| Title | : | The Photograph |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1402556950 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781402556951 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 0 pages |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2003 |
Booker Prizewinning novelist Penelope Lively's latest masterpiece opens with a snapshot: Kath, before her death, at an unknown gathering, holding hands with a man who is not her husband. The photograph is in an envelope marked “DON'T OPEN DESTROY.” But Kath's husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secretswithin marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched.
Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.
The Photograph Reviews
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La novela es como la gráfica de un ritmo cardíaco pero conformada por un solo pulso: una línea más o menos plana y en niveles bajos que de pronto sube en un pico pronunciado, acompañado de un pitido más o menos estridente, para bajar a continuación a una posición similar a la inicial pero modificada en cierta forma por el pulso que se acaba de producir. La historia que nos cuenta Lively, esa señora mayor con aspecto de severa profesora de historia, es lo que pasó durante ese pulso, la elevación brusca de las constantes vitales.
"Verás, el problema es que Glyn ha encontrado una foto tomada por mí de la que se deduce que su mujer (Kath) y Nick estuvieron liados una temporada. No (...) Los hechos escuetos son una parodia, una distorsión. Cierto, cuentan lo sucedido, pero también engañan y crean confusiones. Omiten cómo era Nick o cómo era Glyn y sobre todo quién y cómo era Kath."
Cierto, los hechos por sí solos no sirven. Tendrán que leer la novela para saber cómo era Kath, y además lo harán al mismo tiempo que su marido y su hermana, años después de su muerte. De paso, ellos y ustedes, se conocerán un poco más a sí mismos. -
Imagine the audacity of an author, writing a book containing not a single likable character. Who would have the nerve, the balls to do that?
Penelope Lively, that's who, and her little venture has paid off handsomely in a well-crafted, absorbing book, full of scoundrels and harpies, that makes you pay attention to these people, even as your fingers throb with the desire to throttle them.
Glyn discovers a photo of his late wife. She is clasping hands with another man. It is a picture of thinly disguised lust. The other man is her brother-in-law, Nick. Glyn's first thought (after "Son of a bitch!") is to share the misery. The swine runs straight to his dear, dead wife's sister, Elaine, to expose her husband for the lying, cheating bastard he is. This leads to a portentous chain of events and the introduction of even more loathsome characters.
And yet, I had trouble putting the book down. I had to know what was going to happen next. How could all these awful people have such a hold on me? These people, so caught up in their own lives that they failed to notice the needs of others; they could not see the loneliness and boredom in the eyes of their supposed loved ones.
And then, I realized...oh, crap! I'm guilty of these crimes. I barely glanced at my husband as he left for work this morning. And what shirt was my son wearing today? Did I even look?
Perhaps I should start again...
What author would dare to reveal us for the monsters we really are? Thoughtless, uncaring, oblivious... -
My second experience of Penelope Lively and though I quite liked aspects of this book it was also a confirmation that she's never going to be one of my favourite authors. The novel has an interesting hook - a husband stumbles upon a group photo in which his dead wife is covertly holding hands with her sister's husband. Glyn, the husband, is compelled to reorganise his memories of his wife.
The chief problem for me was how overly neat and tidy the novel is in terms of architectural detail. I like to feel an author's unconsciousness is participating in the novel she writes; that we get some brilliant searing flares lighting up the dark. This felt like a novel entirely forged by the rational part of the mind. Almost everything is too conveniently appropriate to the thesis Lively is expounding. Glyn, the husband, for example is a landscape historian; Elaine the sister of Kath is a landscape gardener. Thus the two central characters are called upon to do emotionally what they do professionally which felt clumsily contrived to me. Then there's the relentless awfulness of both Glyn and his sister-in-law Elaine. Lively is writing about the elusive nature of identity and yet creates a couple of rigid clichéd workaholics to do her detective work. A lot more nuance in her creation of characters and relationships was called for. And just in case we're feeling any sympathy for Glyn or Elaine for Kath's betrayal we find out they also had a brief affair. So we've got still more tidy symmetry now. Paradoxically though the book is rather messy and rambling. Even Kath herself isn't ultimately very interesting or even convincing and her "mysteriousness" is eventually given a very simplistic explanation. There's a feeling everything Kath does she does because the plot needs her to. She's a character without organic autonomy.
Neither did Lively's style of writing win me over. It's chatty and loose and very easy to read, like she's writing for readers of popular fiction. Ultimately, I think this novel proves to me that great novels aren't designed from start to finish on a drawing board. The author should be making new discoveries as she writes, should be uncovering deeper layers of meaning. This, on the other hand, is an overly theorised novel bereft of revelation. -
After his wife’s death Glyn finds a photograph of her covertly holding the hand of her sister’s husband. What follows is a narrative investigating how fundamentally unknowable everyone is. Glyn confronts his wife’s sister with the photograph and all of a sudden various people who thought they had people boxed are compelled to revise their ideas. The four characters of this novel are brilliantly drawn, each one Lively brings vividly to life. And she’s so good at writing about relationships. It reminded me a little of Rosamund Lehman’s The Echoing Grove, also about sister rivalry. Lehman’s novel is essentially a beautiful written and cleverly structured romance whereas this goes deeper. However I prefer Lehman’s book. This rather fizzled out towards the end. There was a sense that what was proposed as an anarchic event simply caused a storm in a teacup. A solid rather than inspired novel. Moon Tiger remains my favourite of her novels by a long stretch.
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So, it was immediately after I had written the update - "don't like this very much" that this book turned a corner and improved! Having completed the book I can now see our author's structure - and as in my previous Lively reads Ha Ha - I found myself sharing the same response, indeed the same values that the author uses to construct her characters.
The problem is, the first half of the book is all about set up - and most of the main characters are horrible; in particular Kath's husband, Glyn Peters - uuh! Every time there was a chapter devoted to him and his thoughts/way of life etc. - I just shuddered and ground through.
And then there is Elaine, Kath's sister - more of the harsh, disciplined, work-oholic type, and with a shortage of the better qualities. She is unaffectionate, insensitive and critical - most notably of her husband Nick, who is a flighty, needy kind of man.
And then as I said, immediately after page 137 the plot turns. We begin to see more of Kath's side of the story - Dead Kath's view of things, through comments from other people: Polly, Elaine's daughter, and the quiet Oliver - Nick's reliable business partner of the past.
Then, as the story fast-paces towards its climax, the three main characters turn up at Mary Packards' door, wanting answers. Some of the hidden truths have been hinted at way before - but basically the three get their comeuppance at the hands of Mary - who is Kath's old friend, someone with whom she was able to communicate on a real level.
It turned out, that I enjoyed this read. But you have to hang in there to get to the juicy part. I do admire Lively - she uses all the tools at the writer's disposal. This narrative is driven forwards by the fact that we know so little about Kath - the missing central character. We want to hear her side of things, but most of all how and why she dies.
This withholding, or absence of information is examined in various ways. When an old photograph of Kath turns up, her hand entwined with Nick's, each of our main characters realises there are holes in the lives they have lived. Each one has to rethink their present and past relationships, and most disturbing of all, their relationship with Kath.
Lively is interested in the question of how we remember; our struggle to recall events but even more our emphasis on the need for "accuracy". Recalling, remembering means, having to change things, having to adapt to new information, new evidence. Her theme is repeated in Glyn, and also Elaine's professions. He is a landscape historian, and she a landscape designer: their work is exactly this - how to uncover the past or how it is continually renewed in the present. Although Glyn and Elaine are adept in their professional lives they struggle to recall or account for their relationships with Kath - their main-stream success hides flaws - which are revealed in this delightfully subversive story. -
I’d been hoping to read another Lively soon and then I happened to ‘eavesdrop’ on an online conversation between two writers, one saying she couldn’t stop thinking of this novel and the other saying she kept trying to figure out how Lively “did it”, which by that I took to mean its structure. I was intrigued enough to immediately request it from the library.
While I do not feel the level of obsession over this novel the two writers felt, I understand it. In fact, obsession is one of its themes—the understandable, though selfish, compulsion to reorder memories after learning a key piece of knowledge not discovered until years later.
Those who should be closest to the hovering, deceased life-force of the novel do not see her for who she is: the most perceptive is not a family member but one who doesn’t take her for granted and another we hear from much later. The disparate voices eventually come together in what I keep thinking is a gentle way, though the topic is not a gentle one: perhaps that is due to Lively’s prose that seems to understand and encompass all. -
While the premise was totally interesting, the implementation of it was NOT. Plot was meandering (not in a good way), characters were almost all unsympathetic, and it was just sort of boring overall. I did read it and finish it, but only because I was on a 13-hour flight and had nothing better to do! Not horrible, but not as entertaining as I'd like a book to be.
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Thank you, thank you, Penelope Lively. At a time when I really needed a good writer to tell a good story about real grown-ups dealing with real situations, this novel came along.
At the outset, landscape historian Glyn is rummaging around for a paper he needs and finds an old photograph kept by his wife, who had died some years before. In it, she is seen surreptitiously holding hands with his brother-in-law, Nick. This starts him out on a journey to discover what was going on, and more importantly, to find out whether his memory of his wife is deeply flawed.
In the process, we meet Nick, a perpetual boy living off his successful landscape designer wife, Elaine. Both are drawn so skillfully by Lively that you can be disgusted with Nick's fecklessness and attracted to him at the same time, and you can admire Elaine's courage and work ethic while still seeing the emotional distance she imposes on others.
Floating through it all is enigmatic Kath, Elaine's beautiful sister, who is dead and whose image now has to be reshaped by everyone who knew her.
Like so many good novels about the human condition, this is not a story filled with action or plot twists or sudden shocks -- it is more like real life, compelling and absorbing and meaningful in quieter and more complicated ways. -
“The dead don’t go; they just slip into other people’s heads.”
Kath is dead, but suddenly Kath is everywhere. That is, in the obsessive mind of her widower, Glyn. Searching for a particular file, he stumbles on an envelope marked 'keep', with a photograph inside that turns his life upside down. “That photograph smoulders in its envelope, and in his head." "Did she plan this, step by step? Did she plan this moment? That she would fall from the landing cupboard, set me ablaze?” His very sense of self is threatened. Glyn who has "a five-star capacity for obsession" obsessively starts searching for the truth of the matter, and in the process he manages to discombobulate everyone who knew her. (He also manages to learn a thing or two about himself!) How well in fact did anyone know Kath? Everything revolves around Kath, but she isn't there, yet she is everywhere and with the hullabaloo caused by Glyn, Kath is in the mind of everyone concerned.
Memories are all they have of Kath, but are those memories reliable? How well does anyone know anyone else? We share part of who we are with others, and each one receives a different portion. Here each character remembers something about Kath; sometimes the memories overlap and sometimes they are totally different. But how reliable is memory anyway? Did everyone simply see the obvious, that which they wanted to see, or did they realise that there was more to Kath than what they perceived? Do we spend enough time with loved ones, do we return telephone calls or do we think that what we are doing is more important? Will we forever regret not making that phone call or simply being there? Will we be consumed by feelings of guilt? If only one could turn back the clock! These are some of the issues confronting friends and family of Kath.
#####
There is so much that I should like to quote, but let's settle for the following:
“Oliver is barely listening. He is thinking of Kath. She has become like some mythical figure, trawled up at will to fit other people’s narratives. Everyone has their way with her, everyone decides what she was, how things were. It seems to him unjust that in the midst of this to-do she is denied a voice."
"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."
"Coffee has arrived. And with it, for both of them, a further presence. Kath is around. Or rather, several Kaths have arrived."
"Odd things happen to time, as you get older. Time compacts. Where once it was elastic, and ten years seemed an eternity, it has become shrunken, wizened – nothing is all that long ago."
"Neither semantic, episodic or procedural memory can help here. Clearly the mind rejects the concept of chronology."
"He wants to go back there and ask her questions – questions he never asked at the time. Where are you going? Why? What is it like there?"
"I don’t understand people. You think you’ve got them pretty well sewn up, and then they go all flaky on you. They fly apart. They even fly apart in your head, for goodness’ sake!” -
*** THIS REVIEW IS FULL OF SPOILERS ***
The Photograph was one of those books that initially it may appear to be somewhat dull and boring, but what a great read it turned out to be. Penelope does a great character study of Kath and the impact that those around her had on her life. In the process she gives us extensive background & in depth insight into the characters of each of these people. There’s Glyn, the husband; Elaine, the sister; Polly, the niece; Nick, the brother-in-law; Oliver, the photographer; Mary Packard, the elusive friend that we don’t know much about until near the end; and a sundry of peripheral people in Kath’s life. For much of the novel we are left to speculate as to how Kath dies, but if one reads closely, it is very apparent that she commits suicide (ten years into her marriage). Glyn finds a photograph years after her death of her discreetly holding hands with Nick, her brother-in-law. A note is with it from Nick making her aware of it & asking her to destroy it which she does not. Glyn is in a quandary over this turn of events & being the historical researcher he is, pursues for more information with an obsession. Did Nick & Kath have an affair? How long did it last? Were there others? As Glyn attempts to find answers he stirs up a real can of worms because he confronts all involved (those who knew or didn’t know anything about the photograph). Elaine kicks Nick out—he is so dependent on Elaine financially and otherwise that he moves in with his daughter, Polly, which totally disrupts her life. Elaine will not discuss the matter with Polly or Nick. The last person that Glyn finally finds to talk to toward the end of the novel after coming to many dead ends in his pursuit for more information, is Mary Packard, who seems to have been Kath’s one & only true friend. Glyn, Elaine & Oliver wind up having a lengthy conversation with Mary learning who the real Kath was. Each of them had been going about their lives & to Kath seemingly constantly inadvertently putting her real needs aside. Keep in mind Kath was a beautiful woman with few aspirations other than to be needed and loved, but no one seemed to realize this. Everyone knew she was beautiful, but didn’t try to see the person underneath the beauty. For me this novel emphasizes the importance of “listening” to our loved ones and our friends and expressing our love not just assuming, “oh they know.” Polly in describing one of her days seems to summarize in a nutshell how many of his go about our lives breezing through our work, exact, but not exactly enough & socializing usefully with our colleagues. This book prompts one to take a look around at the people we know, perhaps the people we’ve dismissed from our lives that we saw as beautiful, self-centered or callous. Do we really see people we know inside? Do we listen? Do we know each other’s “real needs?” If we have something “niggling” at the back of our brain, do we stop to ask ourselves, “are we listening,” what is our subconscious telling us to pay attention to? Can we change our impact on someone’s life? The novel takes us through what many might think superfluous information, but at the end one should see that this exploration into the character’s everyday lives & their interactions (or lack thereof) with Kath were necessary to see the whole picture & understand the purpose of the book. When thinking about what happened to Kath, Oliver says it so well, “He saw—dimly, inexplicably—that in some disturbing way what had happened was heralded, that there had always been something troubled about Kath, something that set her apart. Behind and beyond her looks, her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.”
Oliver mentions the Latin phrase, “lacrimae rum,” in the last pages which he considered untranslatable. When I looked it up, there were a few translations, but the one that touched me was by Robert Fagles, “The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” Robert Fitzgerald translates it as "They weep here / For how the world goes, and our life that passes \ Touches their hearts."
In the end, all those touched by Kath change in their thoughts & perceptions. Elaine welcomes Nick back home, Polly finds what she thinks might be true love & Glyn continues prodding along with his work and “finds that he has to find a new way of living with Kath, or rather a way of living with a new Kath. And of living without her, in a fresh, sharp deprivation.” -
Walking along the beach one day, my friend Paul told me that he'd saved a young man trying to kill himself there not so long ago. Upon engaging the distraught would be suicider, he discovered that the reason for his unhappiness with the world, or with himself, was his extreme beauty. It prevented normal relations with people, with the world.
This is a story of such a person - I imagine it's impossible to understand unless one is in that position. We have no conception, after all, that one could be too beautiful. Too ugly maybe, too tall, too intelligent, but never too beautiful. Difficult as it may be to grasp to see the burden of it, to empathise with it, Lively delivers.
rest here:
https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre... -
I looked forward with great anticipation to Penelope Lively's The Photograph. I believe it was selected for Today's Book Club, and most reviews have been very favorable. I must admit that I was highly saddened. I rarely discover a book I don't enjoy at least in some aspects, but I must say this one is an exception…I read the first few chapters, then thumbed through the rest, eager to find something that would peek my curiosity, really anything, that might capture my attention, but it in no way happened. The book to me was wearisomely uninteresting, so much so that as short as it is I barely made it through half of the book. I could have cared less about the ending.
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De cómo con muy poco se puede escribir tanto y tan absorbentemente, es una de estas lecturas colmadas de tesoros escondidos, puede que la historia que expone este libro no sea nada excepcional, pero la forma en que está escrita, es arte, ese arte de escribir, esos libros con los que me topo de vez en cuando en lo que me digo, por esto merece la pena leer.
Posdata: Pero nunca olvidéis que la historia que cuenta un libro no siempre es igual.
Extractos del libro:
Uno es mucho más productivo si se mueve a su propio ritmo.
A mí me parece una tontería eso de que el físico te imponga lo que haces.
Tienes un corazón de hielo. Se equivocaba. No es hielo por dentro, sino una coraza por fuera. -
An Archaeology of Regret
I enjoyed Lively's recent
Consequences so much that I turned to this slightly earlier novel. It is equally absorbing, but I think the greater achievement. While dealing with similar concerns—families, the power of memory—it is more concentrated, darker in tone but richer in its observation of human nature, and ultimately the more satisfying book. Had Lively not already won the Booker Prize with
Moon Tiger, it would be easy to see this novel as a strong contender.
The premise is simple. Glyn Peters, a sixtyish British archaeologist, comes upon a group photograph that includes his late wife, Kath. Details in the photo, and a brief note that he finds with it, suggest that there are aspects of Kath's married life that he didn't know. So, researcher that he is, he makes some enquiries. Consequences ripple outwards from there, affecting a tight group of people who had been connected with Kath. These include: Elaine, her older sister, a successful garden designer; Elaine's husband, Nick, a former publisher, now full of plans that seldom come to fruition; Oliver, Nick's former business partner, now running a desk-top publishing business of his own; and Nick and Elaine's daughter Polly, who had been very close to Kath growing up and is now a web designer. All of them remember Kath as a force of nature, stunningly beautiful, a magnetic presence in any room. Although there is little present-day action in the novel, Kath is very much alive in the memories of those who were close to her. Her incandescence comes through from the very beginning, but as we move through the heart of the novel into its poignant conclusion, we begin to glimpse the real woman behind the brilliant glow, and each of the characters finds something different in the Kath whom they thought they knew.
Consider again the various professions: archaeologist, landscape architect, publisher, web designer. As always with Lively, it seems, these are typical concerns for people of this class at this time. But there is more; they are all about manipulating and arranging given data to make a certain pleasing sense. Glyn's speciality is the history of landscape, reconstructing a lost way of life from the line of a hedge or the shape of a field; he is used to the way new discoveries can change old perceptions, and he approaches the study of his late wife in the same way. As a garden designer, Elaine also works with the natural features of a landscape, but builds on them, forming them into a new pattern to fulfill an aesthetic concept; this turns out to have been an acute analogy to her relationship with her younger sister. The other characters, as publishers or designers, are concerned with putting out words or pictures that will attract the eye, make apparent sense, and sell to the public. Lively seems to suggest that we treat our memories in much this way; by trying to wrestle them into patterns, putting them between glossy covers as it were, we may distort the natural shapes that point to more subtle meanings.
There is one other significant character in that photograph, Kath's friend Mary Packard. Mary is a potter, a profession that also involves the shaping of raw material into pleasing forms, but in a more basic and instinctive way. The raw material is not landscape but the dirt of which it is made, and the pot grows like a living thing in the potter's hands. It is not surprising that Mary understands things about Kath that even her family has missed. It is her appearance at the end of the story and her ability to listen (for all the others are talkers) that provides the final clues that make us see Kath in a new and gentler light.
Writing this review, I had the feeling of some other author hovering over Penelope Lively's novel. I now realize who it is: the Virginia Woolf of
To the Lighthouse. Of course The Photograph is by no means as difficult a book to get through, and it breaks little new formal ground. But it is similarly constructed out of a series of interior monologues, unbidden thoughts, and chance reflections. It is written with the assumption that the inner world is every bit as important as the outer one, only richer and more revealing. And Lively shares Woolf's power of making the reader look at his or her own life in ways which will never be quite the same again. A magnificent achievement! -
Penelope Lively's books are always a pleasure to read, and this is a beautifully constructed and moving novel. The emotional centre of the book is Kath, who is now dead. Her husband finds a photograph of her which reveals an affair with her brother-in-law, and the story follows the upheavals of the various protagonists as they are forced to adjust their memories and feelings, discovering that none of them really knew her.
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After reading a few novels by Penelope Lively I know not to expect a page turning plot. Instead, Lively develops characters and events that seem to come directly from an average life but she shows us a new way of looking at them. In this case, we never really meet Kath but we learn about her from those who should be closest to her - but they also never really know her until long after she is gone. How many people in our own lives do we know and know us deeply? At times I felt like Kath may have been her own worst enemy but then again - are these reliable narrators? And, as in life, is there really a true version of any story or are there only different versions of what each person experienced?
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I liked this book so much I bought two more books by Penelope Lively, a novel and a memoir, before I finished reading this one. And as I was reading the final chapters, I thought it could be best summarised as: what if Marilyn was one of us? Flighty, ethreal, beautiful, sunny yet unhappy, unseen for her beauty - a wife, an aunt, a sister, a lover?
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Frankly, this has been an unpleasant surprise. "Seductive and hugely suspenseful novel"? I did not find it so. I've found the characters unlikeable, and the ending predictable and rather depressing. The style, in theory, might be interesting, but in practice, for me, it didn't compensate for the lack of something more captivating.
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This book's central McGuffin, the discovery of a decade-old photograph showing that Kate (now dead) had an affair with her sister's husband, didn't seem all that promising to me. But Penelope Lively's exploration of the repercussions of this discovery is brilliantly done - the characters and their reactions ring true, the writing is beautiful. Lively is particularly good at capturing the messiness of people's emotional lives.
This book hits on all three cylinders - characters, plot, and writing. It's the first novel I've read by Penelope Lively. It definitely won't be the last. -
hours of my life I'll never get back
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I think this is my first Penelope Lively book. And I am so glad that one of my goodreads friends recently discovered her with this book and gave it a great review - this prompted my request from my library.
Ms. Lively was 70 when this book was first published and she has a lengthy award winning list of previous books before that. I look forward to reading more by this master.
The story line is quite compelling and all revolves around said Photograph. The photograph contains the image of a now deceased woman and her husband accidentally discovers it.
The POV shifts constantly and allows a story to unfold about this dead woman (Kath). By the end of the book we have a clearer understanding of Kath and what the passage of time and memories can do to each of our stories. For it is only the stories that remain at the end.....whether written, oral or images.
I raced through it and only had to use a dictionary about a dozen times so I not only had a very enjoyable couple of long weekend afternoon reading sessions but also learned some new vocab. Win-win! -
Like Glyn I am a historian and 'the destruction of archival material offends my deepest instinct'. Having spent my life interrogating historical data while searching for explanation one soon discovers there are many universal 'truths' and individual admissions, waiting to be found within the many different perceptions, distortions and interpretations. Historical research and analysis becomes more of an enquiry with the historian asking more questions than positing answers and so the inherent difficulty of revealing long buried truths is soon apparent. So it is with this wretched photograph capturing a moment of intimacy where Kath and Nick are illicitly holding hands. This brief episode will throw many people into a real quandary.
So, as a septuagenarian I must ask myself the same question: do I prepare a dossier of Q & A for my descendants and leave behind explanations of behaviour, and paint a picture 'warts and all' of a parent who did his best in life, but will have disappointed at times. Judged by contemporaries and later by my heirs I will probably be found wanting in so many different ways. So, should I leave my children the answers to many questions they will be desperate to answer when I'm gone. Or does one leave this world with all the difficult questions one's children would love to ask unanswered, and leave reputations unsullied. If one leaves behind previously unknown and potentially explosive material, as in this story with an intimate photograph, then one is inevitably opening a 'can of worms' and likely disappointment and maybe heartache.
Kath did leave Glyn, her husband, the option of destroying rather than reading some 'truths' but who can resist the challenge of opening an envelope marked 'Don't Open-Destroy.' Not anyone with any curiosity about the world and their place in it. So we read this story wondering, as the narrative unfolds bringing more casualties into its wake, whether Kath should have destroyed the photograph rather than keep it. This would have saved those closest to her any retrospective angst and some troubled months revisiting episodes from the past and re-ordering and realigning those memories.
The question of whether people of advancing years, like Glyn and Elaine, should simply accept these things happen in life. What has gone before is now buried in the past, so leave some stones unturned, and move on. This feeling was central to my reading, but younger generations might well view indiscretions and infidelities very differently. Toleration and acceptance to a greater degree are the preserve of the elderly, who are less judgemental.
I was impressed by the author's ability to tell her story by creating so many convincing characters, each with a distinctive voice, and personality traits, although the most interesting and perceptive of them all is Mary, a potter, outside the immediate family, whose task is to draw all the loose strands together which she does neatly at the end.
Penelope Lively is an author of some merit and distinction and her tale unfolds with compelling force. Will this make me change my mind about leaving that personal dossier. Maybe or maybe not. Indiscretions forgivable or not like all secrets should be buried with the dead. -
Penelope Lively is always interested in memory and how differently people remember others and events they have shared. It is something that fascinates me too and I'm always keen to read novels that explore this theme.
The Photograph of the title is one that Glyn (an academic in his 60s) finds of his late wife, Kath, covertly holding hands with her brother-in-law, Nick. He cannot help but reveal this secret to Kath's sister, Elaine. We read the story from the points of view of Glyn, Nick and Elaine (and Polly, their daughter) but Kath remains an elusive figure. We as readers gradually discern more about Kath than any of her family recognised while she was alive. We know that we will eventually find out how she died (for me, when finally revealed, this was the weakest section of the book). What is interesting is that we also come to understand much more about the other characters than they understand about themselves. Glyn's academic field is landscape archeology and Elaine is a landscape gardener. The novel unfolds as if layers of psychological landscapes are being uncovered - it's a conceit that works well.
I always enjoy Lively's novels and this was no exception. It was not in the end as profound an exploration of relationships and mental health as I had hoped, but it provided me with interesting and pleasurable reading hours. Three and a half stars. -
I like most all books by Penelope Lively. This is a good story, well told with some disturbing things to think about. She explores the way we see and know and don't know those closest to us. It was disturbing to think that perhaps I am also more interested in myself than in the people I love so they are only out of focus pictures rather than real people.
Glyn discovers a photograph that indicates that his wife Kath, who died young about 10 years previously, had had an affair with his brother-in-law. Glyn becomes obsessed with finding out if there were other affairs. He visits anyone he can find that might know about Kath and any possible affair. He is unable to hear what people say about Kath. The people who knew her slightly seem to be more in touch with her than her family - husband, sister, brother-in-law, niece.
A nice device; a bit overdone, but Lively writes well and wears well. -
There is a group of British women writers, publishing from about mid-century into the 1980s, who are all lumped together in my head: Barbara Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Jane Gardam, Margaret Drabble ... maybe Beryl Bainbridge? And now, Penelope Lively is in this group and I'm so glad to have found her.
This is a book about a woman, Kath, who has died and whose photograph, when found by the husband who survives her, sparks a firestorm among those who were connected to her and connected to this photograph (namely, her husband, her sister, her sister's husband, her niece, and her sister's husband's business partner).
The exquisite, excruciating central tension in this novel is that Kath was and remains 'unseen' in her life by any of these characters, although they diligently pursue, retroactively, trying to figure out who she was, why she did what she did, and what she was like based on what is revealed in this photo.
In so doing, they never fail to centre themselves completely thereby revealing to the reader, but not to themselves, exactly who they are (awful, callous, egocentric and selfish, to a person) and also who Kath is, or was; much more about her than they ever will or ever did know.
This is almost unbearably sad.
And it is torturous and infuriating, because the reader sees things the characters never did and never do and one wants to reach into the page and shriek at them and then box them soundly upside of their selfish, cruel, obtuse heads.
This is a feat of writing that is pretty much magical.
Another thing: Kath was a looker. This fact gets repeated over and over and over and over. It's the most substantive thing about her that all can see and none can see beyond.
Beauty, as in aesthetically-pleasing surfaces, and 'seeing' are both important. Kath's husband Glyn is a historian (some kind of archeologist maybe?) who looks at topographical maps and can see layers of history revealed there. Kath's sister, Elaine, is a master gardener who creates landscapes with a view to what they will end up looking like 10, 20, 50 years in the future. Both of them can look at acres of dirt and see what it is, what it was, and what it can become. Both are pretty much obsessed with aesthetics, with beauty in various forms (including Kath's), and with money, status, prestige, work and self-promotion.
Photographs of Kath, both the titular one and one other plus a painting, figure prominently and serve to kick off and sustain the plot. People see these, and see Kath in these, and see her beauty in them, and still do not see her, although at several points they come tantalizingly close to gaining some fleeting kind of insight into her, into themselves. Close.
This, the novel's grand irony, is handled by Lively with impeccable deftness and subtlety.
Other characters play interesting (crucial) supporting roles. This novel is rich in psychological complexity, and most chapters are set up as dyads so we also see the interpersonal relationships - again, in more detail and with greater understanding than any of the characters themselves.
It really is quite brilliant. Performed beautifully by Daniel Gerroll and Patricia Kalember. -
An intriguing story. Kath the wife of Glyn is dead and he discovers a photograph that indicates she was having an affair. Only Kath is a nice person. None of the other characters are likeable. Her husband who was to obsessed in her work. Elaine the garden designer also obsessed with her work and not prone to emotions. Nick her husband a likeable leech on his wife who is 58 but never grew up and Polly the daughter. Oliver, Nicks ex work partner who took the photograph.
I think the author wanted to show that while someone’s life may look happy that underneath the exterior all may not be well. In Kath’s case she needed a good therapist and someone she could talk to. The ending left us in a bit of limbo and how people hate change and will tolerate many things. Including an idiotic husband. -
I read this book for the ATY 2020 Reading Challenge Week 14: A book by an author on the Abe List of 100 Essential Female Writers
I am speechless, blown away, amazed by this book. It is haunting. Perhaps, it is a "haunting." Kath the beautiful. Kath the beloved. Kath the nuisance. Kath the bubbling enthusiast. Kath who died far too young, but lives still in vivid memories. Kath who left huge holes in many lives. You may wonder one day who has the right to remember the dead. Who really knows you? How much of you does any one person know? This book may haunt me for a very long time. I hope you read it. If you do, maybe you will tell me how it affected you. -
Definitely a quiet contemplative novel with each character examining and exploring their innermost feelings and actions after a photograph is found. Surprisingly, there were a couple of twists in the story that I found interesting. Penelope Lively is an author that I have sadly put on my TBR many years ago and just now reading.
