Moon Tiger

Claudia Hampton, dying in a hospital in London, is thinking back
over her life. Penelope Lively weaves Claudia's memories with the memories of a daughter and a brother
and friends, and spills the story of Claudia's life onto the page in little snippets and bits to create a story
that is both clever in its structure and beautifully written. Recommended.
Favorite Quote: p. 28 “The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon,
Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an
illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life
as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners.”

Claudia is a historian, a war correspondent, a loud and stubborn child, a red-haired beauty who turns heads, a socialite, she's before her time, she's vain, she knows how to get what she wants, she's adventurous, she's competitive, she's strong-headed, she's enamoured with history, she's eccentric, contemptuous, she dislikes her only child, she's in love, she grieves, she's British, she's on her deathbed, she's writing a kaleidoscope history of her life.

We follow along and get to know her life in fragments and memories and encounters, that are mostly out of order. This is a novel about history, not only WWII in Egypt, but also the writing of history, and the mementos we gift, we keep, we build to hold on to and to preserve our stories. And this is a novel about the different kinds of love one can encounter. And here I have to say, that I found Claudia's youthful and narcissistic “aristocracy of two” with her brother Gordon surprisingly delightful and way more interesting than her desert love story with Tom. The novel didn't give us enough time with Tom to appreciate Tom, while Gordon is introduced as a mirror to Claudia, which gives us all the context we need.

I was a bit irritated that the last chapters were spent on a new character (Laszlo) and Tom's letter, but else I was always delighted and occasionally entranced by this book.