I just finished reading
How It All Began by
Penelope Lively, an adult work of fiction that examines how one person's misfortune can snowball and effect others who are only tangentially connected. The novel begins with elderly Charlotte Rainsford knocked down by a mugger. From this incident, the lives of seven people, some complete strangers, are dramatically altered. It's a engrossing book, and wonderfully crafted by its British author, who also writes for children. Her
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal in 1973.
One of the storylines has Charlotte, now recuperating at her daughter's house, teaching an immigrant from Eastern Europe how to read so he can get a better job. A retired English teacher, at first Charlotte has little success. When she learns of Anton's love of story and that he enjoyed reading novels in his native language, she throws away the clunky school texts meant for adult learners, and places
Where the Wild Things Are in his hands. Although he struggles through the picture book, he's delighted by it. As the lessons progress, Charlotte feeds him
How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (new to me! It's by the great Russell Hoban.),
Charlotte's Web, and
The Finn Family Moomintroll.
As Anton plows through each book, pushed forward to find out what happens next, he has the following insight, so well-expressed I want to share it in its entirety:
"This increasing facility, this breakthrough, reminded him of childhood, of that extraordinary realization that all those black marks on the page could speak, that they were words, language, that they related to what came out of people's mouths, out of his own mouth. This time round, the black marks of another language began at last to make sense, to leap from obscurity, to tell a story. It was though you broke into a new world, were handed a passport to another country."
Wonderful stuff, and a wonderful book.
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The second Scholar's Blog Book Discussion group has kicked off over on the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone - please join in if you've read Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens.
And the second of my Tenth Doctor Who short stories is now up on my Who Fiction Blog.
Enjoy !
Welcome to the second Scholar's Blog Book Discussion Group.
I confess that I instantly fell in love with Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens when I read first read it last August, from the moment that I read the first three verses of Thomas Hardy's poem, "Old Furniture" (below) quoted on the dedication page.
The edition I have (Jane Nissen, 2005) has an interesting introduction by Philip Pullman, which I wish I could quote in full for those who don't have it. He talks about there being an invisible character who haunts much of Penelope Lively's work - that character or presence is Time. He describes Lively as "the laureate of time" and notes that "there's more awareness of the presence of the past in her work, both for children and for adults, than in that of almost any other novelist." Pullman also discusses the extraordinary atmosphere of the novel, and it was that atmosphere as much as anything else that attracted me to this tale.
Old Furniture
I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers' mothers,
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.
I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:
Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.
(The full poem is here.)
From the first page of the story, I was gripped - here are some of the things I loved about it:
1 - The houses there are quite normal. They are ordinary sizes and have ordinary chimneys and roofs and gardens with laburnum and flowering cherry. Park Town. As you go south they are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. (p. 1)
2 - The lines The front door was not locked. Old ladies lose front door keys. (p. 2) - so practical and so typical of Clare's attitude to her elderly aunts.
3 - Clare's imaginary conversation with a person from outer space (also p. 2), which serves to explain to readers who aren't familiar with the style of British homes of earlier centuries, with their quaintly named rooms.
4 - Clare's meditation on whether or not houses should be razed once they are no longer useful, and the reference to the passing of the people who've lived in them. (p. 5)
5 - The exchange between Clare and her aunts in which they award each other grades such as "B double plus" and "Gamma plus" (p. 9). This exchange is full of their shared affection for each other, but it also demonstrates that the two old ladies are not witless.
6 - I like Lively's use of the diary entries (in chapter 6) and the way in which each chapter opens with an account of the lives of the tribe to whom the tamburan belonged.
7 - I thought it interesting that Lively used dreams to show the way in which the tamburan, and its link to the past, affects Clare.
For those of you without the Jane Nissen edition of Lively's book, the tamburan is illustrated on the cover photo (see above), behind the book title (below):
So what did you think of this book? What did you like? What did you feel didn't work? And would it encourage you to read more of Lively's children's fiction?
This is just a quick reminder that discussion of Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens will begin on Tuesday, March 6 over on the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone. Everyone's welcome to participate.
See you there !
My talk for the New England Roundtable of Teen and Children's Librarians is in good shape (I think), I made two inquiries in the last few days and one fiction submission. Okay, it's not the kind of accomplishment Jane Yolen would even bother mentioning, but for me it was a big week!
So after doing so very, very much, I took a little time off this afternoon to finally take a look at the most recent The Edge of the Forest. My favorite articles? You care? You really want to know?
Well, I particularly liked Little Willow's (Allie's?) piece on Rachel Cohn because it led me to this interview with Cohn and David Levithan. (They wrote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, of course.) Get this: Levithan edited sixty of the Baby-sitters Club books. Perhaps I should read one. If memory serves me, I recall a young male relative reading one or two in his younger days.
Another article I found particularly interesting was Michele Fry's Introduction to Penelope Lively's Works for Children. My knowledge of Penelope Lively is limited to her book for adults Moon Tiger. I have to admit that I don't remember a great deal about it. Except that at the time I thought it was fantastic.
So that's another author I need to read more of, should I live long enough to do so.
Penelope Lively was born on March 17, 1933 in Cairo, Egypt. At the age of 12 she was sent to school in England and in 1956 she graduated with a degree in History from St. Anne's College, Oxford University. Lively still lives in England with her husband Jack, who is a Professor of Politics at the University of Warwick. She has two children: Adam, who published his first novel at 26, and Josephine, who is an oboist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Lively began writing in 1970 and her work is generally concerned with the continuity of past and present, and with the relationship between personal memory and history. She says, "Perhaps what I'm interested in... is the operation of memory, the ways in which the physical world is composed of memory, the ways in which it's an encumbrance and the ways in which it's an asset... I can hardly decide which it is. But it's something that I'm constantly aware of and constantly seeing new ways of exploring fictionally." Other frequent themes in Lively's books are death and loss; for example, The House at Norham Gardens is concerned with Claire and the not-too-distant deaths of her great Aunts, and what it will mean to her when both her parents are already dead.
Lively's children's books include:
1970 Astercote (About a village that's literally trapped in the past - Review)
1971 The Whispering Knights (About 3 children who decide to re-create a Witch's Brew, and the consequences that accrue - Review)
1971 The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (What happens when an ancient ritual is performed in the modern day - Review)
1972 The Driftway (About a boy who comes to terms with his stepmother after a series of "encounters" with people from the past - Review)
1973 The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (About a ghost who thinks a 20th century boy is his latest apprentice - Review)
1974 The House in Norham Gardens (About an orphan girl who faces up to the knowledge that she will lose her guardian aunts in the not-too-distant future - Review)
1975 Boy Without a Name (About a nameless boy who learns to be a stonemason and earns a name for himself - Review)
1976 A Stitch in Time (About a girl who finds links with the past via a sampler - Review)
1978 The Voyage of QV66 (A futuristic tale with a dystopian theme – and talking animals - Review)
1981 The Revenge of Samuel Stokes (About a ghost who objects to a modern building developing that's been created on the site of his landscaped masterpiece - Review)
1984 Uninvited Ghosts and Other Stories (A collection of short stories - Review)
Since the publication of her first novel, Astercote in 1970, Lively has developed into a writer who is as prolific as she is wide-ranging. She is the author of over forty novels, short story collections and children’s fiction, and has published in everything from The Literary Review to Woman’s Own, from Cosmopolitan to Books and Bookmen. As the diversity of publications suggests, Lively’s work appeals to both a youthful, popular audience keen to find escape within a good book, and to an academic audience, which is interested in her experimental narrative techniques and her creation of what post-modern scholars sometimes refer to as "historiographical metafiction".
In discussing her storytelling, Lively has this to say:
"In writing fiction I am trying to impose order upon chaos, to give structure and meaning to what is apparently random. People have always sought explanations and palliatives for the arbitrary judgements of fate. I am an agnostic, and while I would not suggest the construction of fiction as an alternative to religious belief, it does seem to me that many writers - and I am certainly one - look at it as an opportunity to perceive and explain pattern and meaning in human existence. I am also deeply conscious of the limitations of experience - the sense in which the writer is fettered by gender, age and social and historical context. It seems to me that the challenge of writing novels and short stories is to transcend and translate personal experience, to try to give a universal and comprehensible significance to things which seem part of the fortuitous scenery of one's own life. But a view of the world is essentially and inevitably a personal one, conditioned by circumstance; I write within the English tradition of saying serious things in a relatively light-hearted way. Two of the qualities I most admire in other writers are accuracy and concision - the ability to say most by saying least; with this in mind what I am always trying to do is to find ways of translating ideas and observations into character and narrative. The short story can act as a concentrated beam of light; the novel is a more expansive and dispersed reflection. They do different things, I think, but both depend upon selection and metamorphosis - taking from life the situations that seem to offer insights, and then giving them the form and discipline of fiction." (From the Contemporary Writers site.)
I keep a list of quotes about books and reading for future use at the head of my Saturday Review of Books each week. So I "borrowed" this one to add to my list. Reading really is like that: an opener of doors.
Thanks for this! Just placed it on hold and am looking forward to reading it.