Spring Reads...

Making It Up by Penelope Lively- 3 stars ***

This was another example of creative non-fiction that I had to read for my course. This book was slightly different though, in that the author took snippets from her life and then created a series of mini fictional stories from them. It was a refreshing way of doing it, but I am still undecided whether it is technically fiction, as the stories are very loosely based. She says of it:

'To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person's own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.'

The book is well written, and has some lovely description in parts, that almost hints towards poetry:

'A house that contains books has concealed power. Many homes are bookless, or virtually so, as any house-hunter discovers. And then suddenly there is a place that is loaded - shelf upon shelf of the things - and the mysterious charge is felt. This house has ballast; never mind the content, it is the weight that counts - all that solid, silent reference to other matters, to wider concerns, to a world beyond these walls. There is a presence here - confident, impregnable.'

The only problem I had was that some of the stories were not as interesting as others, in fact some even edge on being boring, a cardinal sin in writing. It was worth reading though, purely for the interesting slant on the genre.