Customer Reviews

Moon Tiger

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"I'm writing a history of the world. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute-from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine", so says Claudia Hampton, in her 76th year, as she lies dying. We all have books we can't put down, this is mine. This is the glorious book that I did not want to end, that I read in one sitting. I could not, absolutely could not put this book down. A ten star book if there ever was one!

Claudia is a character so rich, you feel her in your bones. You want to know her as your own. Claudia Hampton and her brother Gordon born of a comfortable family. Father died in his war, and mysteriously not much is known of him. Mother lived her life, she withdrew from the world. She lived for her roses, tapestry and unchangeable weather. Gordon and Claudia, sister and brother, wild, untamed as children, brilliant and wild and untamed as adults. They were self-involved and never needed an other person when they were together. The important people in Claudia's life are so well defined and characterized- they become the story.

Claudia became a write of books, history, and met her off and on lover, Jasper and father of her child, Lisa, when she was writing a book about Tito. Not one of Claudia's acquaintances or family approved of or liked Jasper, but that made him much more interesting, and, anyway, theirs was a sexual love-sex kept them together. And the fact that Claudia was beautiful and intelligent and such an asset. Men loved her and women approved of her. They never married, but they saw each other many times throughout their lives.

Tom Southern, the love of Claudia's life. She met him while she was a correspondent during the War in Egypt. Theirs was a love like no other. A sweet, short love, and one of the most memorable affairs.

Sylvia, Gordon's wife. A woman to be put up with. A stable wife who said not much and did little else, but she kept their life together. A woman who mattered not to Claudia- someone to be tolerated.

Lisa, the child of Claudia and Jasper. Like neither her mother nor father and treated as such- like a neither. Shunted off to be brought up by her grandmothers a child who so wanted to be loved by her mother, and was, but the love was not spoken.

Laszlo, the child of a Hungarian, who was left homeless and family less after the Hungarian uprising. Claudia took him in and treated him almost as a son.

These the important people in Claudia's life. This strong, independent woman who had such contentious relations with family and friends. Penelope Lively, won the Booker Prize for this novel. And well she should! What a powerful, moving and beautifully wrought book she has written. Claudia Hampton, a literary figure not to be forgotten. Well done, Penelope Lively !prisrob

Perception. That is the major theme that occurs throughout the novel. The way we see and interpret events may not necessarily be the way others perceive them. One woman's "History of the World" can only be based on subjective interpretation.

Claudia Hampton has lived a full, rich life. At the age of 76, she's now on her deathbed, recalling a myriad of poignant moments she had experienced in her long life. Many people have made an impact upon her life: her brother Gordon, for example, who was a mirror image of Claudia, and who shared in their borderline-incestuous relationship. Her daughter Lisa, as different from her mother as could be. Her lover of many years, Jasper, who served his purpose, but who never truly won her heart. The love of her life, Tom, who she only knew for a short period of time but loved deeply and powerfully. They all play a part in what she calls "Claudia's History of the World". The bits and pieces of her life come rapidly, with no chronological order to bind them together, and Claudia takes the time to muse over everything that has made her who she is.

MOON TIGER is extremely powerful at times and always eloquently written. The love story between Tom and Claudia is breathtaking. Selfishly, I wish it had been longer. I yearned for more character development and depth in Tom, although as readers, we know as much about him as Claudia herself did. Their romance was brief, but passionate, and it left me yearning for more right along with Claudia.

A word of warning: although the book is relatively short (at 200 pages), it feels lengthy and drawn out at times. Again, this only serves to highlight Lively's skill at writing Claudia's last experiences. Of course, being a dying woman's memoirs, the book is short on plot and long on self-discovery, and reflection.

A must-read for lovers of literary fiction - but those with a taste for more adventurous plot lines would probably not find their desired reading material in MOON TIGER.

An exotic novel about a love that haunts us from the grave to our own. Claudia's rendition of her affair in Egypt during a war, resulting in the loss of her great love and their unborn child, is depicted with an Englishwoman's genius of grammar, prose, and Latin-based mastery of the English language. Told through Claudia's story on her death bed between periods of consciousness, Penelope Lively distinguishes herself with the usage of narrative to describe a lifetime of mourning. Claudia mourns Tom throughout her adult and senior years as she lives a journalist's life in London, England. Lively's Claudia is a stubborn woman whose account of things, people, and relationships are rooted in her own view of the world. This is more than a romance, it is a look into the elements and pervasive condition of heartbreak over a lifetime. Tragic, humorous, and compelling. No wonder it was a Booker Prize - the most prestigious literary prize in the world for English language fiction.

Winner of the 1987 Booker Prize, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger is a contemporary pitch-perfect crafted novel that reverberates around the dying Claudia Hampton, a best selling author of popular history. Dying from cancer in a London hospital, she is forced into the cell of her bed, but while her body is severly restricted, her soul and consciousness are free, far from the repression of illness and medicinal injections. With that freedom, the independent Claudia takes a journey unlike any that she has taken previously; it is a journey into her inner self, into the treasure trove of her mind where all the experiences and memories of her earlier life are vaulted. And it is with that that she decides to write or convey an oral history to herself in the hopes of untangling the vast assortment of questions that accrue over a life span of how and why a person does the questionable things that they chose to do. She is, in essence, forced to go back in time and face her own Judgement. In the novel she confronts failed love (the character of Jasper), lost love (the tank commander Tom), a daughter with nothing in common (Lisa), to a plethora of other matters, both great and small. Moon Tiger is a good read, powerful in its evocation of the past through the kaleidoscopic memories of a dying soul. It is a work of fiction where the tapestry of memories becomes the art form, and the keeper of those memories becomes the artist. How true for us all.

"Moon Tiger", for which the author won the Booker prize, is a book that I could admire, but not like. The main protagonist, Claudia Hampton, an accomplished historian, lies dying in a London hospital bed and looks back upon her life. The resulting series of first-person flashbacks, interspersed with third-person accounts of the same episodes, coalesce into a tightly constructed kaleidoscopic view of Claudia's life which is impressive for the skill with which it is achieved, but ultimately left me unmoved.

My fundamental problem with the book is that Claudia is such a self-satisfied narcissist that I tired of the recital of her various accomplishments and the smug superiority with which lesser characters in her history (her unfortunate sister-in-law, her disappointingly conventional daughter) are dismissed. Lively is no fool, and attempts to mitigate Claudia's unrelenting smugness with a brief episode of vulnerability and genuine emotion during a doomed World War II romance with a British tank commander who is subsequently killed in battle. The jacket cover inflates this episode by describing it as "the still point of her turning world", but the problem is that it fails to ring true. Ultimately, the version of Claudia that dominates the narrative is that of the smug, superior harpie. To whom my reaction was - why should anyone possibly care?

So, while I can admire the skill with which this book was written, the emotional vacuum at its core ultimately left me cold.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Claudia Hampton, a popular historian, lies dying in her hospital bed contemplating a tongue-in-cheek "History of the World." But what mainly emerges are memories of her own life, more vivid for her and the reader than the friends and relatives who visit from time to time. One theme dominates: her time in Egypt as a war correspondent in the 1940s and the great love of her life whom she met and lost there. Here, the writing is superb, with a compelling emotional immediacy and magnificent sense of place.* But interesting though the rest of Claudia's life is, it tends to pale beside these central chapters, hence the reluctant absence of the fifth star.

It also sets me wondering about the shape of the book as a whole. I have now read three of Penelope Lively's novels: her latest, CONSEQUENCES (2007); THE PHOTOGRAPH (2003), which I consider the best of the three; and this one, MOON TIGER, which won her the Booker Prize in 1987. All three are essentially romances. All feature independent women doing interesting jobs (writers, artists, academics). Despite their personal independence, the women are shown within the dynamics of families, in relation to a mother, a daughter, or (here especially) a brother -- only very occasionally a husband. Claudia, for example, is unmarried, but we hear of at least three men whom she has loved in different ways. She has a daughter, Lisa, who understands as little of her mother as she does of her; almost of equal significance to Claudia are her first baby lost in a miscarriage, and a Hungarian refugee whom she unofficially adopted. The family ties here vary from the almost meaningless to bonds so strong that they distort all other relationships. Lively's characters mostly forego the support of conventional values and religion; their main defence against the arbitrariness of fate is a strong sense of their own identity, and a very few special connections with others. Claudia protests that she is no feminist, but there she is wrong; Lively's books all come through as an exhilarating manifesto of the feminist spirit.

Lively's success resides less in her stories than in the way she tells them. I think the reason that I liked CONSEQUENCES less, despite the attractiveness of all its characters, was that the narrative began at the beginning and continued to the end. THE PHOTOGRAPH, conversely, begins at the end (with the discovery of a photograph of a dead woman) and works back to the beginning. MOON TIGER also begins at the end, but its action jumps around in much the way that memory does. It also has the delightful trick of occasionally describing the same event from two different points of view in quick succession. Besides, Claudia is so intelligent a companion and her History of the World notion is so amusingly bizarre that what might seem a depressing situation (an old lady dying of cancer, for heaven's sake) turns out to be full to the brim with life, love, and even laughter.

*[I came to this directly after reading two other works set at least partly in Egypt, Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET and Michael Ondaatje's ENGLISH PATIENT. Lively's style is the most down to earth of the three, but no less vivid.]

This book is now an A-level text for many U.K. exam boards and is wonderfully suitable for those teaching adolescents the craft of writing. Its changes in narrative position, the kaleidoscopic nature of the story as it is gradually revealed to us, the combination of old and young characters and the delightful sense of irony make it a magical book for the adolescent just beginning to realise that literature is more than linear narratives with happy-ever-after endings. Above all, it is transparently clear in style. It also makes a great accompanying-piece to Ondaatje's "The English Patient", which covers very similar themes and techniques of story-telling in a much more dense and poetic style

A kadeidiscopic history of a totally fascinating Britishwomen and how war can destroy our lives. Also a wonderfulaccount of how history rests so firmly in the eye of the beholder. Everyone is shaped by their life's experiences, and Ms. Lively so elegantly exposes how we prejudice others when we judge them without knowing of the reasons for their behavior. A beautifully written, intellectually captivating and totally involving work of literature. A truly worthy recipient of the Booker prize in England.

Nearing the end of her illustrious life, Claudia Hampton decides that her final work as a historian should be to write the history of the entire world. While she may not achieve this lofty goal, Claudia succeeds in providing the history of her own life. Lively uses her narrator's profession to great advantage, and the novel is comprised of Claudia's ruminations on her past told in the first person, as well as glimpses of her experiences told in third person. Her philosophies about history--which permit both anachronisms and fictionalization--dictate the manner in which her life story unfolds. Claudia informs us, "I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me." Her other assessment, that she is "a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water," also provides the framework for which the story will be told, and is representative of the poetic tone Lively uses throughout the novel.

The majority of the novel recounts Claudia's experiences as a journalist in Egypt during World War II, where she engages in a fondly-remembered romance with a soldier named Tom. With the exception of the unusually close bond she shares with her brother Gorden, most of the other events and interactions in Claudia's life--however exciting and life-altering--pale in comparison to her love for Tom. Her relationship with her daughter, Lisa, is strained, probably because two of Claudia's most admirable traits--professional ambition and wanderlust--result in frequent absences from the child's life. Although her relationship with Jasper, Lisa's father, is amicable and provides one of the few constants in Claudia's life, it lacks the intensity she feels with Tom. As her life draws to an end, Claudia considers the separateness of the past and present, while not discounting the former's everlasting influence.

While the temporal and narrative shifts are initially confusing, they work well within the greater concept of the novel, and it is interesting to watch Claudia's life unfold from the "kaleidoscopic" view. Occasionally, a scene narrated by Claudia will then be told in the third person, with slightly different details, adhering to the notion that history is never free of fiction. Lively's narrator is witty and amusing, albeit distant and abrasive to those around her. She's seldom apologetic or regretful which, strangely, seems to make her more likable. Claudia does not try to drive people away for the sake of being icy or vindictive, it is simply part of her nature to give precedence to her own pursuits. (As I was reading, Katharine Hepburn came to mind. Claudia would have been right at home in Hepburn's repertoire of unconventional, fiercely independent wartime heroines.)

I am beginning to realize that I love books with these strong women characters. The characters themselves may be difficult to love but when added with the whole of the book it makes for wonderful reading. I especially liked the parts where 'Claudia' talks about how she viewed a situation and then someone else involved in that situation describes it. It gave the story a depth that sometimes is not available in a first person narrative.