Ammonites and Leaping Fish A Life in Time (original 2013; edição 2014)

DANCING FISH gets off to a fine start, then rambles until Gardening becomes the focus.

"The bricks remember."

Studying memory ends up boring and recursive until "Reading and Writing" and the Ammonites.

For the author, "Taxonomy is crucial, essential." For readers...?

She also writes that she is "...only enjoying it ((a tree)) as an agreeable sight."
Hmm...really...no other connections? ( )

This odd little book is both a memoir and a bit of an homage to books, reading, and writing. Penelope Lively looks back on her 80-plus years, exploring how memory has shaped her as a person and a writer. Lively was born in Egypt and lived there until she was about thirteen. Her early education was based on a curriculum provided to English children being raised abroad, and the methods were unusual by today’s standards. Once in England she followed the traditional path for her class: boarding school followed by a degree from Oxford, where she read history. Her career as a writer came much later.

Lively reveals her life story through a somewhat disjointed approach, touching on a variety of topics while simultaneously connecting them to points in her life. While some aspects were repetitive, reading her thoughts left me feeling like I was sitting in Lively’s kitchen having a nice long chat over cups of tea. Lively is one of my favorite authors, and this book is well-written, but the unusual structure will be most appreciated by her fans. ( )

Read 2019. ( )

Years ago Penelope Lively surprised me with "Moon tiger", a misleading autobiographical exploration of the past of a rather eccentric woman. It seemed to me that Lively had made it her trademark in literature to explore the vigour and reality of the past, because the theme is also dealt with in other books. She wrote this booklet at the age of 80, in her own modest style, as a "view from old day". She muses about the passing of time (getting faster as you get older), the inconveniences and challenges of aging, the benefits of 'becoming slightly invisible', and especially the blessing of memory, as an instrument for travelling through the past.
Lively recalls personal memories, quite jumpy and random; she dwells for a long time on the bliss of reading (“it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling…”) and brings a nice ode to books. But above all she opens a perspective on old age as a kind of liberating phase in life: “I think there is a sea-change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that your are still in. Spring was never so vibrant, autumn never so richly gold.”
Maybe Lively opens a lot of open doors, and offers no more than some musings that will mainly be enjoyed by the fans, but oh well, she does so with style. And last but not least, she reminds us of her most important lesson in life: that the past really exists, is real in our lives, if only in the form of a few ancient earthenware plates with leaping fish on it: “The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.” ( )

Not really the story of her life but really what she learned from life and what it's like to be old. Very, Very Clever. She listed her favourite possessions and her favourite books. ( )