Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
Penelope Lively, 2014
Viking Adult
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670016556
Summary
The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing.
“The memory that we live with...is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been.”
Memory and history have been Penelope Lively’s terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively’s life, stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain’s twentieth century. She reflects on her early love of archeology, the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey—including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach. She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 17, 1933
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Awards—Man Booker Prize; Carnegie Medal;
Whitbread Children's Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives London, England, UK
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.
Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister, and Heat Wave.
Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 program on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Buoyant and propulsive.... Dancing Fish and Ammonites is about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing.... Lively communicates ideas and experiences with flashes of narrative color: the tins of water in which the feet of her crib stood in childhood, to spare her from Cairo’s ants; the layout of a beloved garden; the sight of women in felt hats and gloves as they walked past the bombed-out rubble of wartime Britain.”
New York Times Book Review
Lively describes how literature shaped her from the time she was a small girl growing up in Cairo, and gives a deeply thoughtful account of the formative powers of consistent literary engagement.... She moves with agility between a wide range of observations on the personal and social consequences of being old, providing her readers with a perspective from "an unexpected dimension."
The New Yorker
Funny, smart, and poignant.... Admirers of Penelope Lively's many fine novels will find the same lucid intelligence at work in her elegantly written "view from old age." ... Memory, history, archaeology, paleontology—for Penelope Lively, they are all part of our individual and collective effort to retrieve lost time. She chronicles her personal engagement in that quest with wit and rue.
Los Angeles Times
Witty, gentle-humored, sharp... Throughout Lively is a keen observer and an engaging narrator.... Subjects that may, at first glance, seem random and somewhat scattershot take on the elegant coherence of a deeply satisfying conversation.
NPR—All Things Considered
Lively looks out at the world and then back at herself in it, examining everything through the scrim of a prodigious intelligence and a memory that is ‘the mind's triumph over time.’ . . . Dancing Fish and Ammonites is chock full of anecdote, opinion, insight, lore and the sheer delight of a life lived fully.
Shelf Awareness
Lively’s memoir about age and the pleasures and pains of seniority is informative, instructive, unexpected, and beautifully observed.
Vogue (UK)
Lively remains alive to the world, as any novelist should be (and, for the record, she still writes very fine novels)... Dancing Fish and Ammonites is powerfully consoling. Lively is certainly sagacious, her words careful and freighted. But there is girlishness here, too. Things still catch her eye, her attention. New books. Old stories. Another day for the taking.
Observer (UK)
As tightly coiled as one of the ammonites of the title...Lively’s briskness, expressing valuable insight and masking deep feeling, will delight all those who love her novels.... What she offers is a series of meditations on memory itself and on what still gives her life purpose: reading and history. Her attitude is rueful but accepting—as it must be.... Of course, for most of us, memory starts to fail as we get older, but Dancing Fish and Ammonites is itself a wonderfully optimistic testament to intellectual activity as one way towards, if not eternal youth, then a brightness that defies the encroaching gloom.
Daily Mail (UK)
A reader’s pure delight.... It works as a whistle-stop history of the past 80 years from the perspective of one delightful and bookish woman’s life.... Reading it is like listening to a favorite older relative reminisce, if only older relatives were all well-traveled Oxford graduates with keen humor and a sharp knack for observing human behavior.”
Independent on Sunday (UK)
At 80, Lively, celebrated British novelist and author examines in five essays the many appealing and noteworthy facets of old age with her expert observer’s eye and eloquent touch.... [A] digressive, erudite, witty narrative,...these reflective essays offer a wealth of riches for further study.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) An insightful book of self-reflection from the acclaimed novelis.... The faithful will recognize the author’s love of archaeology, and many will keep a pen handy to record titles and authors, since reading is one activity age has not diminished... [An] unsentimental, occasionally poignant meditation on a long life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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