Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, by Penelope Lively
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Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, by Penelope Lively
Ebook Download : Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, by Penelope Lively
Rare personal reflections from “one of our most talented writers” (The New York Times Book Review)Memory and history have been Penelope Lively’s terrain in fiction throughout a career that has spanned five decades. In this “funny, smart, and poignant” (Los Angeles Times) memoir, she offers a glimpse into her influences and formative years, as well as a view of what life looks like from the vantage point of eighty years. Lively traces the arc of her own life, from early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain’s twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archaeology, and on the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey. She also takes an intimate look back at a life devoted to books and writes insightfully about aging.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, by Penelope Lively - Amazon Sales Rank: #203849 in Books
- Brand: Lively, Penelope
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Released on: 2015-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.75" h x .62" w x 5.04" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, by Penelope Lively From Booklist Superb British novelist Lively (How It All Began, 2011) begins her “not quite a memoir” with bracing yet graceful reflections on old age. The author of two dozen keenly observant books, Lively is intrigued by this phase of life and its “metamorphosis of the sensibilities.” Her grand subject has always been the workings of the mind, and even as she rues physical miseries, she celebrates age’s fostering of “an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in.” Lucid and penetrating, Lively looks back to her Egyptian childhood, her fleeing with her mother during WWII, and the shock of cold, bombed London and her parents’ divorce. As a history major at Oxford, the Suez crisis was for her a “baptism by fire, a political awakening.” Ever since then, she keeps “one ear cocked to the clamor of events.” How nimble her episodic stride through the decades, how astute and stirring her perception of memory as “the mind’s triumph over time,” how affirming her gratitude for books and libraries, ancient artifacts and fossils––the endlessly illuminating, tangible past. --Donna Seaman
Review Praise for Dancing Fish and Ammonites“Buoyant and propulsive . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing. . . . Lively communicates ideas and experiences with flashes of narrative color: the tins of water in which the feet of her crib stood in childhood, to spare her from Cairo’s ants; the layout of a beloved garden; the sight of women in felt hats and gloves as they walked past the bombed-out rubble of wartime Britain.”—The New York Times Book Review“Engaging . . . Lively’s writing shines brightest when her discursive remarks demonstrate the methods and preoccupations that have shaped her fiction.”—The New Yorker“Funny, smart and poignant . . . Admirers of Penelope Lively's many fine novels will find the same lucid intelligence at work in her elegantly written ‘view from old age.’ . . . Memory, history, archaeology, paleontology—for Penelope Lively, they are all part of our individual and collective effort to retrieve lost time. She chronicles her personal engagement in that quest with wit and rue.”—Los Angeles Times“A collection of well-written essays that draw on Lively’s past as she reflects on the present. . . . Lively notes the physical challenges of aging as well as the pleasures she’s given up; some with relief, others with regret. She also reveals a sly sense of humor. . . . Her lifelong love affair with books is the topic of "Reading and Writing," where she mines the quirks of her own personal reading habits and library (her fiction is kept in the kitchen) and the glorious news for readers that ‘The stimulus of old-age reading is the realization that taste and response do not atrophy: you are always finding yourself enthusiastic about something you had not expected to like.’”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune“A gift . . . witty, gentle-humored, sharp . . . Throughout Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator. . . . Subjects that may, at first glance, seem random and somewhat scattershot take on the elegant coherence of a deeply satisfying conversation.”—All Things Considered
About the Author PENELOPE LIVELY is an award-winning novelist and author of children’s literature. She received the Man Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger and wide acclaim for The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began. She lives in London.
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Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 41 people found the following review helpful. "A view of old age itself, that place at which we arrive with a certain surprise." By Amelia Gremelspacher Lively has entered that time she feared, "that hazard light worn by the old- slow potentially boring, hard going." While I share that status with Lively, I also believe this book has much to inform those entering the ranks of the aged. After all, there appear to be a lot of us and more on the way. The task to place oneself in the world comes as a reality for us all. I agree with Lively that we are a bit invisible, out of the way, no longer the dominant. I also find it a relief. However, present we are, and Lively's thoughts are instructive and sprightly.I am quite charmed by the ways of viewing age in this book. In particular the review of treasured belongings. Of course I also share with her that legal addiction, reading. Her prose is witty, self deprecating, and literate. Lively's own works are part of my library, and it find enchanting the peppering of titles that share her own life. She has a dignity about diminishment that I admire, and a wry regret that I enjoy. Last, but not the least, the memoirs that apply to her own life come as illustrative of a life culminating in her present state.I would urge you to read this book. The thoughts have a comfort and a wisdom. After all, "the poor have always been with us, now the old are too."
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful. This memoir is living history, and Lively is our very lively tour guide By Bookreporter Penelope Lively knows a few things about a few things: history, being a writer and, well, being herself. She’s almost 80 now and speaks with crystal-clear veracity about how the world looks from where she is, standing atop a lifetime of experience and imagination, a world of her own making. And yet, in her latest book, the “memoir” DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES, Lively reminds us that, although we are all treading water in different places, the water is pretty much the same for everyone.Growing up in Cairo, she was whisked off to an English boarding school, and that dichotomy --- the two different cultures and worlds --- marked her particular life journey in a very curious way. Even as she was caught up in the new directions of politics in 20th-century UK, she nursed a lifelong dedication to the study of archaeology. In fact, on a Dorset beach, she once discovered an Egyptian ceramic shard that depicted dancing fish and ammonites. Thus, the title of the book mirrors the juxtaposition of cultures and the special lookout point on life that this has afforded her.Lively writes about growing up in World War II Cairo, and the ways in which English-language authors affected her for life as she made her way out of war-torn Egypt to jolly old England. She writes about Palestine, the Blitz, Syria, and how the experience of childhood manages to circumvent some of the generalities of what these times meant to so many millions of people throughout the world. Her stories about Egypt before and after the war are filled with historical facts, so many that it reads like a primer of day-by-day wartime movement. The romantic dreams of soldiers on patios, enjoying drinks before the escalation of the war killed so many of them, make an appearance as well, as Lively makes good use of intersecting the savage and the sentimental elements during this wartime journey.Finally, Lively moves to London, where she has lived for years. She considers herself a Londoner, she claims, and spends a good deal of time waxing poetic about Victorians and their beautiful architecture, their literature, and the way that their history informed the love she has for the ages-old city. There are visits to the Soviet Union for a summer school through Oxford at which her husband is teaching that test the measure of her young marriage while expanding her understanding of the unnerving ways in which the world could invade her life of the mind and bring unforeseen discomforts into her life. Lively is nothing if not a gentlewoman, someone for whom manners and morals are important in equal measure. And her early travels certainly did nothing to support her youthful beliefs that such things mattered to all people.But learning new, sometimes frightening things and then adapting to those lessons is something Lively considers throughout the book. As she claims, “If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.” It is delightful to get history lessons from someone who lived through important historical periods and can put them into the kind of individual, personalized perspective that beats any plain history book. This is living history, and Lively is our very lively tour guide.I especially enjoyed the way in which Lively was able to draw on the libraries of books that she has read in her lifetime and have given her so much joy over her many years. Her love of these tomes and her thoughts on the future of the written word are erudite and thought-provoking, to say the least. But DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES is a memoir that allows us a very special peek into the cranial firings of a delightful and accomplished writer to whom the world is a constantly evolving marvel. After this long cold winter, her warm words and apparent love of humankind, along with its trials and tribulations --- as well as its great achievements and progressive thinking --- give us all a reason to celebrate.Thanks to Penelope Lively for sharing her gathered experience for all of us to enjoy. I hope she will write another tome like this after her next 20 years of life on this bright blue marble.Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful. A warm, inspiring book about aging - and much else. By Jo the traveler The British author Penelope Lively has reached the age of 80, and her reflections on her life now, as they relate to the long years she has already lived, are insightful, direct, charming but not at all sentimental. How does she see herself changed, and in what ways is she still the same? What and whom has she gladly put aside? Born in Cairo to ex-pat Brits, she has lived a full and accomplished life, had a clearly-loved husband and family, and traveled widely. This book is an inspiration to anyone facing the last chapters of life, a picture of what remains, and how well it can be lived.
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