| Review: Penelope Lively, THE PHOTOGRAPH |
| The Photograph by Penelope
Lively does not wrap itself around the reader with an easy welcome.
The first chapter is a challenge—dense, oddly stiff, the opposite
of engaging. Several readers I spoke to admitted they would not have
continued if the author had been someone unknown. But the author is
not unknown, she is Penelope Lively. And therefore she can exercise
the option of putting her readers off while she weaves the net that
catches them. We’ll wait. The Photograph presents difficult circumstances. A central character who is dead before the book begins. Two main characters with rigid, self-obsessive, unappealing personalities. A situation that morphs continuously as we gather information. And then there’s that fascinating photograph and the implosion it starts, spinning cracks not only through the present, but back into the past, and onward into the future, forcing examination where it’s unwelcome, discovery where it’s uninvited. And maybe, just maybe initiating a hint, some small degree, of understanding. Even though it’s too late. Despite the taut beginning, Lively is a witch of a writer. She weaves her web of words into an intricate end-shape, a whole that is larger than its parts, a grand truth that comes out of small lies and misunderstandings and narrow lines of sight. A clear story, at least to the reader in the end, that emerges from all the blind tellers and then lingers and makes us think...about who we know or think we know...about why we know or want to know them…about why we can’t know them...and about what all this knowing and not knowing tells us about ourselves. Read it.
|
| Top |
|
