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Moon Tiger
Escrito por Penelope Lively
Narrado por Ruth Urquhart
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Penelope Lively won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel. Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness.
An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she's carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt. Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia's personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia's impact on their world.
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
Moon Tiger
Escrito por Penelope Lively
Narrado por Ruth Urquhart
Descripción
Penelope Lively won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel. Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness.
An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she's carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt. Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia's personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia's impact on their world.
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Talk about a slow burner. For some reason, I plodded on through the patchy plot and came out with a winner. This book really kicks into gear just over half way through.Claudia is the story. She narrates it, mostly, and is telling it from her rest home bed. Alongside her telling her history of the world that is. She is a writer and an outwardly successful and capable person. It is fitting for someone like her to tackle a writing project as complex as "the history of the world" while ill and in decline. She is like that.She also has a personal story to tell, one of the usual trials and tribulations of life and love. And also some very surprising and moving events which end up shaping her as a person, more than even she would like to admit. Through being a war correspondent in Cairo, her close relationship with her brother, her casual marriage and her disdain for the uninteresting we learn enough about Claudia to figure out that she is eventually thoroughly likeable. And all written so cleverly.Lively has a distinctive writing style here, in that other characters throw in their perspective in a scene where the voice is all Claudia. A snippet here and there from someone elses voice shows so neatly how it is in life- when what happens is in the eye of the beholder.I am so glad I put in the time early on to read large-ish sections at a time. It really kept things moving and set me up for the page-turning second half.
Hailed as a forgotten classic, I hope this Booker winner finds more new readers like me. A woozy story about love and ageing, I’d recommend this to anyone and look forward to making my way though more of Lively’s work.
Evocative portrait of 1940s wartime Cairo and Egyptian desert eventually winds back to Montezuma (Cuauhtemoc?) and Cortez in Mexico.Claudia, the main character, works as a newspaper correspondent unaffected deeply by the war until she falls in love with Tom.The war then becomes real for her because she has someone to watch and wait for.This short lived romance offers a brief respite in the endless Claudia and brother Gordon hostile/forgiving repartee and love lust.It was unfair to either of their eventual spouses that these two rude and insufferably self centered persons should marry.The book, like so many more recent novels, offers many dimensions of unlikeable characters for whom it is nearly impossible to feel a connection.It's no wonder that adult readers are drawn to Harry Potter.
The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight. Claudia's ambitions drive her to recount a history of the world and in doing so she will also share with us the story of her life. It is a story of the events that have shaped her into the person she is today. It is also more importantly a story of the people who have come and gone, drifted in and out, shared and taken a portion of essence that is Claudia. It is a truth of the world as she is and the delicate tension between how the world shapes us and how we in turn shape the world we live in.This Man Booker Prize winner is undoubtably a beautiful piece of writing. It is neither rushed nor frivolous. It is methodical, contemplative, intentional, and Lively demonstrates her gift of poetic expression with a deft hand. My only struggle? For all the beautiful writing and my awe of her talent, I just couldn't connect with Claudia, or any of the characters for that matter. I always felt like they were just outside my reach, a bit standoffish, and ultimately unconnected. Ambivalence towards the character in a story is death to a reader. I will most likely seek out other Lively books because she is a talented writer and hopefully this was just a one time issue and not a theme I will come across with all her books. Recommended for the sheer force of her writing.
I read this book twice. The first time sometime in 1998/1999 when I was going through my -I will read every booker prize winner phase- the second time a couple of years ago. I didn't really get it the first time. The second time I was very impressed and it's easily in my top ten books.
I loved this novel! Seventy-six-year-old Claudia contemplates "the potency of life" from her death bed. She sardonically states her intention to write a history of the world and, instead, tells the history of her life. Her life is, of course, a reflection of (part of) the history of the world, and this narrative provides a mirror in which to view the terrible insignificance of any particular life in the context of the whole of human existence. Fate, destiny, self-determination. Connection, isolation, aloneness-in-intimacy. Love, loss, death, grief. It's all here, beautifully examined through Lively's remarkable prose. Claudia is not an entirely sympathetic protagonist and that is part of Lively's point. Claudia herself names her own ambition and striving as key players in the disappointment of her life. But, on a larger level, the vicissitudes of fate or luck, the time into which one is born, the context of place in which one finds oneself -- all determines the path of one's life and there is only so much truth to the absurd notion that "destiny is what one makes of it." "But no one likes the idea of chance, so they play games with language and talk about miracles instead." The power of language and the role it plays in defining truth, creating meaning: this is also a theme throughout this novel. And of course there is love. Love, a word that is "overstretched" and "cannot be made to do service for so many different things -- love of children , love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness." My library copy of Moon Tiger is littered with post-it flags but there is no way to fully capture the scope of the novel's emotional field. I experienced brief moments of boredom but it's the joy that I will remember.
Sheriji recommended this book to me and I'm grateful to her. It's a story about a woman reflecting on her life as she prepares to die. She has had a special life-long relationship with her brother and had another important relationship with a man who died in the war. My own sister is preparing to die at the moment so the story had particular significance for me. Nonetheless, I reckon many would agree that this is one of her better novels. The woman's life story is unusual for the era but I found it quite believable.
No rating because I am not yet sure how I feel about this book. Well written it is but I can't help thinking I've read another story about a strong woman who loses the love of her life somewhere in the Sahara during World War II. In fact, it was central to the movie version, wasn't it? Hmmm.
Lively presents an intimate portrait of a fiercely independent woman, intelligent and adventurous, as she reviews the world from the uncompromising perspective of her own life. I loved the way memory was represented as simultaneity of events - and how Lively shows us the truth of other people's perspectives as well. Wonderful writing.
Claudia Hampton is 76 years old, and dying in hospital. Having spent her career as a journalist and historian, she decides to spend her last days recounting her own history. The telling takes place in her mind, interrupted by nursing care and visits from family members. Born in 1909, Claudia was a bit of a radical and far more independent than most women of that period. She was an intellectual, pursued a career, and refused to marry even when she found herself pregnant. She was attractive, but not interested in the men who pursued her. She was a distant and non-traditional parent, and her relationship with her adult daughter was uncomfortable. Claudia's brother Gordon was the only person she could identify with; in fact, this bond was a bit too strong, and intimidating to others.Claudia initially seemed cold and aloof, and I was worried we were heading towards the "career woman as bitch" stereotype. Then Penelope Lively took me deep inside Claudia, revealing her inner core, and the private, unforgettable love that changed her life. Suddenly, the other events in Claudia's life were cast in a far different light. This was a woman in extreme emotional pain, made all the worse by her unwillingness to share her feelings with anyone else. She simply could not appear vulnerable, and so kept her young adult experiences to herself for her entire life. Moon Tiger is a moving, rich character study which also has me considering how to live life in such a way as to have no regrets at the end.
Nearing the end of her illustrious life, Claudia Hampton decides that her final work as a historian should be to write the history of the entire world. While she may not achieve this lofty goal, Claudia succeeds in providing the history of her own life. Lively uses her narrator's profession to great advantage, and the novel is comprised of Claudia's ruminations on her past told in the first person, as well as glimpses of her experiences told in third person. Her philosophies about history--which permit both anachronisms and fictionalization--dictate the manner in which her life story unfolds. Claudia informs us, "I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me." Her other assessment, that she is "a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water," also provides the framework for which the story will be told, and is representative of the poetic tone Lively uses throughout the novel.The majority of the novel recounts Claudia's experiences as a journalist in Egypt during World War II, where she engages in a fondly-remembered romance with a soldier named Tom. With the exception of the unusually close bond she shares with her brother Gorden, most of the other events and interactions in Claudia's life--however exciting and life-altering--pale in comparison to her love for Tom. Her relationship with her daughter, Lisa, is strained, probably because two of Claudia's most admirable traits--professional ambition and wanderlust--result in frequent absences from the child's life. Although her relationship with Jasper, Lisa's father, is amicable and provides one of the few constants in Claudia's life, it lacks the intensity she feels with Tom. As her life draws to an end, Claudia considers the separateness of the past and present, while not discounting the former's everlasting influence.While the temporal and narrative shifts are initially confusing, they work well within the greater concept of the novel, and it is interesting to watch Claudia's life unfold from the "kaleidoscopic" view. Occasionally, a scene narrated by Claudia will then be told in the third person, with slightly different details, adhering to the notion that history is never free of fiction. Lively's narrator is witty and amusing, albeit distant and abrasive to those around her. She's seldom apologetic or regretful which, strangely, seems to make her more likable. Claudia does not try to drive people away for the sake of being icy or vindictive, it is simply part of her nature to give precedence to her own pursuits. (As I was reading, Katharine Hepburn came to mind. Claudia would have been right at home in Hepburn's repertoire of unconventional, fiercely independent wartime heroines.)
This is my second novel from this author having enjoyed The Bookshop. It begins with Claudia a fiercely independent woman who is dying. She tells the nurses that she is writing a history of the world. She recounts her life from childhood, her experiences as a war reporter in Egypt, the many relationships that have shaped her life especially that of her brother , daughter and her one true love. This is a beautiful read and I loved the main character of Claudia. Winner of the Booker prize in 1987 .
We were supposed to read this for my book club and I didn't, but I finally picked it up this weekend.
It was such a short easy read that I'm a bit surprised how much it's stuck with me. I keep thinking about it like you do when you've seen a really good movie.
Also: Laszlo! Love him.
It was such a short easy read that I'm a bit surprised how much it's stuck with me. I keep thinking about it like you do when you've seen a really good movie.
Also: Laszlo! Love him.
Claudia Hampton is a beautiful, famous writer, old now, dying in a hospital. The nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, but she is unfazed, quietly plotting her greatest work :a history of the world, and by this she means her own.Claudia is not necessarily a likable woman. I wondered throughout the story how she would have fared if she had been any less than beautiful? But that hardly matters. I loved this book for the amazing prose and the mosaic storytelling, effortlessly switching from present to past, exquisitely shifting from one point of view to another, the personal details amidst the vastness of history. There is her adored brother, Gordon; Jasper, the charming, playboy lover; Lisa, her sadly conventional daughter; and her one great love, a soldier found in the blowing sands of wartime Egypt. The story of Claudia's life is indeed masterfully told in this Booker Prize Winner. Here are a few of my favorite Claudia quotes (I think I used a half of tin of those Book Darts!):"Shall it or shall it not be linear history? I've always thought a kaleidoscope view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water." (page 2--Yup, smitten already, I was!)"If feminism had been around then I'd have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me." (page 14--Did I mention she was arrogant?)We will win the war, says her true love. "Not because the Lord's intervention or because justice will prevail but because in the last resort we have greater resources. Wars have little to do with justice. Or valor or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them...War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had disgracefully good press." (page 102)And one from Gordon for good measure: " 'Mad opportunists,' says Gordon. 'Tito. Napoleon. That's not real history. History is the grey stuff. Products. Systems of government. Climates of opinion. It moves slowly. That's why you get impatient with it. You look for spectacle.' " (page 186)Definitely recommended! Four stars.
Claudia is dying, looking back on her long and eventful life. She's prickly, not much of a mother. She's always been a woman who's done what she wanted. She thinks about history, people she's loved, people who were part of her life and have become part of her. Some relationships were difficult or unconventional but all part of life's rich tapestry. Her memories of childhood, war years when she was a correspondent in Egypt, motherhood, her writing career - all are vivid and evocative. I loved this book.
Claudia Hampton, dying in a hospital in London, is thinking back over her life. Penelope Lively weaves Claudia's memories with the memories of a daughter and a brother and friends, and spills the story of Claudia's life onto the page in little snippets and bits to create a story that is both clever in its structure and beautifully written. Recommended. Favorite Quote: p. 28 "The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon, Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners."
Claudia Hampton's life is drawing to a close, drifting softly away to smoke and ash like a burning mosquito repellent coil, the Moon Tiger of the title...the symbol of a brief intense period of her life when love was the glowing eye at its center. As Claudia slips in and out of consciousness her mind is occupied with "writing" her autobiography. Her memories and musings of past affairs and other attachments are interspersed with vignettes from the point of view of some of the players in her story. Claudia was a war correspondent; a writer of popular history; an independent, not entirely likeable person whether seen from her own perspective or that of family, lovers or friends. And yet, her life makes quite compelling reading. At the end, we regret her failed relationships, the loss of her one great passion, and the falling of that last bit of ash only slightly less than she does herself.
Talk about a slow burner. For some reason, I plodded on through the patchy plot and came out with a winner. This book really kicks into gear just over half way through.Claudia is the story. She narrates it, mostly, and is telling it from her rest home bed. Alongside her telling her history of the world that is. She is a writer and an outwardly successful and capable person. It is fitting for someone like her to tackle a writing project as complex as "the history of the world" while ill and in decline. She is like that.She also has a personal story to tell, one of the usual trials and tribulations of life and love. And also some very surprising and moving events which end up shaping her as a person, more than even she would like to admit. Through being a war correspondent in Cairo, her close relationship with her brother, her casual marriage and her disdain for the uninteresting we learn enough about Claudia to figure out that she is eventually thoroughly likeable. And all written so cleverly.Lively has a distinctive writing style here, in that other characters throw in their perspective in a scene where the voice is all Claudia. A snippet here and there from someone elses voice shows so neatly how it is in life- when what happens is in the eye of the beholder.I am so glad I put in the time early on to read large-ish sections at a time. It really kept things moving and set me up for the page-turning second half.
Claudia looks back on her life as she is dying and remembers her intense relationship with her brother Gordon, and the love of her life Tom, who was killed in WWII. She also remembers her daughter Lisa, whom she found boring and left to be brought up mostly by her grandmothers; Jasper, Lisa's father, who was not the love of her life; Sylvia, Gordon's wife, who could not compete with Claudia in any arena; and Laszlo, a Hungarian refugee, whose function in the story escapes me - the son she wishes she had?I enjoyed this novel very much, although Claudia was hard to sympathize with (except in the heart-breaking Tom sections). Interesting about the war in Egypt and the difference between history as it is experienced and as it is recorded.
This book won the Booker Award, but I didn't like it because I couldn't stand the main characters (very self centered, cold hearted, controling, rude) until after Claudia met Tom and learned more about love and caring about someone besides herself and about being loved and feeling secure. I still didn't like her very much because she didn't change fundamentally and still her abysmal version of mothering. The narrative skips from place to place, era to era, and character to character. Such a challenge is supposed to make a book more three dimensional, but this just made it harder to read. It does have good perceptions of aging: how it feels and what it is like.
I couldn't stand this book. The writing may be good but that doesn't mean anything if you don't like the characters. Claudia was unbearable pretentious and self-centered, and by the end of the book I didn't even care what happened to her.
The story of elderly Claudia Hampton who reflects on her life as she lays dying in a hospital. Claudia, who is independent and prickly, reflects on her relationships with the people in her life and the twentieth century. The novel hinges on Claudia falling in love with a tank commander in Egypt during World War II, but covers many other times in her life. The same scene is often retold from two or three different perspectives, which worked well and really helped to reveal the characters' personalities. Overall, I wasn't sure that the love story was affecting as it could have been, but the novel was still interesting enough that I liked it very much.
Wow. A wonderful book about a woman called Claudia looking back on her life as death approaches. As she acknowledges, historical events are open to all kinds of interpretation and the events of her life are often presented from different points of view. Or, as Claudia is narrating, we should accept that these different points of view are actually her interpretations of how the other people involved have reacted and felt. Claudia would appear to be a difficult character on the surface, with the ability to be cruel and unthinking, but she is delightful. She tells the two love stories of her life with sparse language, but this does not stop the emotion coming through.Other reviews contain much that I would agree with, so I just wanted to write that this book contains one of my favourite quotes. A key character's thoughts on their impending demise: "One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I'd have liked to know the outcome." I feel a similar frustration at knowing that I won't be around to see what happens next.
I have to admit that this has been a difficult book to reconcile myself with. Not only did the premise of reading about an elderly woman on her deathbed sound a little depressing but our main protagonist neither said nor did very much to endear me throughout the initial few chapters.Claudia Hampton is a 76 year old woman; terminally ill and compiling her 'History of the World', a history that quickly descends into reminiscing about her life, the people within it, and the events that have shaped her. Throughout the sporadic retelling of her history, which occurs quite naturally and not necessarily chronologically as she slips in and out of consciousness, we meet significant characters and are transported through two world wars, the stark desert landscape of a besieged Egypt and an earth shattering romance to the present day to observe a strained and awkward daughter, a self-absorbed lover and a tortured, Hungarian artist visiting her bedside.Although I struggled to get along with Claudia at first, upon reflection I get the feeling that Lively has quite deliberately created a woman who the reader isn't necessarily going to warm to right away. Why, after all, should we always been indulged like children and feel comfortable with every character we encounter? As a professional (albeit controversial) historian and war correspondent, she is a strong, opinionated, compelling character whose ramblings betray some intriguing points of view. On the other hand, I found her to be obnoxious, arrogant, self-centered, cold and superior, meaning that I spent the first few chapters wondering exactly why I should care about her life at all!That aside, Lively did a fairly good job at crawling back some of my compassion, although her (almost) mother-like relationship with Lazlo didn't quite do it, her passionate relationship with Tom, an officer fighting out in the desert in Egypt during WWII, certainly did. In this short portion of the book we could almost be reading the internal thoughts of a completely different woman; soft, loving and refreshingly vulnerable.It is very difficult to really adore a book when you can't completely sympathise with characters or situations (e.g. I found her relationship with her brother Gordan to be a little disturbing, you'll have to read the book to learn more!) but I do relish a challenge and I do admire strong female characters. Do persevere with this book. It is very well-written, quite compelling and does create a bit of conflict in your mind. And if you persevere for just one thing, stick it out for the end. The final chapter contains some of the most beautiful and poignant passages I have read over the past couple of years. Claudia's honest approach to both her situation and the legacy she will leave behind is both admirable and thought-provoking.
Let me preface this review by saying that I have read two books by Penelope Lively, Family Album and How It All Began. She is one of my favourite authors ,based on those two books, but sadly [Moon Tiger ] disappointed me. Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps she has refined her writing over time. The characters in Moon Tiger were not well developed and I found them difficult to like , or even have much of a sense of them. Claudia, the main character, around whom everyone seems to rotate, struck me as a narcissist . Claudia says about herself at about 80 % into my kindle, " The life of an attractive woman is different from a plain one....when I was eight years old I realized I was pretty - from that moment onwards a course was set. Intelligence made me one kind of being; intelligence allied with good looks made me another. " She seems to judge everyone that she meets on that basis, and none measures up to Claudia, save perhaps her lover, Thomas and her brother Gordon. Claudia resents her brother's wife , Sylvia, essentially on the basis that she is plain and plump and also not deemed intelligent by Claudia. I suppose it is possible Claudia might have resented any wife of her brothers, due to Claudia's relationship with her brother. Jasper, her on and off lover, comes and goes as Claudia wishes or needs him. Their daughter, Lisa, is mainly an inconvenience to Claudia, and Lisa is quickly shipped away to live with her grandmothers. Thomas, her one "true love", well, suffice it to say that love and war often lead to tragedy. I have such a negative opinion of Claudia that I have trouble thinking that any relationship that she had could last for any amount of time.I felt that Lively could have fleshed out the the characters so that a reader could feel some sort of connection or sympathy to a character, but Lively failed to do that. I wished I could have know Claudia better, so as to understand her , as well as the rest of the characters, but it was not to be. Lively did a wonderful job with shifting time, narrators, and her use of language is beautiful. But for me, I was left with a feeling of shallow impressions of both the characters and the places that Claudia interacted with. On the plus side, I am keen to read Lively's memoir, Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir. Perhaps that will give me more insight into [Moon Tiger] . I hope so!3.5 stars
A beautiful piece of writing.
Moon Tiger is a "green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-raspingdarkness" and this simple device organized the novel. The moon tiger is used in Egypt while Claudia lies with her lover Tom who will be killed in the desert war of WWII yet is vividly remembered as she lies, in old age, dying in a hospital. The memories burn off one at a time until the coil is no more and she is no more. We are the only ones who can know what she tells us, how she tells us and what the memories mean to her. We grow to understand memory itself and we travel with her towards her death. It is an elegy, not a novel. Wonderful book.
"nothing is ever lost...everything can be retrieved" A lyrical novel of rememberance and love, set against the pain of war.
In Moon Tiger, historian Claudia Hampton is lying on her deathbed reflecting on her past, though she chooses to call it a word history. This is probably meant to be somewhat ironic—Claudia has a peculiar sense of humour and most definitely has her very own way of looking at things, as she considers we each have our very unique experiences of events (a point on which I completely agree with her). She reflects on the nature of history and time, on whether they are linear and her thoughts bounce around very much in a non-linear fashion to her childhood and the competitive relationship with her brother Gordon; to an on-and-off lover with Russian roots called Jasper with whom she had a daughter—mostly estranged—called Lisa; to another lover, much dearer to her, lost during WWII, called Tom; to a young refugee she helped called Laszlo. These various people come visit her in the hospital where she is lying and drifting in and out of consciousness, those no longer living visit her in thought as she reflects back on the various relationships she's had with them. The mother who was distant. The daughter who was colourless, the lover in Egypt whom she had hopes to marry, tragically lost and forever cherished in memory. The brother with whom no other man could ultimately compete. All these reflections seen from the perspective of a woman who has always had an independent and strong spirit, who has always done things in her own way and has never sought approval, not from her mother or her lovers or her daughter. A woman who became a war journalist and travelled into the Egyptian dessert when women were not allowed to do so. A woman who devoted her life to her art, to her writing.All this should have fascinated me, should have pulled me in. It all made for an excellent story, I could see that objectively, I could also see that Lively was an excellent writer and knew how to put together words beautifully, yet I felt this wasn't written for me. Hard to explain really, but at no point was I able to connect with this book, and my greatest interest was in looking at the number of minutes left in the ebook on my Kindle app, which I think is rather telling. Maybe it was just the wrong timing. Or maybe, this being the second Lively book I failed to connect with, I just don't 'get' her. I'll give her one more try, then I'll decide.
I loved this book. It’s engaging, thoughtful, beautifully written. It’s a woman’s life, written in her head as she lies dying, and she’s a wonderful character.