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How It All Began: A Novel by Penelope Lively
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How It All Began: A Novel (edition 2012)

by Penelope Lively

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9716321,374 (3.74)246
The mugging of a retired schoolteacher on a London street has unexpected repercussions for her friends and neighbors when it inadvertently reveals an illicit love affair, leads to a business partnership, and helps an immigrant to reinvent his life.
Member:WisteriaLeigh
Title:How It All Began: A Novel
Authors:Penelope Lively
Info:Viking Adult (2012), Hardcover, 240 pages
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How It All Began by Penelope Lively

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English (61)  Italian (1)  All languages (62)
Showing 1-5 of 61 (next | show all)
very good, 3.5 - but I have to say I'm curious about whom Penelope bases the complete drips of husbands that adorn her novels on! In a chat on this general subject in "How It All Began" one of the characters refers to them as lettuces, and it does seem to fit, though rather old, limp and smelly lettuces. The women are cleaver, interesting and complex and the story carries quite well, as they tolerate their burden of boring men. It seems lovers are the only male characters that are not desperately lame, but in this work even this only applies to some lovers, the character of Jeremy intersects with both groups and definitely deserves segregation to the husband phenotype.

The digs at The Da Vinci Code, including on the cover photo of this edition, are fun.

Although I enjoyed it I doubt I'll ever read it again. ( )
  diveteamzissou | Jan 1, 2024 |
I really liked this book three months ago, judging from the four stars. I do remember it - with a little help from the synopsis, and I recall I enjoyed it well enough. But it didn't make even half the impression Penelope Lively's other books made (firstly, the one about the house; and secondly, The Photograph,) both of which I still think about at random times. Dropping to three stars.

Presumably a Libby e-book
Probably from Nashville Library ( )
  Kim.Sasso | Aug 27, 2023 |
Fun story, actually a fun set of connected stories. Lightweight, but in a good way. I really liked the author's voice.
( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
Charlotte, an intensely independent seventy-something widow, is mugged on the street, breaking her hip, and must live with her daughter, Rose, while she recovers. This book is a humorous and poignant character study of seven lives impacted by this single event. It is chaos theory in novel form, or a sequence of unintended consequences. The author employs an understated plot and well-developed characters. She brings the intertwined storylines together in a satisfying ending.

The characters are the highlight. In addition to Charlotte and Rose, we have:
- Lord Peters an aging historian with a rather pompous attitude that adds to the amusement
- Lord Peters’ niece, Marion, an interior designer having an affair with a married man
- Jeremy, the married man, and his wife, Ruth, whom he hopes to keep from divorcing him
- Anton, Charlotte’s student, an eastern European immigrant learning English to get a better job

Supporting characters augment the humor, such as the young academic who plays up to Lord Peters’ ego to further his own career. Each has a distinctive personality. I felt like I knew them personally by the end of the book. I am impressed by the author’s skill in deftly designing their interplay. This is the first book I have read by Penelope Lively. I enjoyed it tremendously and will be reading more of her works.

4.5
( )
  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |
66/2020 I wasn't expecting this novel, a tragicomedy of manners, to be so witty and satirical. Penelope Lively's writing is well formed and I didn't notice until I began this review that the whole story is in the often disparaged present tense omniscient. Observations of each character are telling. The skilfully constructed plot revolves around Charlotte who is mugged, apparently by the butterfly effect, and whose subsequences have consequences rippling out through her social support systems, both give and take, to effect other people who have never and will never meet her.

Reading notes

Eminent but ageing historian Henry knows about the history of UK politics but can't relate this to the democratic society in which he lives and where, we're supposed to believe, ordinary voters (on pg 33 literally the man on the omnibus) determine the course of politics. Henry only knows his history through Great White English Men and has no understanding of contemporary English society shaped by the two-way influences of Empire / Commonwealth, and European Communities / European Union because that history is deemed irrelevant by the ruling classes of which Henry is a product. Henry feels "disorientated" because he can't effectively "judge" the social status of his fellow bus passengers or put them in their place in relation to his perceptions of himself. He is contrasted with Charlotte who, in spite of the infirmities of ageing, continues to immerse herself in her surrounding society, which is to her own and other people's benefit.

Eternally relevant: "History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion."

Charlotte: "Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. [...] She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without."

Identity is made of memories, both our own and other people's: "What we add up to, in the end, is a handful of images, apparently unrelated and unselected. Chaos, you would think, except that it is the chaos that makes each of us a person. Identity, it is called in professional speak." ( )
  spiralsheep | Jul 2, 2020 |
Showing 1-5 of 61 (next | show all)
How It All Began begins in uncharacteristically violent fashion: "The pavement rises up and hits her. Slams into her face, drives the lower rim of her glasses into her cheek." Charlotte, a retired schoolteacher in her late 70s, finds that she has been mugged and relieved of her house keys, bank cards and £60 in cash. As a reader, you share her sense of shock and bewilderment – after all, one might expect to be reasonably safe from street crime in a Penelope Lively novel; though the book introduces a number of elements you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find, including East European immigrants, chocolate cream frappuccinos and errant text messages used as a plot device.

It soon becomes apparent that being knocked down has a knock-on effect. Charlotte is forced to move in with her daughter Rose while she recuperates, which means that Rose is unable to accompany her employer, Lord Peters, to receive an honorary doctorate in Manchester. His Lordship's niece, an interior designer named Marion, goes with her uncle instead, though a text explaining her absence is intercepted by the wife of her lover, thus hastening the demise of their marriage. It all unfolds with the inescapable logic of a well-oiled farce, though every so often Lively's authorial voice intrudes to comment on the domino-toppling effect: "Thus have various lives collided, the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away, offstage, impervious."

The novel contains some of Lively's funniest and most enjoyable character studies, not least the pompous bubble of self-esteem that is the academic relic Lord Peters; once a leading authority on Walpole, he now worries that "the 18th century has passed him by", and hopes to re-establish his reputation with a David Starkey-style television series. Lively is deliciously intolerant of interior designers – Marion's paramour, who runs a reclamation yard, is painted as little more than an jumped-up junk merchant; while Marion's business is principally based on the resale of "a cargo of interior adornments forever on the move, filtering from one mansion flat or bijou Chelsea terrace house to another".

Yet the most telling relationship is that which develops between the comfortably married Rose and Anton, an economic migrant who comes to visit Charlotte for literacy lessons. Rose surprises herself by developing an affection for this timid man with soulful eyes and fractured English, but sensibly limits the relationship to wistful strolls round London parks and weekend assignations in Starbucks.

Anton, a trained accountant, has had to accept work on a building site while struggling to master the language. Charlotte achieves a breakthrough by throwing away the standard uninspiring teaching materials and presenting him with a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. "I am like child," he says, happily. "Child learn because he is interested … Story go always forward – this happen, then this. That is what we want. We want to know how it happen, what comes next. How one thing make happen another."

It can only be a matter of time before Anton graduates from Maurice Sendak to Penelope Lively novels, as she remains a sublime storyteller – the opening sentence has us riveted with curiosity as to what will happen next. Yet she also keeps us consistently aware of the nature of the illusion. "So that was the story," she concludes, "so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story … These stories do not end, but spin away from one another, each on its own course." In other words, they momentarily collide and separate to form the kind of narrative at which Lively excels: the untidy, unpredictable one in which everyone lives ambivalently ever after.
added by VivienneR | editThe Guardian, Alfred Hickling (Nov 18, 2011)
 
*Starred Review* The ruling vision of master British novelist Lively's latest is the Butterfly Effect, which stipulates that a very small perturbation can radically alter the course of events. The catalyst here is a London mugging that leaves Charlotte, a passionate reader and former English teacher become adult literacy tutor, with a broken hip. She moves in with her married daughter, Rose, to recuperate. Rose works for Henry, a lord and once-prominent historian, whose ego is as robust as ever but whose mind is faltering. With Rose out helping her mother, Henry prevails upon his niece, Marion, an interior designer, to accompany him out of town, where she meets a too-good-to-be-true client. When she texts her lover, to postpone a rendezvous, his wife intercepts the message. Charlotte begins tutoring Anton, who affirms her ardor for language and awakens Rose out of her smothering stoicism. Throughout this brilliantly choreographed and poignant chain-reaction comedy of chance and change, Lively shrewdly elucidates the nature of history, the tunnel-visioning of pain and age, and the abiding illumination of reading, which so profoundly nourishes the mind and spirit.--
added by kthomp25 | editBooklist, Donna Seaman
 

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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Penelope Livelyprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bentinck, AnnaNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kellgren, KatherineNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather — and to a global forecaster small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards — any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see. — James Gleick, Chaos, 1998
Dedication
To Rachel and Izzy
First words
The pavement rises up and hits her.
Quotations
History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant, but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. [...] She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.
You slide, in old age, into a state of perpetual diffidence, of unspoken apology. You walk more slowly than normal people. You are obliged to say 'what?' too often, others have to give up their seat on the bus to you, on train journeys you must ask for help with your absurdly small and light case. There is a void somewhere in your head into which tip the most familiar names [....] You can use a computer, just about, and cope with a mobile, but with such slow deliberation that the watching young are wincing.
What we add up to, in the end, is a handful of images, apparently unrelated and unselected. Chaos, you would think, except that it is the chaos that makes each of us a person. Identity, it is called in professional speak.
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The mugging of a retired schoolteacher on a London street has unexpected repercussions for her friends and neighbors when it inadvertently reveals an illicit love affair, leads to a business partnership, and helps an immigrant to reinvent his life.

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When . . . Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter Rose cannot accompany her employer Lord Peters to Manchester, which means his niece Marion has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is . . . just the beginning in the ensuing chain of life-altering events.
In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other and entire lives to become irrevocably changed. Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game.
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