My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past

This was the first book I'd read by this author; it will not be the last.

This book was a delight, absorbing and moving. The writing of Jhabvala is so fine, and the thematic device of returning again and again to different memories of one's past is so metaphysically transcendent, that it proves again the mastery of one of the finest writers of our age. Why she has not been more honored and awarded for the body of her work is beyond me. The only reason I give it four stars instead of five is because I'm still so in love with "Heat and Dust."

The nine chapters in this book represent nine different imagined lives that the author might have had. You have to be told this in the preface, since you would not guess it. In each chapter the narrator and her parents have different names and are different people. Each story is plot-wise completely self-contained and could be read separately; but as we have been told that they are one person's fantasies of a life she could have led, we are more aware than we otherwise might have been that there is a similarity of tone and of feeling in all these stories, and that the themes that recur - a continental refugee background, experiences in India and in the United States, triangular relationships, artists of tempestuous personalities, and a kind of dependency by the central character on other people in the story - draw on genuine autobiographical material. It is all most beautifully done, and the author writes so well. The different personalities in the stories come magnificently alive - indeed some of them, especially the artists, are almost bigger than life. Melancholia is offset with humorous observation. The settings are evocative: the ones in India may be familiar from other novels about that country; but I have never yet read a better descriptions of life in the London boarding houses where so many German or Austrian refugees started their lives in Britain.

I was spellbound by this book and couldn't put it down until I reached the last page. For me this is always a sure sign that I hit gold at the bookstore. I loved the variations of themes and Jhabvala's writing in these stories. The book's a bit like jazz. If you love listening to the same tune over and over again with different takes, different players, different scenarios and moments in time you'll be mesmerized by these nine stories.