The Photograph by Penelope Lively

I want to talk to you this morning about the latest book of an author who is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living novelists, as well as one of the very best of the last hundred years. Her name is Penelope Lively, and the book is The Photograph, published in 2003. It seems incredible to me that I did not even discover Lively until a few years ago when I stumbled across her Booker Prize winning Moon Tiger (published in 1987), but since then I have read so many of her intricate novels. Martin Heidegger insists that we are beings in time, indeed that this is one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human. But while philosophers from Hegel onward have insisted on the paramount (and generally neglected) importance of temporality, it is novelists who have spelled out just what it means to live in time, to be that strange combination of animal who simultaneously lives in the past, hurls towards a future, and takes too little note of the always vanishing present. Lively understands not only how we are caught and suspended in time, but also has an astute sense of time on a non-human scale-of paleontology, geology, archaeology. I think of her as primarily a philosopher, an intellectual who is intent on doing a kind of phenomenology of time, especially lived time—her stories meant more as a way of telling us about the human condition than to catch her readers in merely clever plots.

In The Photograph she takes up (as she so often does) the whole idea of history. Is there such a thing as objective history? Is memory a reproductive faculty, like a camera, or is it, instead, more a creative faculty, fashioning out of the helter-skelter of sensory input a story that it tells and retells to itself until it finally seems more real than the hodge-podge of daily experience? The story begins innocently enough with a landscape archaeologist/anthropologist rummaging through his old files in search of a particular piece of data needed for some current project. That he is looking through this particular pile of the past is happenstance; he may well have lived out his life without ever sorting through this stuff again. And again, that out of some forgotten folder a packet should fall and catch his attention is pure chance. What catches his attention is the hurried scrawl on the outside of the packet written in his dead wife's handwriting, and even that would not have diverted his usually well focused scholar's attention had it not carried the inscription “Don't Open-Destroy!” That is simply too tempting. Not one to have listened very carefully to his wife's injunctions even when she was living, he quickly, if distractedly, opens the packet and discovers among a collection of personal detritus a single photograph, and in that moment's discovery alters not only his own life, but the lives of many others in his circle of family and friends.

Iris Murdoch and Penelope Lively love to display for their readers just how simply one's supposed past can, in an instant, be overturned, scrambled, destroyed. The photograph is innocent enough, simply a gathering of friends on a weekend outing, two of the gathering with their backs to the camera. Only a second and longer look shows that these two are holding hands behind their backs, and hence begins an earth-shattering, a past-shattering, a life-shattering tale. The woman is his wife, Kath, the man his brother-in-law, Nick. And now the reader is treated to the experience of how this bit of data disrupts the lives of the husband, Glyn, Kath's sister, Elaine, Elaine's husband, Nick, and a host of friends. I could open to dozens of passages in which Lively skillfully, mischievously displays for her readers the tricks of memory, the mysteries of time. I will consult just one in which the sister, Elaine, ruminates on the photograph.

Elaine looks back at the photograph. Something strange is happening-to her, to the figures that she sees. She sees people who are familiar, but now all of a sudden quite unfamiliar. It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis. A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside, everything appears different. The reflections are quite other, everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.

And hence begins an analysis of just what history is, what memory can and cannot do, and how lies and deceit can reach suddenly into the past to restructure, rearrange, destroy. The woman in the picture, Kath, is dead, but not in the hearts and minds of those with whom she lived. A kind of hero to her sister's daughter, Polly, a kind of frustrating enigma to her hardworking older sister, Elaine, and a thoroughly kind and benign presence to almost everyone else that she has lived around, all of whom have some sort of investment in keeping intact their private pictures of the past.

As usual, I intend to reveal nothing more of the story than this skeleton, which the reader would discover in reading just the first few pages of this short but wonderfully complex novel. Let me introduce just one other theme that Lively takes up and worries in this book (such an excellent one for the busy city-reader, easily read in a weekend or a few evenings of concentrated attention). How much difference does it make if a woman is really, really pretty, and are the consequences of such arresting good looks the same for a man as for a woman? In the passage I will read, it is the niece, Polly, who is worrying the question, but the reader discovers as the book unwinds that Lively has had this question in mind all along, and that she wants us to think hard about it. In this scene, Polly has just reported to a friend that Kath had always been told that with her good looks she just must go in for acting.

I mean, that's so stupid. The idea that what a person looks like decides what they ought to do. You might as well say that red-haired people should drive London buses. And it happens to women more than men. Above all it happens to ultradecorative women. A good-looking guy can ride it out. He can end up as prime minister, or governor of the Bank of England, or whatever you like. I'm not saying that they do, but you get the point. If a girl is very, very pretty, then that's going to put a particular spin on everything that happens to her. She's privileged, but there's a sense in which it's a curse as well. She's directed by her looks. In Kath's case the actress stint meant that there was no college, no learning how to do anything, just muddling along until that becomes a way of life.

And how much do her good looks have to do with her marrying the distinguished scholar, Glyn? How much to do with the photograph itself? How much to do with an entire life and all its existential questions?

Certainly, I'm not going to tell you, but Lively tells you lots and leaves lots for you to ponder and worry over. This is a treat of a book; the reader learns from it in spite of herself.

Nina: Adolescence by Amy Hassinger

I want to depart a bit from my usual habit this morning in that I will briefly mention to you two excellent books, either or both of which I might review at a later time, and then talk to you about a third book that troubles me some. As I have said before, there are so many wonderful books out there that I would find it odd to discuss bad or even mediocre books. While it might give some reviewers pleasure to criticize and dissect books, especially popular ones that they find lacking, I prefer simply to recommend some of the many really good ones. Another more personal explanation for my departure from habit is my tendency at present to start too many books and then read them sequentially and sporadically in a kind of balancing act that I think does not really do justice to the books nor make for the best reading experience. The last that I picked up and have not quite finished is a recent book by Penelope Lively, who in my opinion is one of the very best living novelists, and one of a handful of greats from the last hundred years. The title of the book is The Photograph, and it is perfect for the busy city reader since it can be read in just a few sittings. Lively understands time in a scientific and philosophical sense as well as in terms of lived time. She plays with and wonders about time in all of her many, excellent novels, including her Booker Prize winner, Moon Tiger, published in 1987. The Photograph, published just last year, seems to me to crystallize all of her many insights about the oddities and trickeries of lived time. A single photograph, discovered quite by accident as a professional landscape archeologist searches through some of his old documents, throws his entire history into disarray, and as his past is suddenly deconstructed, leaving him to reconstruct it, he manages to shake up the lives of many with whom he has shared history. What Lively calls into question is the very idea of an objective history, and certainly of memory as a reproductive faculty. Instead, as the philosopher Kant insisted and as Lively vividly demonstrates, memory is a creative, synthetic faculty only partially informed by what we think of as 'real' events. In a moment, perhaps from a single photograph, what seems to be indelible becomes plastic, kaleidoscopic. But this is enough of a hint for now. For those of you who are already Lively fans, this is a must read, and for those of you who have yet to discover her, this is a delicious and rather mischievous place to start.

The second book I want to mention and then hold in reserve for a future time is entitled Mating, and the author is Norman Rush. Unlike the short and quick to read Lively novel, this one is a major undertaking. The language is rich and almost laughable erudite; read it with a dictionary close to hand. Another wrinkle is that the lead character and narrator is a woman although the author is a man. Several of my friends suggested this novel as an excellent example of a successful attempt by a man to write from a woman's perspective. That contention I will leave to you readers to decide, although I may have something to say about it when I give a more detailed account. However, what I can say now is that the political content of this novel is complex and first-rate. Like several other books I have reviewed in the last year, this one is set in Africa and deals with questions of economic imperialism and the dire economic straits of third world countries. How could countries, long dominated and exploited by foreign market economies, wrest control from those who suck their lifeblood, consume their natural resources, and yet remain somehow viable economic entities in a world controlled by market forces? And furthermore, how could such a process even begin without centralized control and loss of individual liberties? This book is the best I have read since Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger on these incredibly complex economic and social questions, and it is quite a good love story as well. While it is a long and rather difficult read, it is well worth the effort, and deserves to be read in a sustained way rather than in snippets over months.

Finally I come to the subject of this month's review, Nina: Adolescence, a first novel by Amy Hassinger. I often choose first novels because they tend to be the best or among the best of any author's work, and they tend even more than most novels to be autobiographical. As I have said many times, I like to read novels about us-here-now. However, I hope this novel is not autobiographical. While it is very well written and quickly captivating, the content is, at the very best, disturbing. Of course, important books about real life are often, even usually, disturbing. But if I am going to be disturbed, I want to be disturbed for a reason. I want to be enlightened or warned or, at least, presented with important moral questions and dilemmas. Perhaps this is the author's intent with this novel, but I can't be sure.

I won't give away too much of the plot here, although what is disturbing about the novel is intimately tied with complexities of the plot. Enough for now to tell you that Nina, the adolescent who is at the center of the novel, is the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old daughter of a woman painter. Because of a tragedy that has occurred, the mother, Marian, has retreated to her bedroom and given up painting. Slowly, painstakingly, Nina lures her mother out of her bedroom and back to the studio, and in that process becomes her model for a series of nude paintings. As Nina had hoped, the work brings her mother back to life, both as artist and as a person in the world, and when the series of paintings is exhibited in a show dedicated to her work, Marian's career is resurrected. As one might guess, the father, Henry, is less than pleased that his teenaged daughter is the nude center of attention in these paintings. Even if the paintings are fine art, they can become pornography in the hands and eyes of a pedophile. And, sure enough, one of her mother's ex-lovers, Leo, does make a move on Nina. Under the pretense of simply befriending her, and then of taking photographs of her, he first kisses and pets her, and eventually lures her to his apartment. Nina is in that crease between girlhood and womanhood, but decidedly on the side of girlhood. Inexperienced with boys her own age and with dating of any kind, she is both flattered and repelled by the attentions of this handsome man in his thirties, and to complicate matters even further, Leo is in a position to help along the career of Marian by publishing a piece on her as an artist.

Why is this man so fascinated by this obviously young and inexperienced girl? And given his past experiences with Marian, the mother, what sort of twist is added to the mix? And even further, why is this story of seduction and use an important one to tell? In some ways, that the story is told so well simply compounds the questions. Elizabeth McCracken, an excellent novelist and one who seems to understand exploitation and abuse, says that this novel is “elegant, sad, often funny.....excellent.” Certainly it is convincingly told, and elegant in its simplicity and sparse language, but I as a reader waited for the moral message. While I do not expect justice and think of myself as a reader who understands the cruelty of the real world, I expect writers who dare to take as subject matter the horrible fascination (at least in this culture) of grown men for little girls to make it clear just how awful this fascination is and how devastating it can be for the victims. Perhaps the message is really there, and just too subtle for me to have picked up. Perhaps this is really autobiographical, and the voice of Nina is the voice of the artist who is struggling with her own past in writing this account, needing finally to voice her anguish and to sound a warning. If you happen to read this book and discover that it is I as reader who has failed to understand, I hope you will let me know. Or maybe, just maybe, like a piece of fine erotic art, this book is just so superbly fashioned that the disturbing elements are mitigated, even exculpated by the art itself. I can imagine that some of the paintings described are truly beautiful, and perhaps the beauty of the book comes first, the clear and articulate voice of Nina. For me, I simply became more and more disturbed, feeling not quite right even when I found the book interesting and beautiful.

Casa Rossa by Francesca Marciano

I want to talk to you this morning about what was for me a chilling little book by Francesca Marciano entitled Casa Rossa. If you are a frequent listener to the Old Mole, you may recall that I talked not so long ago about Marciano's first novel, Call Of The Wild. That book was about a band of journalists, film-makers, wildlife lovers and travelers living in Nairobi, and until the very end of that book, I thought Marciano might be simply one of the rather spoiled white American and European voyeurs who seemed unable to extricate themselves from the beauty of Africa and the comparatively luxurious life-style they were able to live there. In fact, towards the end of the book, I realized that Marciano was clearly critical of those whom she was describing and critical of the horrendous economic colonization of Africa.

This book too begins as a rather simple tale of an eccentric painter who stumbles onto a run-down villa in a tiny Italian village in Puglia which is located in the heel of Italy. Enchanted by the both the beauty and the isolation, he buys and restores the villa and surrounding land, and decides to escape the big cities of Europe once and for all so that he can live a hermit's life as a painter.

As usual, I don't intend to give you much of the story line, hopefully even less than you could get from reading the jacket cover (and I hope you are not in the habit of ruining the experience of books by reading the jacket covers). Suffice it to say that the painter marries a woman who quite soon escapes from him, but not before bearing a daughter whom she has to leave in order to find her own freedom. The daughter, Alba, in turn finally escapes from her father and the rural life by marrying a film producer who lives in Rome. Quite quickly, they have two daughters, and the novel is primarily about these two girls growing up in Rome with extended stays at the little village where there grandfather still lives and paints.

Again, I will not be telling you much that you would not discover in the first few pages if I tell you that the film-producer father commits suicide, setting up what seems in many ways to be a simple little mystery as the two daughters, grieving the loss of their wonderful father, try to decide why he died, suspecting from the first that their mother killed him, if not literally, then by causing him to despair to the point of suicide.

In fact, this book is about a lot more than these two lonely, seeking girls, though their loneliness and their journey make up the backdrop for a much bigger, heart-rending story of political struggle and the wild and often futile forms it takes when the enemy is huge and amorphous and armed with both lethal weapons and the vast legal machinery of the state. It came as a surprise to me how quickly and insightfully this novel turned political (just as it surprised me to when I began to get the picture Marciano was painting for the reader in Call of the Wild). The younger daughter, Alina, begins to flirt with Marxism and leftist politics, though in quite and innocent and diletantish manner, and then the older daughter, Isabella, partly in order to flee from what she sees as her sister's attempt to barge into her life and the troupe of dancers she is hanging with, enters into a much more serious and clandestine life of political activity.

Quite quickly, I realized as a reader that I was being afforded a window into the the political life in Italy in the late 70's and early 80's, a window that few Americans ever get from the standard press. All of us probably remember some of the sensational news about the Red Brigade and the series of political assassinations that occurred in Italy, but we probably know much less about the group trials that followed those acts or of the treatment of the prisoners who were detained, often enough, simply as material witnesses. Techniques that we have come to be all too familiar with, to some extent during the war in Viet Nam, and more recently in vivid form in Iraq. All who were arrested were held in strict isolation, questioned and grilled and at least psychologically tortured in various ways in the attempt to get or manufacture evidence against the rest. Often enough, those who actually perpetrated the crimes, the kidnappings and assassinations, buckled and made deals with the state, naming names and helping in the prosecution of others, receiving in return either light sentences or no sentences at all, while those who refused to betray their mates were convicted and given ridiculously long sentences as punishment for their silence. The standard ploy was to charge all arrested with all of the acts that had been done, using the threat of conviction on all charges as leverage to force information, to force each to betray all. So that if one was even loosely associated with a group, but refused to list all others whom they knew (or thought) to be in the group, he or she was tried on all charges leveled at the group.

Isabella belongs to one such group, and because of her integrity, her refusal to name names, she and others of her group who refuse to cooperate are tried on a host of charges. All who were arrested and charged were held in isolation and questioned relentlessly until the trials begin, and then housed in bullet-proof glass cages in the court rooms as the state presented its case, using the silence of those accused as proof of guilt. I suppose not so ironically, it is often those who are most directly responsible for the acts who cooperate with the prosecution, and those who are at most indirectly connected who band together, holding fast to their moral stance and to the guilt of the state, who refuse to break and betray. Their reward is, of course, outrageous blanket sentences.

I have to tell you readers that this is not a happy book, neither in the rather lonely and agonized lives of the two girls described, nor in the political scenes overviewed. In her book on Africa, Marciano noted how impotent the little band of white Europeans and Americans felt about making any real change in Africa, about doing anything to make things better. “We're like ghosts here; we can't contribute to anything, we don't really serve any purpose.” I suggested that Marciano may be talking not only of how powerless they felt, but also how easy it is to feel powerless and unable to effect real change anywhere in the world against the gigantic and ruthless and apparently nationless economic forces that seem to govern events. Marciano makes it clear where her heart is, but the reader feels her frustration as well. Quoting from the book as Alina thinks of her sister in jail, “I couldn't stop thinking about Isabella, how she had lost her faith, her identity, her lover, and now was losing her youth, all because of remaining faithful to her idea of integrity. And how she hadn't managed to change anything, to make the world remotely a better place.”

As I have done before, I want to warn readers that this is book that they should read when they are feeling strong. I think it has important things to tell us about the world, about political struggle, as well as about relationships and guilt and fidelity. There were times when I wished I had not begun it, just as there are times when I wish that I could turn away from newspapers and from the world out there. In the end, I think this is a book worth reading, written by an author who will continue to see things as they are and to struggle.