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The Photograph

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The Photography is a literary, psychologically complex novel of suspense that brings acclaimed author Penelope Lively's talents to a whole new level.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      While searching through a closet, Glyn discovers a photograph of his wife, Kath, secretly holding hands with her brother-in-law. He can't demand an explanation, for Kath has been dead for a year. Instead, he sets out to query all who knew her, thereby unleashing a cascade of unintended consequences. This thoughtful story by the exquisitely talented English novelist Penelope Lively is about how little we attend to the people we purport to love. It's a book with a surface calm and an undercurrent of tension. Husband and wife narrators Gerroll and Kalember read adequately, even well sometimes, yet overall, they are too affected by the story's apparent placidity. They both employ an uninflected tone and do not differentiate between voices. One doesn't want drama, just some sense of engagement. Then again, the book is about how distant we are from each other, so perhaps they're just right. A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 12, 2003
      Lively likes historians. Her most famous novel on this side of the Atlantic, the Booker Prize–winning Moon Tiger, told the story of a popular historian; her latest narrates the quest of a "landscape historian" in search of what Proust called "lost time": the living past of his dead wife. Glyn Peters, a famous British archeologist, discovers a compromising photograph of his wife, Katherine Targett, sealed in an envelope in a closet at home. Peters specializes in excavating the long defunct gardens, buried fields and covered-over roads of the British landscape. Reverting to professional habits, he treats Kath's infidelity as a sort of archeological dig. The photo depicts Kath and Nick Hammond, the husband of Kath's sister, Elaine, surreptitiously holding hands on some outing, with Elaine and Mary Packard, Kath's best friend, in the background. Glyn decides to interview this cloud of witnesses, beginning with Elaine. Elaine is a successful, and somewhat cold, landscaper; Nick, her polar opposite, is a man one degree away from being a Wodehouse dilettante. Lively, who is never shy of letting us know her opinion of her characters (like Trollope), makes her disapprobation of Nick plain. Elaine, after learning of the affair, kicks Nick out. He takes refuge with Polly, their daughter, in London, and goes rapidly downhill. Glyn, meanwhile, has searched out Nick's ex-business partner, Oliver Watson, who took the photograph, and Mary Packard. Lively is always a discerning, keenly intelligent writer. This, for instance, is how she describes, in three irrevocable words, Elaine's pregnancy: "She is pregnant: heavy, hampered, irritable." Unfortunately, Kath, a demon-haunted beauty with little depth, remains unconjurable. Her insubstantiality and the much-foreshadowed nature of her death, not revealed until late in the novel, drains this story of its full emotional impact. 5-city pre-pub tour.(June 2)Forecast:Lively has strong name recognition, but her sales on this side of the Atlantic continue to be modest. Her latest is unlikely to break the mold, but her steady, reliable output (this is her 13th novel) should help keep her on readers' radar screens.

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  • English

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