Moon Tiger (Re-Issue) (Penguin Essentials)
As Claudia Hampton faces death, she reconstructs her life while setting it against the history of the world. The novel traces female agency, layered time, and lost love through a precise and lyrical voice.
Work Information
One woman’s life becomes a miniature history of the world.
The fragments Claudia remembers are at once private memory and twentieth-century history. Past and present fold over one another repeatedly, leaving a long afterglow after the final page.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Viking
- Published
- 2015-10-06
- Pages
- 224 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 11.2 x 1.4 x 18.1 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780241973684
- ISBN-10
- 9780241973684
- Price
- 2302 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire, published here as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a 'history of the world . . . and in the process, my own'. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia's life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view. There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt. 'Leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away' Anne Tyler 'A complex tapestry of great subtlety. Lively writes so well, savouring the words as she goes' Daily Telegraph 'Very clever: evocative, thought-provoking and hangs on the mind long after it is finished' Literary Review
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
Reviews
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Moon Tiger - a readable classic
Moon Tiger has the literary merits of the English Patient - but is more readable. This novel deserves to be read widely both for its beautiful prose, its page turning plot and its beautifully drawn characters. An absolute delight. The Moon Tiger is a mosquito coil that, like the story, glows in the night and keeps performing until it reaches its ultimate conclusion. Read this novel - you will not be disappointed.
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Deludente
Diversamente dagli altri romanzi di P:L. ho trovato Moon Tiger pretenzioso e faticoso nella lettura. Ottimo antidoto a chi fatica ad addormentarsi
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parfait
parfait
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Refleja la vida de su tiempo
Refleja la vida de su tiempo, memorias y poco mas.
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A wild and wonderful British character with a good story to tell
Penelope Lively is a modern British writer. Moon Tiger is one of her best, written in 1997. The book opens when Claudia is in her seventies and dying in a nursing home. Then there is a series of flashbacks to her life. She's a wild and wonderful character from an upscale British home, battling with her brother in her childhood, and battling with everyone else after that. Yes, Claudia has a strong personality and there is nothing soft or sweet about her. She's a hard-boiled journalist who gets caught up in the winds of history, living in Egypt during WWII and writing about it with a sharp and realistic tongue and indulging in a love affair that ends in tragedy. Her life is her career and she certainly is nonconventional. She is a mother of a daughter conceived with a Russian boyfriend who she was not intent on marrying. She's not a good mother in any sense of the word, leaving her daughter's upbringing to her own mother and being rather abrupt and unfeeling with the child. Perhaps the best part of the book is her reportage of the War in Egypt. Usually books about WWII do not go into this aspect in much detail. However, her words makes it come alive. Her personality comes alive too. She is anarchistic, neurotic and filled with her own self-importance. Frankly, she is not a likable character. But she is real, very real and frankly, I loved her. I enjoyed this book. It took me to a time and a place in history that I found fascinating. And I loved the view of history through the personal lens of this writer.
Related Literary Awards
- Booker Prize Edition 19 (1987) ・Winner