Look out for Penelope Lively’s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories.
Hailed by critics as a benchmark in a career full of award-winning achievements, Making It Up is Penelope Lively's answer to the oft-asked question, "How much of what you write comes from your own life?" What if Lively hadn't escaped from Egypt, her birthplace, at the outbreak of World War II? What would her life have been like if she'd married someone else? From a hillside in Italy to an archaeological dig, the author explores the stories that could have been hers, fashioning a sublime dance between reality and imagination that confirms her reputation as a singular talent.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Roxanna Robinson
Who knows what determines the course of a life? Genes, character, chance? There are many means of exploring these questions, but one of the most tantalizing is Penelope Lively's "confabulation."
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Jonathan Yardley
… if one theme coursing through all these stories is the connection of past and present, the other is love. Nobody writes more astutely or affectingly about that great subject than Penelope Lively, and rarely has she written about it so well as she does here. Making It Up is indeed a confabulation, but it is rooted in real human experience and real human emotion. What happens here is not what really happened, but it feels as real as reality itself.
— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
In this engrossing, perverse challenge to genre "an anti-memoir" Booker Award novelist Lively (Moon Tiger, 1987) explores the road not taken. What if her family, evacuating Egypt during WWII, had traveled to South Africa rather than Palestine? What if a date that ended chastely had led to unwed motherhood? What if her husband-to-be had been captured in Korea? What if that other Penelope had taken up with Achilles? What if Lively, who eventually became a writer, had, as a student, gone on an archeological dig? "This book is fiction," Lively warns. The narratives are inventions, rendered by an omniscient voice, framed by brief, evocative autobiographical passages, and peopled by non-Penelopes. Lively achieves "the authenticity of fiction" in their credibility, but she lived none of these alternative lives. Writers and would-be writers will be intrigued to observe the transformation of life into literature. Readers may enjoy wrestling with questions of choice and chance in human affairs, or they may settle for a series of neatly crafted tales. The vividly imagined lives stir up questions far more thought provoking than the simple "what if?" As Lively so elegantly demonstrates, "The paths do not so much fork as flourish." Agent, Emma Sweeny. (On sale Oct. 24) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Lively (Moon Tiger) invents new versions of herself in a series of tales she calls "anti-memoir." A true version of the events in her life appears at the preface or conclusion to these graceful stories, which might well serve as lessons for would-be writers on how to create fiction from real life. This series of "what-ifs," or roads not taken, considers how Lively's life might have turned out had the ship on which she sailed as a girl escaping wartime Cairo been torpedoed; had her sexual initiation resulted in an unplanned pregnancy; and had the man she married ended up, as he very nearly might have, being sent to fight in the Korean conflict. At times, the character of Lively is the main attraction, while at others she is an off-stage presence. But in every case, she proves as captivating and intriguing as we can only assume the author must be. A gemlike collection by a consummate storyteller; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/05.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
This collection of eight short semi-fictional works demonstrates the effortlessly transparent style that has won English novelist Lively (The Photograph, 2003, etc.) both a Booker Prize and an appreciative international audience. Describing these stories as "confabulations" in the psychoanalytic sense of being a compound of memories and imagined events, the author takes actual bits of her life-a moment of choice or menace-and reconstructs what might have happened, had things gone a different route. These phantom existences begin with the memory of growing up in Cairo during World War II, when British ex-pats fled Rommel's incursions by going either to South Africa or Palestine. Lively, a child of six, her mother and her nanny, went to Palestine. In the imagined work, narrated from the point of view of the pretty young nanny, a similar trio takes a ship that is torpedoed on the way to Cape Town, and the child dies. In other narratives, Lively's fictional equivalent, age 22, dies in a plane crash in 1956; her handbag is discovered 50 years later and returned to a younger half-sister, who tries to envision that lost life. Some incarnations are funnier and more robust. In "Transatlantic," Lively's alter ego marries an American, lives in New England and visits the quaint home of a stodgy, patronizing aunt and uncle, where "a large dog lumbered occasionally from one resting place to another." There is a charming modesty to this work, as Lively puts herself at the periphery of other imagined lives, or allows herself to be extinguished by chance events. Nearing the end of her eminent career, the author seems content to recede, to acknowledge the onrush of time, while showing an unobtrusivegratitude for the world she has been permitted to enjoy. Lively's ability to reveal character sharply and instantaneously makes this an unalloyed pleasure.
From the Publisher
Nobody writes more astutely or affectingly about [love]... than Penelope Lively. (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post)Making It Up display[s] Lively's incisive prose style, her wit, and, above all, her agile imagination. (Entertainment Weekly)
Read More
Get Free eBook Sample
