Penelope Lively is one of England's greatest living writers. In City of the Mind, Matthew Halland is an architect intimately involved with the new face of London, while haunted by the destruction and loss in its history. Matthew has a rich and moving relationship with his daughter Jane, and becomes entangled with an array of fascinating characters, from Rutter, a corrupt real estate developer whose Mafia-like ways disgust him, to Sarah, a romantic ray of hope who enters his life. In Lively's most ambitious novel, she has created a wonderfully rich and audacious confrontation with the mystery of London.
City of the Mind
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
City of the Mind,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: City of the Mind (Paperback)
This is the finest book I have read this year. It is an urbanphile's dream and is for those who have lived and absorbed the wonders of cities past and present. One floats through time and space and although this book is set in London it takes little imagination to site it in Paris, Philadelphia, or Prague. I found it superior to her Booker prize winning novels. What a joy.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Weak character development,
By algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: City of the Mind (Paperback)
Character development is not up to Lively standards. At the same time, as the title suggests, the city of London, as filtered through the mind of an intellectual architect, becomes a focal point. Lively uses a literary device to enhance London as a living, historical presence: brief flashbacks to scenes from the past, especially scenes centered around a warden during WWII.
Interestingly, in Lively's "Perfect Happiness", the protagonist thinks: "Places are receptacles, that's all: they give nothing away, they don't record, they don't tell". Hardly consistent with the viewpoint in this book, but Lively is simply channeling two different characters.
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Yawn,
By
This review is from: City of the Mind (Paperback)
What does it way about a book if you can't remember the plot less than a week after you've read it? (And, no, I'm not quite yet an Alzheimer candidate.) It's good-enough late-night fare, and definitely better than Ayn Rand if you want to read a novel about an architect. It's not *bad*--it's just not memorable.
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Inside This Book
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12
books
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- The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation by Robert Jay Lifton on 4 pages
- The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000 by Hartmut Berghoff on page 267, page 269, and page 281
- Writing the City: Eden, Babylon and the New Jerusalem by Peter Preston on page 7, and page 14
- Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Science and Cultural Theory) by John Law on page 89, and Back Matter
- The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man by Andrew Brown on page 13
See all 12 books citing this book
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