Customer Reviews

The Hand That First Held Mine

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have not read Maggie O'Farrell's work before, but I certainly will retrieve her prior novels with the hope of discovering similar strong characterizations and taut plots.

This story develops when Alexandra Sinclair, renamed Lexie by the love of her life, Innes Kent, leaves her traditional family and moves to London. The setting is Bohemian post war London in the 1950's when most women lived with their families or boarding houses for women only. Lexie is unconventional; she is ahead of her time, she is independent, passionate and wants to carve a niche for herself. With the help and high powered love of Innes, she becomes knowledgeable about art and turns herself into a credible reporter. She works hard in this Soho art scene and is rewarded with like-minded friends. Tragedy befalls her and eventually she ends up an "unwed" mother out of choice. Throughout her travails, she holds onto her passion for Innes and confidence in herself as a mother and journalist.

Decades later, another woman in London, has a near death experience giving birth to her son, Jonah. Elina is also not married but is a loyal, bright companion to Ted, the father of her child. She is also an artist and has a solid understanding of contemporary art and its value. Ted, who is nearly paralyzed by nearly losing Elina during labor, begins to recover lost memories. These memories traumatize him and he experiences deep loss.

O'Farrell draws a brilliant connection between Lexie, Innes, Elina and Ted. There are other significant characters (Margot and Felix for example) weaved into the plot with strong purpose. Both Elina and Lexie are transformed by motherhood and their individual expression of motherhood is the best I have read. The author links the stories at the end, not too surprising, but there are some twists which convinced me that some birthrights deserve to be carried on.

I was really looking forward to this read. Reviewed in the New York Times, Amazon Book of the Month. And what a terrific title and great cover!

This parallel story, one of a woman in 1950s London and another woman in present-day London, sounded intriguing. And it starts off strongly with the character of Lexie, a headstrong country girl who moves to London on a whim. The author creates a terrific character in Lexie, and in the first man she attaches herself to, Innes Kent.

But Elina's story starts so slowly and oddly that I quickly lost interest. A woman who doesn't remember having a baby? Post-partum depression, sure, but isn't this a wee bit over the top?

But to give it a good try, I decided just to follow Lexie's story first and then come back to Elina. Even reading Lexie's story straight through, skipping every other chapter, I started to lose interest in her. The men in her life begin to mount -- Innes, Felix, Robert -- until I lost track. No one seems to stay around very long. I didn't really care to, either.

Returning to Elina, I did the chapter-skipping thing again until I got to the point that Elina comes around but her boyfriend Ted starts slipping away from reality. This is pretty much where I gave up. It was all too hazy for me.

Everything about the novel worked against my involvement in it. The alternating stories drove me nuts. I'm a buy-and-hold reader and want to stick with a character. The author also plays puppet master -- "Here is Lexie, standing on a pavement in Marble Arch" -- a literary device that distracted me. And O'Farrell foreshadows to the point of making my own reading seem unnecessary: "Life as she will know it is about to begin..." "Innes' flat today is no longer a flat... he is gone. And so is Lexie."

Eventually, I skipped to the end. I won't print a spoiler here, but the payoff just wasn't worth going back to get what I'd missed. It looks like I'm in the minority, though, so maybe you'll think differently.

"The Hand that First Held Mine". It feels as if a hand has taken yours as you start reading. As if you are being gently led into a new world. You are directed where to look, introduced to people as they enter the story. Given help as you adjust to this new place...are birthed into this book.

I liked this narrative tool - like the scene direction that the reader is given by the author. It gives a certain texture to the words that made the actions even more visual, a movie that unfolds before us...or rewinds in front of our eyes.

"But this is anticipating. The film needs to be rewound a little. Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, he appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump onto the bed, Lexie zooms backwards towards the window."

I was a bit unsure where this book was going...who the focus of the book would be. What the focus would be. Was this a story about the cataclysmic change that happens as one becomes a mother? Was this a story about madness? Were we being brought slowly behind the scenes of a mystery? Or was it a story about parents and children and that special kind of love?

"Elina and the baby walk together to the window. They don't take their eyes off each other. He blinks a little in the bright light but stared up at her, as if the sight of her to him is like water to a plant. Elina leans against the windows to the garden. She raises the baby so that his forehead touches her cheek, as if anointing him or greeting him, as if thy are starting all the way back at the beginning."

I was enjoying the story, I was interested in the characters...but I wasn't engrossed in the book. And then...I put it down for a week. I read two other books...and then came back to "The Hand that First Held Mine"...and I was hooked. Something about the story had changed, or I'd been wondering about the characters...and I inhaled the last third of the book.

Something about this story of couples and parents in two different time periods but in the same places had worked on my imagination. I had to know what happened...both in the future and in the past. I'd grown accustomed to the rhythm of their lives and the scenery of their world and had to have more.

"He feels for a moment the vastness of the city, the whole breathing breadth of it and he feels as if he and this girl, this woman, are sitting together in its very centre, at the very eye of its storm, and he feels as if they might be the only people who are doing this, who have ever done this."

I can't explain what grabbed me at the end of this book, I can only say that I almost couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I had to know how all of these lives tied into one another...what might have happened in one character's past to determine another character's future. I had to experience what they did...yet in some cases I already had.

"So, she thinks to herself, no walk for you today. And she must sit here for however long he sleeps. Which isn't the worst thing in the world, is it? But for a moment it seems to Elina that it is. She has such an urge, such an ache to go out, to see something other than the interior walls of this house, to apprehend the world, to move about in it. Sometimes she finds herself eying Ted when he has come in from work, when the life of the city still seems to cling to him. She sometimes wants to stand near to him, to sniff him, to catch the scent of it. She wants, desperately, to be somewhere else - anywhere else."

Ulitmately, I think this story is about the ferocity of love. Specifically the love between a mother and a child. The bond that exists between them - an invisible, nearly unbreakable bond. A bond that is magical, and terrifying and inexplicable. There is beauty in this story, beauty in words and action and descriptions. But none was more beautiful for me than the story about that bond.

"The women we become after children...We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, perspective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and - look! - they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squished can along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going...We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live."

This book included some glimpses of excellence in the writing. However, the predictable plot and the very, very slow start dampened my enthusiasm for the book.

Set in London, the story follows Lexie during the early '50s through the early '70s and Ted during his adulthood in the present time period. Lexie is a sassy journalist who escaped from her small town to make a name for herself in London, while Ted is a film editor with a girlfriend and a new baby. Some of the insights into motherhood included in the book are compelling, and O'Farrell paints a painfully realistic portrait of life with a newborn. Nevertheless, I found the sections about Lexie far more dynamic and interesting than the sections about Ted.

You will figure out exactly what's going on early in the book, if you stay with it. Some sections make it a worth a read, but I agree with another reviewer: borrow, don't buy this one.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This story follows two sets of characters, at two different points in time. Their stories are told in alternating narratives as we jump back and forth between the two time periods.

The first in time is the story of Lexi Sinclair and the setting is post WWII London. Lexi has been raised in a traditional manner by her parents in a rural village, but Lexi is unconventional at heart and moves to London to experience life at its fullest. She is smart, adventurous and artistic, at a time when women were first (barely) being accepted in roles outside the home. We know from the start that Lexi begins a relationship with Innes Kent, an older and sophisticated magazine editor.

The other narrative takes place now, in London, as we follow the lives of a young Finnish artist named Elina and her English boyfriend Ted. Elina has just had a son with Ted, and we know that she almost died while giving birth to him. We start off seeing Elina's mental problems and confusion due to the circumstances of her son's birth. We also start to see some troubling signs of mental lapses or spells suffered by Ted.

What we come to realize in this book is that there is a connection between the two narratives, and it is only at the end of this novel that we find out just what that is. The resolution and denouement explain the puzzling behavior early on, and we finally see the whole picture.

Although there were bits that were a slow-go for me, I did like this story and I've always liked the technique of alternating narratives. The author gives us a good sense of time and place, and she shows us the importance of finding our passions in life and making honest and intimate connections with those around us. And for those of you who like a good twist at the end, this book will satisfy.

I did enjoy this novel. I am a fan of Maggie O'Farrell, and have read all of four of her previous novels. If I were to rate her books, I would say that this would fall right in the middle - my favorite book of her's is her first, After You'd Gone.

This deceptively simple (but ultimately highly rewarding) story begins in alternating chapters. In the mid-1950s, 21-year-old Lexie Sinclair, tired of waiting for her life to begin, comes up to London and gets involved in the bohemian art world. Flip channels to the present day, where Elina Vilkuna, a Finnish painter working in London, is recovering from the difficult birth of her first baby, a Caesarian with complications in which she almost died. Despite the likability of both heroines and the relative normality of their stories, the reader has a strange sense of disquiet. Is Lexie well advised to fall so heavily for the man who becomes both her lover and her boss? Should Elina have discharged herself from hospital so soon? How has the birth changed her relationship with the baby's father, a film editor named Ted? Some of one's fears turn out to be groundless; others develop in unexpected ways. Although I write as a man, it strikes me that O'Farrell has a remarkably visceral sense of how life-changing events such as the birth of a child or the death of a loved one can affect a woman at the deepest level; it makes it a disturbing book to read, but also an intriguing one.

The most intriguing question is of course what links these two stories? Are the connections merely thematic, or are there direct links in plot? O'Farrell loves predicting things that will happen far into the future, but her hints only titillate one the more, and seldom answer the central question. By the time the two stories do begin to come together, towards the end of the book, one has long since stopped thinking in plot terms, but is borne along by sheer empathy with the characters themselves, especially the two women. Passages in the last few chapters moved me almost to tears.

This is the first Maggie O'Farrell book that I have read, but it won't be the last. I was, however, reminded of several other authors. The professional world of the characters (art, film, journalism) and the multi-decade setting reminded me strongly of Penelope Lively's CONSEQUENCES, but O'Farrell is the tougher writer. Although her feeling for art is not quite so strong as either Siri Hustvedt's in WHAT I LOVED or Sarah Hall's in HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN, she shares with both authors an uncanny ability to portray sometimes painful relationships and put even a male reader into the female psyche. But what puts her in a class of her own is her ability to balance all the various aspects of a woman's life: her personal and intellectual development, her romantic fulfillment as a lover, and -- of increasing importance as the book goes on -- her role as a mother.

In "The Hand that First Held Mine", Maggie O'Farrell weaves the stories of two women separated by a generation. We began not knowing how they are related (if at all), with the story of the headstrong Lexie, who left her conservative, traditional family for London to pursue her dreams in post-war London. The other story is that of new Finnish mother, Elina, and her relationship with motherhood and the father of her child, Ted, set in modern day London.

For starters, both women are mothers and both had been uprooted from places of their birth. Their relationship to one another was not revealed until towards the end. The stories center around both women's struggles with family lives and the joys and perils of motherhood. Lexie's character was developed most thoroughly, but others lack sufficient development. Towards the middle of the book, I almost lost interest waiting for the big reveal as to the two women's relationship. Maggie O'Farrell successfully creates beautiful moments and prose that are relateable to my real life, but these little tidbits lack a central thread for a smooth flow of the story. Although I liked the plot enough and I enjoyed parts of the pretty prose, the flow of the story could be better and I personally didn't enjoy the characters enough.

From Bohemian post-war London to present-day London, we follow two extraordinary women and learn how their lives intersect in surprising ways.

First, we meet Alexandra (Lexie) Sinclair, who leaves a country village to explore life in London, with the encouragement of a man she meets right outside her door one day. This man, Innes Kent, will impact her life in unexpected ways and for many years. She finds a menial job in a shop, but eventually begins working for Kent's magazine, "Elsewhere."

Across time, almost in an alternate universe, we meet young parents, Ted and Elina. Elina is a painter, but she has just given birth to a boy...and almost died in the process. As she navigates this new life, and as she attempts to pull her boyfriend Ted into a more active role in his son's life, she gradually comes to accept that Ted's peripheral involvement is not really a failure to care, but has to do with some long-ago traumatic incident, about which he recalls only bits and pieces. He sometimes seemingly glimpses snippets of a childhood and people that populate that childhood that can't possibly have anything to do with him.

These mysteries gradually unfold as we move along in the tale, and as these separate lives seemingly mesh.

In The Hand That First Held Mine, the author very skillfully weaves these seemingly disparate lives together, strand by strand, spotlighting the accidental legacies that remain in the present; through chapters that alternate between the past and the present, we finally see the whole picture.

I really enjoyed Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, so when I discovered she was coming out with a new book, I knew I wanted to read it. The Hand That First Held Mine is certainly different from O'Farrell's previous novel, but it is just as well-written and beautifully told.

I have to admit, I wondered where the story was going for the first part of this book. It wasn't that I wasn't interested or that it was slow, it just didn't seem like it was in a hurry to make its point. However, as the book progresses, the reader becomes more and more engrossed in it as the hints and subtle references begin to emerge. O'Farrell manages to create a sense of urgency while maintaining the facade of a laid back novel.

The women in The Hand That First Held Mine, Lexie and Elina, were both incredibly well developed. Though I personally liked Lexie more, both her and Elina were wonderfully drawn. O'Farrell did a great job breathing life into these complicated characters.

This book also has a very haunting quality that comes from O''Farrell's writing. It gives the book the atmosphere of a mystery, even though that isn't necessarily the main focus of the plot. Her prose is beautiful and flows very well, making this an enjoyable novel that is very easy to read.

I really enjoyed The Hand That First Held Mine and will definitely be going back to read some of Maggie O'Farrell's earlier work. Those who want a literary novel that isn't difficult to read should pick up this book.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5

"... the image of the woman outside enters his mind and takes up a place there as a noise from the external world will incorporate itself into a sleeping man's dream."

The woman entering the man's dream is Lexie, a young, smart and head strong woman whose path he had crossed a few weeks earlier at her parent's home in the country. She has escaped to London to experience all the excitement and thrill that the big city offers. She is twenty-one, beautiful and full of the confidence and exuberance. The young man, Innes, thirteen years her senior and a hedonist, art connoisseur and creative journalist, offers her a job and much more. Maggie O'Farrell takes us right into the centre of the bohemian culture scene in Soho in the 1950s, buzzing with life and vibrant characters. But then we jump some fifty years into our present where, initially in alternating chapters, the author brings to life her other heroine, Elina Vilkuna, a Finnish painter of some renown. She had also been a rebel of a kind but now, living in London with boyfriend Ted, a film editor, she has just emerged from the traumatic birth of her son that almost killed her.

O'Farrell develops these two narrative streams at different speeds: Lexie's story moves in leaps and bounds, paralleling her fast moving life, advancing career, and her emotional growth, realized through a series of intricate scenes like film clips. At several points, the narrator intervenes, giving hints pertaining to future event and, once , she suggests a fast rewind of "the film" to an earlier event-point. Elina's story, in contrast, is presented in slow motion: She and Ted are trying to come to terms with their suddenly and dramatically changed relationship and the challenges the newborn represents. The birth of his son also seem to trigger in Ted new and strange visualizations from his own childhood... Some reviewers have criticized the slow build-up of the present-day story. To me, it was an important slowing down to create the specific situation that the two protagonists found themselves in. O'Farrell's empathy with the young couple is reflected in her gently flowing language.

Gradually the reader senses possible connections between the two separate stories through, initially subtly, then more directly developed hints and suggestions as Lexie's timeline moves closer to Elina's present. However, the associations are not straight forward and O'Farrell introduces twists that may mislead a reader's hasty conclusions. And, like the sea (the contrasting theme to London in the novel), where for a long while waves gently lap against the coastline, only to suddenly build up into a storm, the story's events move progressively more towards a crescendo that eventually has to erupt into a torrent. More should not be said about it ...

Those familiar with O'Farrell's earlier novels, such as her award-winning first, After You'd Gone and her fourth, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox will not be surprised to find independent or even rebellious women at the centre of the narrative. She always creates very engaging female characters: strong, yet vulnerable, vivacious yet also reticent. She evokes their varied emotional turmoils with great understanding, choosing her words with precision and sensitivity. In this novel, however, more than in those two earlier ones I have read, the sons (partners and fathers) are more prominently developed and take on individuality beyond secondary roles. Her language flows beautifully and the reader is carried along into a highly moving, at times heart-wrenching, and finally satisfying journey. [Friederike Knabe]