World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Cleopatra's Sister

Name: Cleopatra's Sister
Author: Penelope Lively
ISBN: 9781568950396

by Penelope Lively

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Overview

A paleontologist by choice - and perhaps also due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on Blue Anchor Beach on the north Somerset coast when he was six years old - Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for a Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is embarked on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that bring love and can take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives. The imaginary country of Callimbia, which lies between Egypt and Libya on the Mediterranean Sea, has its own history whose narrative unfolds alongside those of Howard and Lucy in the first half of Penelope Lively's new novel. Callimbia's existence depends on an alternative account of ancient history in which the charismatic Berenice, sister of Cleopatra, flees Egypt to escape execution and eventually takes over the throne of neighboring Callimbia. Berenice's subsequent adventure with Antony, her sister's lover, and indeed the history of Callimbia down through the ages are no less real, perhaps, than the stories representing Howard's and Lucy's respective pasts in our own era. All three narratives converge in the second half of Cleopatra's Sister, which takes place in modern-day Marsopolis, the capital of Callimbria. The suspenseful tale of what happens to the British passengers of Capricorn Flight 500, at the mercy of a capricious new ruler in violence-torn Callimbia, illustrates yet again the randomness of events that make up both history and a human being's life. That Howard and Lucy find each other in Marsopolis is no more or less fateful than Howard's finding that piece of ammonite on Blue Anchor Beach many years earlier. Indeed, one event would never have happened without the other. While the past has always seemed to haunt the present in Penelope

About the Author, Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively was born in 1933 in Cairo and spent her childhood there, moving to England in the last year of World War II. She has written many prizewinning novels and collections of short stories for both adults and children, including the novel Moon Tiger, which won England's prestigious Booker Prize in England in 1987, and most recently Heat Wave. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

Good To Know

In her interview with Barnes & Noble.com, Lively shared some fun facts about herself:

"I came late to writing -- I was in my late 30s before I wrote anything. The years before that had been busy with small children, and I seem to have fallen into writing almost by accident. Since then, I have never stopped -- books for children to begin with, then a period writing for both adults and children -- short stories also -- then for adults only when the children's books, sadly, left me."

"It has been a busy 30 years, but because writing is a solitary activity and I like the company of others, I have also always had other involvements -- with writers' organizations such as Britain's Society of Authors, with PEN, with the Royal Society of Literature, and, for six years, as a member of the Board of the British Library (the opposite number of the Library of Congress) which I regarded as a great privilege -- what could be more important than the national archive?"

"I have always been an avid user of libraries; like any writer, much of my inspiration comes from life as it is lived -- what you see and hear and experience, but my novels have sprung from some abiding interest -- the operation of memory, the effects of choice and contingency, the conflicting nature of evidence -- and these concerns are fueled by reading: serendipitous and eclectic reading."

"I am first and foremost a reader myself. I don't think I could write if I wasn't constantly reading. I both wind and unwind by reading -- stimulus and relaxation both. I used to love tramping the landscape, and gardening, but arthritis rules out both of those, so I do both vicariously through books. I live in the city now, but feel out of place -- I have always before lived most of the time in the country: I miss wide skies, weather, seasons."

"Never mind, there are compensations, and London is a very different place from the pinched and bomb-shattered place to which I came as a schoolgirl in 1945 -- now it is multicultural, polyglot, vibrant, unpredictable, in a state of constant change but with that bedrock of permanence that an old place always has. I like to escape from time to time -- mainly to West Somerset, where we have a family cottage and I can admire my daughter's garden -- she has the gardening gene in a big way and is far more skilled than I ever was -- bird-watch, walk a bit, talk to people I've known for decades, and see the night sky crackling with the stars that the city blots out."

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Editorials

Donna Seaman

A key to reading master novelist Lively is to remember what could be her motto: "Everything depends on the point of view." In her newest work, history is, once again, her theme, philosopher's stone, paradigm, and obsession. A quartet of personal histories intersect to shape this nervy, parabolic tale in which time is manifest both in the vast, vague stretch back to prehistory, then antiquity, and in moments so filled with feeling they seem to last for weeks. Lively has invented a Mediterranean country named Callimbia, poised between Egypt and Libya. The capital, Marsopolis, was once home to Cleopatra's ravishing sister, Berenice, whose story Lively convincingly conveys as sparsely documented but vivid fact. A grand and voluptuous statute of the legendary queen still dominates the city's center, but the contemporary ruling force is a mad, half-English dictator named Omar. Meanwhile, back in London, we meet a dreamy paleontologist named Howard Beamish and Lucy Faulkner, an ambitious journalist. Their lives converge on a flight to Nairobi. The plane develops engine trouble and is forced to land in Marsopolis. Omar holds the British passengers hostage for an interminable week during which they all experience a surreal suspension of normalcy, gut-wrenching fear, and, for Lucy and Howard, sudden love. A command performance. Lively probes the often frightening, sometimes magical arbitrariness of fate with devastating finesse and gracious succor.