The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery

[shewhomust]

There is something evocative about sherds - the detritus of the past. Crucial archaeological evidence, of course, and, if you are not an archaeologist, this vivid, tangible reminder of people who have been here before, making things and using them and discarding them. The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery.

Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish

Comments

[sovay]

The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery.

Yes.

[shewhomust]

It's a good line, isn't it? I found the book as a whole heavy going, but this passage, very near the end - yes.

[sovay]

I found the book as a whole heavy going, but this passage, very near the end - yes.

What is the problem with most of the book? (I love the title.)

[shewhomust]

(I love the title.)

Me, too. But it actually refers only to the last section of the book - 30-odd pages out of over 200 - in which she discusses six objects around her house which fit her general themes of time, and memory, and the view from old age.

The preface begins: "This is not quite a memoir. Rather it is the view from old age." Not a good sign, to open a book by defining what it is not, quite. It felt like homework, dutifully undertaken - as if her publishers had asked for a memoir, and she had racked her brains, come up with a list of topics, and they'd said OK, that'll do.

It has a disconnected feel. If it had been written as a blog, I'd have read it quite happily: there'd have been days when I'd have skimmed (passages of speculation about how memory works, recollections of the Suez crisis which don't bring to the argument any deeper than 'but I knew these places!' - but there'd be days when I'd have linked to something I really liked, as here. As a book, though, I'm looking for something more, and not finding it.

I very much liked some of her earlier books, for both children and adults, but I have enjoyed her later stuff less (inevitably, this includes her 'greatest hit', the novel which finally won the Booker Prize) - which makes me nervous of going back to those earlier books.

The Telegraph liked it (but then, I never agree with The Telegraph!

[sovay]

But it actually refers only to the last section of the book - 30-odd pages out of over 200 - in which she discusses six objects around her house which fit her general themes of time, and memory, and the view from old age.

See, that sounds like a great idea, metonymizing your life through the things that fetch up in it. It's a completely functional structure for a book, too, if you divide things up correctly. It sounds more like it came out a nice essay appended to a rather (but not deliberately or ironically) fragmentary book?

The preface begins: "This is not quite a memoir. Rather it is the view from old age."

I love her non-memoir Making It Up (2005), in which you learn the ways her life went by the other ways she writes the stories about. I'm sorry the more direct approach didn't work out.

I very much liked some of her earlier books, for both children and adults, but I have enjoyed her later stuff less (inevitably, this includes her 'greatest hit', the novel which finally won the Booker Prize) - which makes me nervous of going back to those earlier books.

I think it's more likely that her writing changed with time than that you were wrong about the earlier books all along. Also I have good memories of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), which should count as early.

[shewhomust]

I haven't read Making it Up; nor yet A House Unlocked, in which she tells the history of her grandmother's house through the objects in it. I begin to wonder whether Ammonites and Leaping Fish suffers from her desire not to revisit the same ground.

I have good memories of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which I was indeed counting as early; and even better ones of The House in Norham Gardens, The Treasures of Time and The Road to Lichfield. I hope you are right...

[sovay]

nor yet A House Unlocked, in which she tells the history of her grandmother's house through the objects in it.

I'll have to read that. (I thought it would work for a book!)

I have good memories of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which I was indeed counting as early; and even better ones of The House in Norham Gardens, The Treasures of Time and The Road to Lichfield.

I haven't read any of those, either!

[poliphilo]

I love that final sentence!

[shewhomust]

Me, too - but I thought it needed the rest of the paragraph to make sense.