The Photograph

Author - Penelope Lively ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Viking Adult was reviewed on 10-Aug-2008.

Search ISBN:0670032050 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. The Photograph Reference Book. Classifications : British 18th Century 19th Century 20th Century Classics Contemporary General Historical Humor Letters & Correspondence Middle Old Poetry Renaissance Shakespeare Short Stories World Literature Literatu . Click the following link to view the cover of The Photograph.

Related topics: British. 18th Century. 19th Century. 20th Century. Classics. Contemporary. General. Historical. Humor. Middle.

1) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. I enjoyed Lively´s recent CONSEQUENCES so much that I turned to this slightly earlier novel. It is equally absorbing, but I think the greater achievement. While dealing with similar concerns -- families, the power of memory -- it is more concentrated, darker in tone but richer in its observation of human nature, and ultimately the more satisfying book. Had Lively not already won the Booker Prize with MOON TIGER, it would be easy to see this novel as a strong contender.

The premise is simple. Glyn Peters, a sixtyish British archaeologist, comes upon a group photograph that includes his late wife, Kath. Details in the photo, and a brief note that he finds with it, suggest that there are aspects of Kath´s married life that he didn´t know. So, researcher that he is, he makes some enquiries. Consequences ripple outwards from there, affecting a tight group of people who had been connected with Kath. These include: Elaine, her older sister, a successful garden designer; Elaine´s husband, Nick, a former publisher, now full of plans that seldom come to fruition; Oliver, Nick´s former business partner, now running a desk-top publishing business of his own; and Nick and Elaine´s daughter Polly, who had been very close to Kath growing up and is now a web designer. All of them remember Kath as a force of nature, stunningly beautiful, a magnetic presence in any room. Although there is little present-day action in the novel, Kath is very much alive in the memories of those who were close to her. Her incandescence comes through from the very beginning, but as we move through the heart of the novel into its poignant conclusion, we begin to glimpse the real woman behind the brilliant glow, and each of the characters finds something different in the Kath whom they thought they knew.

Consider again the various professions: archaeologist, landscape architect, publisher, web designer. As always with Lively, it seems, these are typical concerns for people of this class at this time. But there is more; they are all about manipulating and arranging given data to make a certain pleasing sense. Glyn´s speciality is the history of landscape, reconstructing a lost way of life from the line of a hedge or the shape of a field; he is used to the way new discoveries can change old perceptions, and he approaches the study of his late wife in the same way. As a garden designer, Elaine also works with the natural features of a landscape, but builds on them, forming them into a new pattern to fulfill an aesthetic concept; this turns out to have been an acute analogy to her relationship with her younger sister. The other characters, as publishers or designers, are concerned with putting out words or pictures that will attract the eye, make apparent sense, and sell to the public. Lively seems to suggest that we treat our memories in much this way; by trying to wrestle them into patterns, putting them between glossy covers as it were, we may distort the natural shapes that point to more subtle meanings.

There is one other significant character in that photograph, Kath´s friend Mary Packard. Mary is a potter, a profession that also involves the shaping of raw material into pleasing forms, but in a more basic and instinctive way. The raw material is not landscape but the dirt of which it is made, and the pot grows like a living thing in the potter´s hands. It is not surprising that Mary understands things about Kath that even her family has missed. It is her appearance at the end of the story and her ability to listen (for all the others are talkers) that provides the final clues that make us see Kath in a new and gentler light.

Writing this review, I had the feeling of some other author hovering over Penelope Lively´s novel. I now realize who it is: the Virginia Woolf of TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Of course THE PHOTOGRAPH is by no means as difficult a book to get through, and it breaks little new formal ground. But it is similarly constructed out of a series of interior monologues, unbidden thoughts, and chance reflections. It is written with the assumption that the inner world is every bit as important as the outer one, only richer and more revealing. And Lively shares Woolf´s power of making the reader look at his or her own life in ways which will never be quite the same again. A magnificent achievement!¤

2) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. This book is a fast read - I felt annoyed that the protagonist insists on digging up the infidelity of his beloved dead wife and in the process ruining the lives of others. However, it is interesting from a psychological standpoint especially as we learn increasingly more about his beautiful but very troubled young wife.¤

3) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. The concept, though similar in ways to Three Junes, was compelling, but the execution left me wanting. The early middle section was best, as Glyn began his search, and the characters were all unknown. Trouble is, there was little to know.¤

4) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. This amazingly brilliant novel delves into the tangled memories of several interesting people, all of whom had their lives changed, for better or worse, by a woman named Kath whom apparently nobody really knew.

It all starts when Kath´s widower, Glyn, a "landscape historian" and university professor of some renown, comes across an old photograph that shows his wife holding hands with another man--the husband of Kath´s sister Elaine. The picture sends Glyn into an obsessive hunt for "the truth"--did Kath have an affair? Did this really happen? And if so, why? He cannot let it go.

Throughout the story, as he hunts into his increasingly foggy past, we see Kath as the catalyst. But she is different in the eyes of everybody who remembers her, from her rigid, uptight (and not very likeable) landscape artist sister Elaine, to her niece who adored her, to various friends and yes, maybe lovers, who populated her world. But nobody, it seems really knew her.

So what is time? A straight line through the decades, as historians tend to discuss it? Or an endlessly whirling series of events that ebb and flow in one´s memory, taking on different shapes and importance as one´s life changes? An interesting question, an interesting story, a brilliant book.¤

5) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. I loved this book. I read it in a day and a half and I was sorry to see it end. I thought it was a wonderful concept for a novel and I have never read another one quite like it.

The story centers around a dead woman named Kath. We don´t find out until later in the story how she died but we see how her life and death affected those she left behind. Lively allows us to meet one character at a time beginning with Kath´s husband Glyn. Glyn finds a photograph of Kath holding hands with another man and he begins a journey to find out more about the woman he was married to. Next we meet Elaine Kath´s sister and learn of her life and how she visualized Kath. Later we meet the man in the picture; Kath´s niece; and a couple of old friends of Kath´s. I kept reading because I had to know what was going to happen and what they were going to find out next.

This photograph along with the memories and now new discoveries about Kath affect each character profoundly and in a different way. There is a sadness about each and every one of them. This is an engaging, lively book which moves along quickly. I highly recommend it to everyone!¤

6) Hardcover Book The Photograph by Viking Adult. Penelope Lively is a grande dame of British letters whose novels have attracted readers of Ian McEwan and Iris Murdoch-as well as those enthralled by her insight into relationships and family. The Photograph brings her talents into a whole new page-turning realm.

It opens with a snapshot: a young woman, Kath, at an unknown gathering, hands clasped with a man not her husband, their backs to the camera. Its envelope is marked DO NOT OPEN-DESTROY. But Kath´s husband, Glyn, does not heed the warning. The mystery of the photograph, and of Kath herself and her recent death, propels him on a journey of discovery that sends shock waves through the lives of her family and friends. The elfin Kath-with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways-moves like an insistent ghost through the thoughts and memories of everyone who knew her: self-centered Glyn, past his lusty, passionate professorial prime; her remorselessly competent sister Elaine, a doyenne garden designer married to feckless ne´er-do-well Nick; and their daughter Polly, beloved of Kath, who oscillates between home and family and the tumultuous new era she inhabits.

The Photograph, with Lively´s signature mastery of narrative and psychology, explores issues that extend far beyond its London suburban setting: a woman´s beauty and its collision with her own happiness, sisters´ rivalry and lovers´ cooling, a marriage in supreme crisis, and the cost of professional "success" as life unfolds. It is Penelope Lively at her very best, the dazzling and intriguing climax to all she has written before.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 7-Sep-2008, 06700320509780670032051, 570-710-500-310-900-GYB-8

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