Moon Tiger by Penelope LivelyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it."
Moon Tiger is a kind of mosquito coil, or so Penelope Lively tells us, and coming from a country with its share of dengue outbreaks, the use of it as a metaphor for how memory twists and turns into ash did not escape this reader.
This is a very short read, but a fascinating one! It also demands much of its reader: this is literary fiction at its Booker Prize winning finest, with a unique frame narrative: our heroine is dying at the end of a long and eventful life, and her past flies before our eyes, thankfully, in such fascinating form. We are given flash backs, out of order, and some from the other person's point of view. So it is less memoir, and more of a commentary on the shifting nature of History, on how we are all prisoners of our upbringing, our time. And how complex love is. How The Narrative changes, like sand, depending on one's view. And written in such beautiful language!
Lively's heroine is VERY opinionated, and delivers critiques on everything, from religion to education, warfare and table fare, offering cutting psychological portraits and gorgeous lines along the way. She makes the reader question their complacency about a set world-view, by offering her own experiences growing up in multicultural Egypt, and reminds us also of our place in history. Quite fitting to read this a few days from a very historic election! Our individual choices do matter and send out ripples whose ends we cannot know.
Adding Penelope Lively to the list of authors whose books are worth looking out for. What is it with this generation of writers who have lived through World Wars? There is so much wisdom and truth in their books!
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