiente, dura, inteligente, desdeñosa con la estupidez y la mojigatería, agnóstica y alérgica a lo convencional, también hermosa, elegante, de las que arrastran las miradas allá por donde pasa, circunstancia que no dudó en utilizar cuando le convino. Claudia, desagradable y fascinante al tiempo, tuvo cinco amores en su vida, cuatro si restamos el que siente por sí misma, tres si descontamos el incestuoso que sintió por su hermano Gordon y que fue casi también como amarse a sí misma, dos si no tenemos en cuenta a Laszlo, un joven exiliado húngaro, por el que sintió un amor filial que, por el contrario, nunca ejerció con su verdadera hija, uno si nos olvidamos de Jasper, el padre de su hija, con el que tuvo una relación civilizada e intermitente pero muy lejos del amor. El otro sí, el otro, corto e intenso, fue su gran amor y el centro de su vida, Tom Southern.
“Laszlo siempre llevaba el alma por fuera, igual que los faldones de la camisa, lo cual era incompatible con Gordon, que no tenía nada contra las personas con alma, pero prefería que la mantuvieran alejada de la vista.”Tom fue su felicidad y ella fue la felicidad de Tom (“Nunca antes había hecho feliz a nadie”), a pesar de la guerra en la que él combatía y de la que ella informaba como corresponsal. Mientras en la retaguardia se seguían celebrando fiestas, la gente se quejaba del calor, de la escasez de alimentos, de las incomodidades que acarreaba el conflicto, muchos soldados, recién salidos de la adolescencia, luchaban por su vida o morían a pocos kilómetros de allí. Otros lloraban a sus muertos, algunos se consolaban con sus creencias religiosas, igual que hicieron muchos otros antes que ellos en otras guerras y con otras religiones ya olvidadas, pidiendo a su Dios que les protegiera a ellos y confundiera a sus enemigos que también estarían rezando a su Dios pidiendo lo mismo, ese Dios al que Claudia rezó una sola vez en su vida, ese Dios que no la oyó, seguramente, pienso yo, porque estaba muy liado decidiendo las plegarias de qué bando oír.
“Jasper jamás dominó mi vida. Tuvo su significación, pero no es lo mismo…El atractivo de su aspecto y la desenvoltura con que afrontaba la vida eran herencia del padre ruso; la inquebrantable seguridad que demostraba en la vida social y el complejo de superioridad procedían de la madre”.
“Tom duerme. Está tumbado junto a ella, desnudo y dormido… Está tan bronceado que las partes no expuestas al sol parecen de una blancura innatural, brillante en la oscuridad: los pies, las axilas, las nalgas y sobre todo la entrepierna. El color cambia a marrón en el ombligo. A partir de ahí es otro hombre, como si el caparazón protector de un crustáceo diera refugio a una criatura distinta, blanda y vulnerable.”
Ah, se me olvidaba, Moon Tiger es “una espiral verde que se quema por la noche para repeler a los mosquitos y va dejando un largo rastro de ceniza gris”, testigo mudo de sus pocas noches de arrebatado amor y metáfora de lo que es una vida.
June 27, 2018
This is one of these situations where I just loved this book so much that I don't think my review will be able to contain all my enthusiasm for it.
It is only now, I realise how close I came to never reading this. It is not really a book that advertises exactly what it is, (I had vague notions of romance and grumpy old people). It feels somehow eclipsed by other books in the annuls of Booker history. I do feel indignant on behalf of Lively that this book, written a full 5 years before The English Patient seems to cover similar ground but in a writing style that I deem more warmly accessible and yet still deceptively clever. However, I guess we should be happy she won the 1987 Booker Prize and is now getting more attention because of the Golden Man Booker ( ironically it is up against The English Patient - there is no question in my mind as to which is the better book )
It is just immensely impressive to me what Lively achieves in the space of 225 pages. The scope, ambition and execution of Moon Tiger is spectacular. It is told from multiple points of view, although predominantly from the spiky but outrageously funny Claudia. The story of her life told not chronologically but more like one of those mind map diagrams. It seems to me to reflect perfectly how ones own memories work, jumping from childhood to events far distant and back again. You will be astonished how, Ancient Egypt, the voyage of the Mayflower, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Cortes conquest of the Aztecs and desert warfare in North Africa during WWII are all knitted into tiny but critical aspects of Claudias life. Typically all this jumping around in time and voice usually would annoy the hell out of me. Lively seamlessly makes it all work. I want to hand this book out in MFA courses and say look here young writers, study well, this is a master wordsmith in action.
Moon Tiger ended up, for me, being just a lovely bit of unexpected genius. Claudia perhaps one of my all time favourite female characters, monstrous, and magnificent all at once. It is a rare book that can convey the passage of an entire life, credibly and remarkably on such a small canvas - how did she manage that ? I want to read it again immediately to find out.
It is only now, I realise how close I came to never reading this. It is not really a book that advertises exactly what it is, (I had vague notions of romance and grumpy old people). It feels somehow eclipsed by other books in the annuls of Booker history. I do feel indignant on behalf of Lively that this book, written a full 5 years before The English Patient seems to cover similar ground but in a writing style that I deem more warmly accessible and yet still deceptively clever. However, I guess we should be happy she won the 1987 Booker Prize and is now getting more attention because of the Golden Man Booker ( ironically it is up against The English Patient - there is no question in my mind as to which is the better book )
It is just immensely impressive to me what Lively achieves in the space of 225 pages. The scope, ambition and execution of Moon Tiger is spectacular. It is told from multiple points of view, although predominantly from the spiky but outrageously funny Claudia. The story of her life told not chronologically but more like one of those mind map diagrams. It seems to me to reflect perfectly how ones own memories work, jumping from childhood to events far distant and back again. You will be astonished how, Ancient Egypt, the voyage of the Mayflower, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Cortes conquest of the Aztecs and desert warfare in North Africa during WWII are all knitted into tiny but critical aspects of Claudias life. Typically all this jumping around in time and voice usually would annoy the hell out of me. Lively seamlessly makes it all work. I want to hand this book out in MFA courses and say look here young writers, study well, this is a master wordsmith in action.
Moon Tiger ended up, for me, being just a lovely bit of unexpected genius. Claudia perhaps one of my all time favourite female characters, monstrous, and magnificent all at once. It is a rare book that can convey the passage of an entire life, credibly and remarkably on such a small canvas - how did she manage that ? I want to read it again immediately to find out.
March 30, 2018
As soon as I read the synopsis of Moon Tiger I knew I was going to enjoy it. An elderly woman in her hospital bed, dying of cancer, recaps the story of her life, and a very interesting life at that. I liked Claudia very much. She had her faults but she was also captivating, intelligent and larger than life.
The author writes beautifully and her descriptions of Egypt made me feel as if I was there. The piece towards the end when Claudia reads Tom's description of the war in the desert is an incredibly realistic narrative of war as it is suffered by the men on the ground.
I am amazed that I have not read anything by this author before, but now that I have read one I will be back for more.
The author writes beautifully and her descriptions of Egypt made me feel as if I was there. The piece towards the end when Claudia reads Tom's description of the war in the desert is an incredibly realistic narrative of war as it is suffered by the men on the ground.
I am amazed that I have not read anything by this author before, but now that I have read one I will be back for more.
July 23, 2018
The more I think about and talk about this book, the more impressed I am by it. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1987 but had bad reviews. It was selected as the book from the 1980s to go up for the Golden Man Booker Prize this year, and despite the fact that it didn't ultimately win, I feel like that process put it back on the radar for a lot of us. First I was standing in line waiting for another book to be signed when another reader-podcaster brought it up, and then last night I was having some reading ennui yesterday and started poking around my favorites list in Hoopla, and the book came up both times. I am not one to ignore signs from the universe on books I am supposed to be reading, so I downloaded it and read it that night.
A lot of female authors in the 21st century receive acclaim for "daring" to write unlikeable characters. But Penelope Lively already showed how this can be done. The trick is not to make the reader not like them, but to show how they might be unlikeable to the people around them, while the reader finds herself completely on their side.
Claudia, the main character, is not interested in what other people think. This moves through her childhood in how she behaves and in her relationship with her brother. It moves into her education and career as she declares she will be a war correspondent, and live in Egypt during WWII. It extends past her romances with men, while unmarried, into her fling that leaves her pregnant. She has a child but never feels particularly maternal. (The book starts with her in her death bed, and from time to time the narrative returns there, including a particularly honest and memorable moment between mother and daughter.) She despises her brother's wife, who is her opposite.
All of this is going on while time moves back and forth, as does the point of view. Sometimes Claudia is spoken of in the 3rd person while it usually has Claudia speaking in the 1st person. Sometimes the same scene segment will replay from a different character's perspective, providing information from that person that Claudia could not have included, either because she is not aware of the piece of information or hasn't noticed it. (Because, remember, she is selfish.)
It really worked for me, I'm so glad I read it, I want to read it again, and I will go looking for more of her books.
A lot of female authors in the 21st century receive acclaim for "daring" to write unlikeable characters. But Penelope Lively already showed how this can be done. The trick is not to make the reader not like them, but to show how they might be unlikeable to the people around them, while the reader finds herself completely on their side.
"Self-centred? Probably. Aren't we all? Why is it a term of accusation? That is what it was when I was a child. I was considered difficult. Impossible, indeed, was the word sometimes used. I didn't think I was impossible at all; it was mother and nurse who were impossible, with their injunctions and their warnings, their obsessions with milk puddings and curled hair and their terror of all that was inviting about the natural world - high trees and deeper water and the texture of wet grass on bare feet, the allure of mud and snow and fire. I always ached - burned - to go higher and faster and further. They admonished, I disobeyed.This section is very early in the narrative and I was immediately sold and in her hands forever. Who hasn't felt this way as a woman? And who as a woman hasn't had the word "difficult" used about them as if it were the worst thing you could be? Ah, it cut deep in my own experience at least.
Claudia, the main character, is not interested in what other people think. This moves through her childhood in how she behaves and in her relationship with her brother. It moves into her education and career as she declares she will be a war correspondent, and live in Egypt during WWII. It extends past her romances with men, while unmarried, into her fling that leaves her pregnant. She has a child but never feels particularly maternal. (The book starts with her in her death bed, and from time to time the narrative returns there, including a particularly honest and memorable moment between mother and daughter.) She despises her brother's wife, who is her opposite.
All of this is going on while time moves back and forth, as does the point of view. Sometimes Claudia is spoken of in the 3rd person while it usually has Claudia speaking in the 1st person. Sometimes the same scene segment will replay from a different character's perspective, providing information from that person that Claudia could not have included, either because she is not aware of the piece of information or hasn't noticed it. (Because, remember, she is selfish.)
It really worked for me, I'm so glad I read it, I want to read it again, and I will go looking for more of her books.
June 3, 2008
Wow. Just wow. The nerdiness quotient in how I picked this book up is off the charts (it was quoted in an article I was reading for my thesis) but I can honestly say I have rarely made so wise a geeky decision. To read the summary on the back in a bookstore, I doubt I would have decided to read it. An old woman dying alone in a hospital reflects on her life. Call that a picker-upper. But the way she constructs her life: viewing it as a historian. Weaving the history of the world into her own existence. Seeing history not as dates and names but an extension of her own consciousness, a reflection of her experiences. Amazingly and beautifully written. I wanted to take down every other line as a quote. I'm sure my love of this book is slightly colored by the fact that the main character is a historian and sees the world accordingly, but I maintain that anyone can enjoy this book. Her reflections on life aren't told chronologically, more like little anecdotes sprinkled throughout the main story surrounding her deathbed. If done less well, this would make for a confusing and frustrating piece. But Lively makes it remarkably easy to follow her character's train of thought as she moves from one memory to the next and then back to the present.
I can't say enough about this book. As soon as I reached chapter 2 I knew it was going to be one of my all-time favorites.
I can't say enough about this book. As soon as I reached chapter 2 I knew it was going to be one of my all-time favorites.
August 17, 2023
I am intrigued. I have been enticed. I am in love with Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger.
I alternately wanted to read more quickly to continue with Claudia's story and to slow way down to savor Lively's beautiful way with words.
The story takes it's name from a coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, which is also a metaphor for the spiraling nature of memory.
Much of the story is told from inside the head of Lively's self-centered, feisty, acerbic, charismatic heroine Claudia Hampton. Claudia, at age 76, is lying in hospital remembering her life.
Memory isn't linear; and Claudia's thoughts spiral, sliding back and forth through time with a central defining moment in her life as the pivot to which she periodically returns. She touches on the people and events that are most important to her. The shifting view points, which sometimes replay the same scene through different eyes, reinforce the concept that history is subjective. While it took me a chapter or two to adapt to Lively's style, I quickly fell into her rhythm and was captivated by the story.
Claudia lives a full and event-filled life; and Lively presents it in a story laden with atmosphere and poignancy
I alternately wanted to read more quickly to continue with Claudia's story and to slow way down to savor Lively's beautiful way with words.
The story takes it's name from a coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, which is also a metaphor for the spiraling nature of memory.
Much of the story is told from inside the head of Lively's self-centered, feisty, acerbic, charismatic heroine Claudia Hampton. Claudia, at age 76, is lying in hospital remembering her life.
Memory isn't linear; and Claudia's thoughts spiral, sliding back and forth through time with a central defining moment in her life as the pivot to which she periodically returns. She touches on the people and events that are most important to her. The shifting view points, which sometimes replay the same scene through different eyes, reinforce the concept that history is subjective. While it took me a chapter or two to adapt to Lively's style, I quickly fell into her rhythm and was captivated by the story.
Claudia lives a full and event-filled life; and Lively presents it in a story laden with atmosphere and poignancy
December 15, 2018
If this novel had not been chosen as the group read for December 2018 by the ManBookering group here on GR, I would have missed this splendid book! It is strange, but I had never heard of Penelope Lively nor of this Booker Prize winner of 1987 and I would surely have forever missed this masterpiece if not for its choice of the group read.
I simply adored this book. I cannot express how connected I felt to Claudia, that stubborn woman with a mighty tough attitude. Her story is told in a non-chronological fashion. I especially liked to read about her time as a war correspondent in Egypt. This period had a great impact on her life, although she kept silent about it during the rest of her life and never told anybody what happened to her there. Nevertheless, it provided her with an ambition and direction in life which lasted to her final days.
I especially liked the way in which Lively could change perspectives by switching from the viewpoint of one person to the other in the same conversation. It was often hilarious and enlightening what Claudia and the person she was talking to would think of the other. I cannot recall another author who could this in such a natural way as Lively.
I can only recommend this book greatly. It was a book that captivated my mind and my soul.
I simply adored this book. I cannot express how connected I felt to Claudia, that stubborn woman with a mighty tough attitude. Her story is told in a non-chronological fashion. I especially liked to read about her time as a war correspondent in Egypt. This period had a great impact on her life, although she kept silent about it during the rest of her life and never told anybody what happened to her there. Nevertheless, it provided her with an ambition and direction in life which lasted to her final days.
I especially liked the way in which Lively could change perspectives by switching from the viewpoint of one person to the other in the same conversation. It was often hilarious and enlightening what Claudia and the person she was talking to would think of the other. I cannot recall another author who could this in such a natural way as Lively.
I can only recommend this book greatly. It was a book that captivated my mind and my soul.
November 28, 2019
Reading Moon Tiger is a catalyst for drifting into one’s own memories. A woman lays dying in a hospital bed. Back and forth her thoughts carry her. Back she goes to the places she knew well, for many were the hours spent there. She drifts and loses time as she re enters scenes of passion, love, loss, disappointment and failure. A complex and flawed human she can now see herself for who she is. Visitors come and add messages to her memories. As she really hears and feels the messages from others around her, and those long gone, she responds, at long last, with honesty. This is not always what others want to hear. Yet it is only then that she can pass on wisely and well. A story of a woman facing her end, naked and unashamed, her true nature revealed. Once an unstoppable hurricane she is finally able to find her peace. This is not an easy book to read for anyone who has sat beside a dying loved one. It is beautifully written and honest in its portrayal of our human foibles and frailties. The melancholy last passage is so realistic it offers a true sense of a life’s end.
July 20, 2020
Read this soooooo many years ago. Loved it! Own it!
Remember it well.
A treat to see new reviews and new readers discovering this thin book.
Powerful - page turner gorgeous storytelling!
Remember it well.
A treat to see new reviews and new readers discovering this thin book.
Powerful - page turner gorgeous storytelling!
January 12, 2010
"Moon Tiger", for which the author won the Booker prize, is a book that I could admire, but not like. The main protagonist, Claudia Hampton, an accomplished historian, lies dying in a London hospital bed and looks back upon her life. The resulting series of first-person flashbacks, interspersed with third-person accounts of the same episodes, coalesce into a tightly constructed kaleidoscopic view of Claudia's life which is impressive for the skill with which it is achieved, but ultimately left me unmoved.
My fundamental problem with the book is that Claudia is such a self-satisfied narcissist that the reader ultimately tires of the recital of her various accomplishments and the smug superiority with which lesser characters in her history (her unfortunate sister-in-law, her disappointingly conventional daughter) are dismissed. Lively is no fool, and attempts to mitigate Claudia's unrelenting smugness with a brief episode of vulnerability and genuine emotion during a doomed World War II romance with a British tank commander who is subsequently killed in battle. The jacket cover inflates this episode by describing it as "the still point of her turning world", but the problem is that it fails to ring true. Ultimately, the version of Claudia that dominates the narrative is that of the smug, superior harpie. To whom my reaction was - why should anyone possibly care?
So, while I can admire the skill with which this book was written, the emotional vacuum at its core ultimately leaves me cold.
My fundamental problem with the book is that Claudia is such a self-satisfied narcissist that the reader ultimately tires of the recital of her various accomplishments and the smug superiority with which lesser characters in her history (her unfortunate sister-in-law, her disappointingly conventional daughter) are dismissed. Lively is no fool, and attempts to mitigate Claudia's unrelenting smugness with a brief episode of vulnerability and genuine emotion during a doomed World War II romance with a British tank commander who is subsequently killed in battle. The jacket cover inflates this episode by describing it as "the still point of her turning world", but the problem is that it fails to ring true. Ultimately, the version of Claudia that dominates the narrative is that of the smug, superior harpie. To whom my reaction was - why should anyone possibly care?
So, while I can admire the skill with which this book was written, the emotional vacuum at its core ultimately leaves me cold.
April 7, 2019
“… crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once”
I came to this book as a result of its inclusion as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament – but it was also an opportunity to add a Booker prize winner to the list I have read (I think this is my 22nd) and one which was generally seen as a surprise pick to represent the 1980s for the Golden Man Booker (surprise as it was picked ahead of Midnight’s Children – which has twice been awarded a Best of the Booker/Booker of Bookers prize I believe).
The plot of the book is summarised here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Tiger) albeit that does not capture the process of memory and of different perspectives on events which drives the book – as the opening quote implies.
Overall I thought this was an excellent book – much stronger than I was expecting. Comparisons with “English Patient” are inevitable and I think it’s a close run thing: Ondaatje’s descriptive writing and command of language gives him an early lead in my view: but Lively I think creates a more memorable and rounded character in Claudia, and is so much better at observing the nuances social interactions (a struggle for social supremacy between Claudia and Japser’s ageing ex-lothario father Sasha for instance, is brilliantly conveyed in a few lines). And this book’s ending, while inevitable, does not mar the story like “English Patient”.
What I really enjoyed in this book was its examination of memory and history: individual memory and how perspective alters over time and varies between different individuals; the contrast and interaction between collective historical narrative and individual experiences.
I had two main criticisms of the book:
The relationship between Claudia and Gordon at first intriguing in its narcissistic exclusionary nature, I think veers too far when it becomes incestuous.
The character of Laszlo seemed to me simply a device to allow Claudia’s life history to encompass not just the World Wars but the events of 1956 (Suez and the decay of British influence being an obvious one given her history in Egypt, but the link to Budapest seeming to me unnecessary).
But overall I found this an excellent read and an unexpected delight.
February 3, 2017
An impressive account of war-correspondent and popular-historian Claudia, from her childhood to her death, the story she tells herself in a hospital bed at the end of a long life, its style mimicking the way a person might remember, without it being so-called stream-of-consciousness. Claudia’s thought processes include eras she didn’t live through—those of Pilgrims and Aztecs, for example—connecting those times to herself and to the time she did live through.
The narrative also gets handed off in paragraphs to the important people of her life: the reader sees of them what Claudia will never know, just as the same is true of what they will never know about Claudia.
If any of this sounds impersonal, it’s far from that: Claudia is a forceful character, living her life after WWII with verve and engagement despite a huge sadness at her core. An overarching image of memories and moments as kaleidoscopic shards of bright colors is sustained throughout and is especially brilliant at the end.
The narrative also gets handed off in paragraphs to the important people of her life: the reader sees of them what Claudia will never know, just as the same is true of what they will never know about Claudia.
If any of this sounds impersonal, it’s far from that: Claudia is a forceful character, living her life after WWII with verve and engagement despite a huge sadness at her core. An overarching image of memories and moments as kaleidoscopic shards of bright colors is sustained throughout and is especially brilliant at the end.
September 6, 2016
This winner of 1987 Man Booker Prize probably should have won many more distinctions. The main character, Claudia, is anything but dull; she is irascible, unapologetic; a woman very much ahead of her time.
“We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. … I never cease to wonder at it. … That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive, survive and survive.”
Rarely does an author take you as far inside a character as Penelope Lively does with Claudia. This novel is a gift to readers. Definitely a 5★. Thanks to Shane and Marguerite whose reviews inspired me to read this novel.
May 25, 2020
One of my rereads for 2020.
This time through, I was struck by the fact that Penelope Lively somehow managed to make Claudia Hampton a likable character (at least I felt that she was) although she considers almost every other person in her life to be beneath her - her brother and her lover being two exceptions. She basically abandons her daughter to the care of her two grandmothers, partly because she deems her uninteresting. She looks down on the father of her child because he's made a lot of money creating cheesy historical spectacles for television, yet when she's presented with the same opportunity, she takes the money and runs.
I'm not sure how Ms. Lively managed to avoid making her thoroughly unlikable, but somehow she did. There are times when writers have a similarity to magicians.
"...eclecticism has always been my hallmark. That's what they've said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton's range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton's bold conceptual sweep: my friends."
"Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message. I once thought I was a myth. Summoned to the drawing-room, aged six or so, to meet a relative richer and more worldly than Mother, of whom Mother was in awe, I found myself swept up, held at arms' length by this gorgeous scented woman, exclaimed at: 'And here she is! The little myth! A real delicious red-haired green-eyed little myth!' Upstairs, I examined my hair and eyes in the nursery mirror. I am a Myth. I am Delicious. 'That'll do, Claudia," says nurse. 'Handsome is as handsome does.' But I am a Myth. I gaze at myself in satisfaction."
"Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons,' she asked? I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said that all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, there must have been dragons.'"
I could imagine Ali Smith writing that 20 years after this book was published.
"Of course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it. It was an immense relief to me that Lisa's was merely average. Her life has been the more comfortable. Neither her father nor I have had comfortable lives, though whether we would have wished them different is another matter. Gordon's (her brother) life has been intermittently uncomfortable, but then so, come to that, has Sylvia's (her sister-in-law), which would appear to destroy my theory about intelligence and happiness. Sylvia is profoundly stupid."
"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."
I've never had a desire to meet writers. Looking back, I think that I've only met one writer for anything more than a few minutes. However, if I could spend some time with any living writer, I believe that I would choose Penelope Lively. It would be fascinating to hear her expound on interests of hers of which I have no knowledge -archaeology, history, gardening, and whatever else she might wish to share. Strictly a fantasy, but fantasies can be interesting.
I raised my rating to five stars after thinking more about this book and writing my review.
This time through, I was struck by the fact that Penelope Lively somehow managed to make Claudia Hampton a likable character (at least I felt that she was) although she considers almost every other person in her life to be beneath her - her brother and her lover being two exceptions. She basically abandons her daughter to the care of her two grandmothers, partly because she deems her uninteresting. She looks down on the father of her child because he's made a lot of money creating cheesy historical spectacles for television, yet when she's presented with the same opportunity, she takes the money and runs.
I'm not sure how Ms. Lively managed to avoid making her thoroughly unlikable, but somehow she did. There are times when writers have a similarity to magicians.
"...eclecticism has always been my hallmark. That's what they've said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton's range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton's bold conceptual sweep: my friends."
"Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message. I once thought I was a myth. Summoned to the drawing-room, aged six or so, to meet a relative richer and more worldly than Mother, of whom Mother was in awe, I found myself swept up, held at arms' length by this gorgeous scented woman, exclaimed at: 'And here she is! The little myth! A real delicious red-haired green-eyed little myth!' Upstairs, I examined my hair and eyes in the nursery mirror. I am a Myth. I am Delicious. 'That'll do, Claudia," says nurse. 'Handsome is as handsome does.' But I am a Myth. I gaze at myself in satisfaction."
"Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons,' she asked? I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said that all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, there must have been dragons.'"
I could imagine Ali Smith writing that 20 years after this book was published.
"Of course, intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it. It was an immense relief to me that Lisa's was merely average. Her life has been the more comfortable. Neither her father nor I have had comfortable lives, though whether we would have wished them different is another matter. Gordon's (her brother) life has been intermittently uncomfortable, but then so, come to that, has Sylvia's (her sister-in-law), which would appear to destroy my theory about intelligence and happiness. Sylvia is profoundly stupid."
"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."
I've never had a desire to meet writers. Looking back, I think that I've only met one writer for anything more than a few minutes. However, if I could spend some time with any living writer, I believe that I would choose Penelope Lively. It would be fascinating to hear her expound on interests of hers of which I have no knowledge -archaeology, history, gardening, and whatever else she might wish to share. Strictly a fantasy, but fantasies can be interesting.
I raised my rating to five stars after thinking more about this book and writing my review.
July 7, 2020
Candi’s wonderful review of this amazing book reminded me that it’s another review I lost in my old hacked accounts, but more importantly, it reminded me of just what an incredible novel this is. Simply brilliant. :-)
June 25, 2024
Moon Tiger is a novel written by Penelope Lively in 1987, and spanning the time before, during and after World War II. This novel was the winner of the 1987 Booker Prize. I found the writing of Penelope Lively sublime. It is written from multiple points of view as it moves back and forth through time. We first meet Claudia Hampton on her death bed in a London hospital as she announces to the nurses that she is writing a history of the world, and in that process, her own history. As she describes it, the bit of the twentieth century to which she has been shackled, like it not. They learn that Claudia Hampton in fact, has written books and newspaper articles pertaining to history over the years.
Moon Tiger is beautiful, powerful and moving novel touching on they myriad ways our lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past. As we piece together the pieces of history, it becomes clear that this is a mosaic of her life as it is tangled with the stories of her brother, her daughter and her lover. The unfolding beautiful relationship with Tom, her one love found and lost in war-torn Egypt is one of the most stunning fictional love stories I have read. The impact of this book continues to mount as the kaleidoscope shifts with its myriad refractions. The only other book that I have read by Penelope Lively was her memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. Just pulling that from my bookshelf, I may read that lovely book again. I certainly intend to read more of Penelope Lively. Incredible writing.
”Oh, I shan’t spare them a thing. The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad of Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.”
“William Smith was inspired by stratification. My strata are less easily perceived than those of Warwickshire rock, and in the head they are not even sequential but a whirl of words and images. Dragons and Moon Tigers and Crusaders and Honeys.”
“I’ve grown old with the century; there’s not much left of either of us. The century of war. All history, of course, is the history of wars, but this hundred years has excelled itself. How many million shot, maimed, burned, frozen, starved, drowned? God only knows. I trust He does; He should have kept a record, if only for His purposes. I’ve been on the fringes of two wars; I shan’t see the next.”
Moon Tiger is beautiful, powerful and moving novel touching on they myriad ways our lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past. As we piece together the pieces of history, it becomes clear that this is a mosaic of her life as it is tangled with the stories of her brother, her daughter and her lover. The unfolding beautiful relationship with Tom, her one love found and lost in war-torn Egypt is one of the most stunning fictional love stories I have read. The impact of this book continues to mount as the kaleidoscope shifts with its myriad refractions. The only other book that I have read by Penelope Lively was her memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. Just pulling that from my bookshelf, I may read that lovely book again. I certainly intend to read more of Penelope Lively. Incredible writing.
January 17, 2022
This stylistically unusual novel is a meditation on shifting memories, historical perceptions and the subjectivity of personal experiences. It has a non linear plot and sifts through multiple points of view to create swirling images of remembrance and longing.
In the late eighties, seventy six year old Claudia Hampton is lying in a hospital room awaiting death. She is a formidable woman who has garnered acclaim as a historian and has witnessed seminal world altering events. She has presented a public image of panache and determination yet has a strain of selfishness and vitriol lurking within. As her physical strength ebbs during her final days, Claudia embarks on a final project. She will cull through her memories to write a history of the world in which she is the heroine.
Thus we are introduced to a disjointed collage of the recollections that define Claudia’s life. Her memories are conveyed inside her head from a first person point of view. These same memories are also recounted from the third person perspectives of her long term occasional lover Jasper , her brother Gordon and her daughter Lisa. These juxtaposed and often contradictory perspectives force the reader to evaluate the validity of each account to arrive at an understanding of the events and people involved. As befits a lifetime recollection, the memories are jumbled and non linear, keeping us engaged in constructing a coherent vision of Claudia’s life.
Deciphering personality, causality and events within this format results in an engrossing, almost interactive reading experience.We become mesmerized by emotions and feelings rather than plot. Gradually we realize that Claudia’s story is at heart a remembrance of love and regret as she sifts through the important relationships in her life, linking them to moments in history in an attempt to define her personal legacy. Her efforts make us realize that the memory of our experiences is subjective, sometimes burning brightly and sometimes receding in our consciousness.
During the course of the novel we learn that a moon tiger is,” a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away with lengths of grey ash, it’s glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness.” This coil, remembered from an intensely emotional period of Claudia’s life in wartime Egypt, is a fitting metaphor for Claudia’s life arc. Her life force has burned incandescently and is now ebbing away. Her memories have created a polychromatic canvas that will resonate with those who have wandered within its glow.
In the late eighties, seventy six year old Claudia Hampton is lying in a hospital room awaiting death. She is a formidable woman who has garnered acclaim as a historian and has witnessed seminal world altering events. She has presented a public image of panache and determination yet has a strain of selfishness and vitriol lurking within. As her physical strength ebbs during her final days, Claudia embarks on a final project. She will cull through her memories to write a history of the world in which she is the heroine.
Thus we are introduced to a disjointed collage of the recollections that define Claudia’s life. Her memories are conveyed inside her head from a first person point of view. These same memories are also recounted from the third person perspectives of her long term occasional lover Jasper , her brother Gordon and her daughter Lisa. These juxtaposed and often contradictory perspectives force the reader to evaluate the validity of each account to arrive at an understanding of the events and people involved. As befits a lifetime recollection, the memories are jumbled and non linear, keeping us engaged in constructing a coherent vision of Claudia’s life.
Deciphering personality, causality and events within this format results in an engrossing, almost interactive reading experience.We become mesmerized by emotions and feelings rather than plot. Gradually we realize that Claudia’s story is at heart a remembrance of love and regret as she sifts through the important relationships in her life, linking them to moments in history in an attempt to define her personal legacy. Her efforts make us realize that the memory of our experiences is subjective, sometimes burning brightly and sometimes receding in our consciousness.
During the course of the novel we learn that a moon tiger is,” a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away with lengths of grey ash, it’s glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness.” This coil, remembered from an intensely emotional period of Claudia’s life in wartime Egypt, is a fitting metaphor for Claudia’s life arc. Her life force has burned incandescently and is now ebbing away. Her memories have created a polychromatic canvas that will resonate with those who have wandered within its glow.
April 7, 2015
Late life reminiscences have been done before, though they are rarely as eloquent as this one.
Claudia lies abed, reexamining the years and the people with whom she spent them. She recalls the complex relationship with her brother Gordon. As a child, she had once asked God to eliminate him - painlessly but irreversibly, but as adults, they were more like a married couple, so closely tuned it was almost incestuous. She also fondly and sadly remembers her brief affair with Tom, the only man she ever truly loved.
Interrupting her memories are visits from Jasper, the father of her child, her painfully ordinary and boring sister-in-law Sylvia and Claudia's unremarkable daughter Lisa.
As she did in The Photograph, Lively takes haughty, somewhat unlikable characters and transforms them into fascinating people. Here is a beautifully written book, well deserving of its prize. I absolutely loved this bit where an elderly and hospitalized Claudia muses about language:
Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object - a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room - a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. I breathed again.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes - our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
As Lively proves, looking back on loves lost, opportunities missed, deeds done and regrettable words exchanged can be both a luxury and a curse.
Claudia lies abed, reexamining the years and the people with whom she spent them. She recalls the complex relationship with her brother Gordon. As a child, she had once asked God to eliminate him - painlessly but irreversibly, but as adults, they were more like a married couple, so closely tuned it was almost incestuous. She also fondly and sadly remembers her brief affair with Tom, the only man she ever truly loved.
Interrupting her memories are visits from Jasper, the father of her child, her painfully ordinary and boring sister-in-law Sylvia and Claudia's unremarkable daughter Lisa.
As she did in The Photograph, Lively takes haughty, somewhat unlikable characters and transforms them into fascinating people. Here is a beautifully written book, well deserving of its prize. I absolutely loved this bit where an elderly and hospitalized Claudia muses about language:
Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object - a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room - a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. I breathed again.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes - our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
As Lively proves, looking back on loves lost, opportunities missed, deeds done and regrettable words exchanged can be both a luxury and a curse.
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