Rating: 4/5
Review:
Excellent - in the end
I enjoyed Live A Little very much in the end. It is witty,
insightful and rather touching, but I found the first two-thirds or
so a bit of a slog.
This is a story of
two people in their eighties and nineties respectively who have very
different pasts and views of themselves. Shimi Carmelli is cursed
with remembering almost everything – especially his shames and
embarrassments which are many. (“A butterfly doesn’t beat its
wings in China without Shimi feeling it is his fault or at leasts
reflects badly on him.”) Beryl Duisenbery, on the other hand, is
losing her memory, while trying to write a memoir of her imperiously
lived life (“Who the hell cares, anyway, she thinks. It’s true
if I say it is. It’s true if I recall it that way.”)
We spend the first
two-thirds of the book getting to know Beryl and Shimi, allowing
Jacobson time to develop his characters while throwing witty barbs at
politics of both shades, artists, elderly widows and plenty of other
targets. It’s well done and fantastically well written, of course,
and they are interesting characters but I did find that it meandered
a bit. The book really takes off when Beryl and Shimi finally meet
and their relationship brings about some surprising and sometimes
genuinely touching revelations, confessions and redemptions of a
kind. Here, I think Jacobson has important things to say about
loneliness, the impact of shame on a life and about relationships in
general.
I laughed several
times and was moved, too and in spite of my reservations about the
length of the first section, I can recommend Live A Little as a
rewarding read.
(My thanks to
Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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