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deea_bks 's review for:
Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively
Last month I spent a day and a night in the desert. I had almost given up on the idea of going on this particular trip to Jordan just because of the fact that it included a day and a night in the desert (which meant sleeping in a tent, so kind of out of my comfort zone). And then I just didn’t and went for it.
Before the trip, I had kept thinking there would be insects or things crawling, there had been mentions of the night being really chilly there, so I had kept picturing some how I was going to be shivering and not be able to sleep at all for the whole night. How I was going to hate it.
Fast forward, I loved the desert. It was not cold (at least, not even by far as cold as I had expected it to be during the night) and there were no insects. In fact, it was nothing like I had imagined it to be. And it was the best experience ever… a real adventure. Walking in the sand barefoot trying to reach the top of a dune or another to get a better perspective over the Martian landscape or drinking Bedouin tea while sitting on the sand in a semicircle, facing Mecca in the middle of nowhere while waiting for the sunset... Such simple things, yet so fulfilling.
And now, with this experience still fresh and vivid in my mind, I stumble not on one, but two books in which the desert plays a part (still reading the second one). What were the odds? I did not read the blurbs, so I was not influenced by them to pick these books, but felt strangely drawn to them at this particular moment in time. A fortunate stroke of serendipity to say the least.
Claudia is 76 and dying of cancer. So, she decides to write a history of the world, seen from her perspective. Following Zeno’s idea that time is composed of moments (of “nows”), she writes a non-chronological history. She strongly believes “that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once”. Following this logic, she just goes back and forth in time, jumping from a moment to another, from a perspective to another and concocts her own history of the world. She can go back to Egyptian times or to the Aztecs and Montezuma and then just jump forward in time to the harsh reality of troops playing versions of deadly chess with human pawns, games of advancing and retreating in the desert, during the fights of WW2 that took place in Egypt.
Having just had the Jordan experience, mentions of mirages, sandstorms, blazing sun, merchants being pushy and shouting in all directions “Cheap price, cheap price, I offer you a cheap price” in order to convince you to buy their merchandise, as well as Arabian nights references added an extra flavour for me to this book.
The writing is good, quite brilliant at times. The love story is great. The characters are totally unlikable (except for Tom), but Claudia, flirting with incest and maverick as she is… well, I… if not liked her, I sort of admired her in the end for the originality, for the strength of character and the courage to be different, to not be brainwashed by the times she was living in (although this didn’t really ring true to me for those times: since she was the one that kept saying several times that we were all prisoners of our times and preconceptions, wasn’t she supposed to be one as well?).
Oh, and about the writing. Again. I had got to 93% of this book and realized that I had simply missed too many (important) episodes from it because of frustration with its style, which is… well, all over the place. Stream-of-consciousness type. So I decided to go back and I read like 70% of it again. (This had only ever happened before with “Wolf Hall”.) And it all started to add up really nicely. So, it was totally worth it.
Before the trip, I had kept thinking there would be insects or things crawling, there had been mentions of the night being really chilly there, so I had kept picturing some how I was going to be shivering and not be able to sleep at all for the whole night. How I was going to hate it.
Fast forward, I loved the desert. It was not cold (at least, not even by far as cold as I had expected it to be during the night) and there were no insects. In fact, it was nothing like I had imagined it to be. And it was the best experience ever… a real adventure. Walking in the sand barefoot trying to reach the top of a dune or another to get a better perspective over the Martian landscape or drinking Bedouin tea while sitting on the sand in a semicircle, facing Mecca in the middle of nowhere while waiting for the sunset... Such simple things, yet so fulfilling.
And now, with this experience still fresh and vivid in my mind, I stumble not on one, but two books in which the desert plays a part (still reading the second one). What were the odds? I did not read the blurbs, so I was not influenced by them to pick these books, but felt strangely drawn to them at this particular moment in time. A fortunate stroke of serendipity to say the least.
Claudia is 76 and dying of cancer. So, she decides to write a history of the world, seen from her perspective. Following Zeno’s idea that time is composed of moments (of “nows”), she writes a non-chronological history. She strongly believes “that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once”. Following this logic, she just goes back and forth in time, jumping from a moment to another, from a perspective to another and concocts her own history of the world. She can go back to Egyptian times or to the Aztecs and Montezuma and then just jump forward in time to the harsh reality of troops playing versions of deadly chess with human pawns, games of advancing and retreating in the desert, during the fights of WW2 that took place in Egypt.
Having just had the Jordan experience, mentions of mirages, sandstorms, blazing sun, merchants being pushy and shouting in all directions “Cheap price, cheap price, I offer you a cheap price” in order to convince you to buy their merchandise, as well as Arabian nights references added an extra flavour for me to this book.
The writing is good, quite brilliant at times. The love story is great. The characters are totally unlikable (except for Tom), but Claudia, flirting with incest and maverick as she is… well, I… if not liked her, I sort of admired her in the end for the originality, for the strength of character and the courage to be different, to not be brainwashed by the times she was living in (although this didn’t really ring true to me for those times: since she was the one that kept saying several times that we were all prisoners of our times and preconceptions, wasn’t she supposed to be one as well?).
Oh, and about the writing. Again. I had got to 93% of this book and realized that I had simply missed too many (important) episodes from it because of frustration with its style, which is… well, all over the place. Stream-of-consciousness type. So I decided to go back and I read like 70% of it again. (This had only ever happened before with “Wolf Hall”.) And it all started to add up really nicely. So, it was totally worth it.
“I saw the stark textural immensity of the desert, the sand carved by the wind, the glittering mirages."