Live a Little

Review by Booklist Review

Nonagenarians Beryl Dusinberry and Shimi Carmelli cope with their hopefully not-too imminent demise in their own separate ways. When asked to describe her life, the oft-married and well-loved Beryl is at a loss for words, literally. Her failing memory has her grasping for just the right bon mot to describe a lover, an enemy, a spouse, even an estranged child. Shimi's problem is just the opposite. He can't seem to forget anything: a name, a face, an encounter, or, most problematically, the shame he felt as a young child, constantly tormented by his slightly younger brother, Ephraim. That the two senior citizens find each other in their dotage is serendipitous. That they discover they share not only a neighborhood but a past is shocking, bordering on scandalous, but, ultimately, surprisingly satisfying. Jacobson (J, 2014) is more than kind to his cantankerous heroine and circumspect hero. He imbues them with a pathos, a vibrancy, a joie de vivre that is delightful and enlightening. A charming romp and wise meditation on timeless love.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Booker-winner Jacobson's latest is a deliciously entertaining, rollicking dark comedy about nonagenarians searching for meaning while confronting their deepest fears. Beryl Dusinbery has survived countless marriages and torrid love affairs yet finds herself terrified of forgetting words and being rendered incommunicative. She spends her days making elaborate needlework designs of "death samplers," with morbid phrases ("he was born without fuss and died without fuss, slipping out of life like an oystery down an open throat. 'That wasn't so difficult,' he said, and expired. No one was listening.") while giving her caregivers a hard time. Shimi Carmelli is a 91-year-old diviner whose clients are a circle of wealthy London widows who consider him to be an eligible bachelor: he walks without an apparatus and can still dress himself. Shimi's problem is that he suffers from an excellent memory and can't forget anything. He remains haunted by his childhood experiment trying on his mother's underwear and feels permanently tainted. Beryl and Shimi meet after the funeral of his brother, Ephraim, and strike up an unlikely relationship with the deceased Ephraim as their mutual connection. Together they discover a new way to live by confiding past experiences, and Shimi is shocked by how easily they can trust each other. Jacobson's appealing tale will delight readers. (Sept.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Memorieselusive, shattered, or tormentingare central to a tender story of unlikely love.In his 15th novel, the prolific Jacobson (Pussy, 2017, etc.) considers the debilities of very old age in a shrewd, surprising tale centered on a feisty nonagenarian who wraps herself in boas and baubles and a reticent bachelor. "Memory is a sadist," observes Mrs. Beryl Dusinbery, who styles herself the Princess, after Scheherazade, seductive teller of tales. But Beryl's tales are fragmentary and vexing: Troubling memories rise unbidden while the pleasures of her erotic past swirl mistily. "In her heyday," Jacobson's wry narrator reports, "Beryl Dusinbery had been able to drive the thought of any other woman out of a man's mind. It wasn't infidelity she conjured, it was oblivion." Now, though, oblivion threatens her, as she struggles to remember the details of her many lovers; mixes up the identities of her two grown sons and their offspring, none of whom interest her; and frustrates her two caregivers with capricious demands. At the age of 91, Shimi Carmelli, like the Princess, exudes old-world sophistication with his "air of elegant, international desolation" and refined wardrobe. Other than in his appearance, though, Carmelli stands in sharp contrast to the Princess: Formerly a seller of phrenology busts, he tells fortunes, reading cards at a local Chinese restaurant and at charity events attended by widows eager for new love. He has lived a circumscribed, solitary life, striving in every way "to remove the stain of common humanity from his person." Unlike the Princess, Carmelli is beset by remembering. "I have selective morbid hyperthymesia," he confesses, unable to forget anything, most notably a childhood transgression that has haunted his entire life. Jacobson treats with compassion the dilemma of old age, when the future seems to hold nothing more than "the same, unvarying story" and an inevitable diminishment; instead, he offers his brittle Princess and self-effacing fortuneteller a chance to discover deeply hidden capacities for kindness and caring and the inspiration, as the Princess puts it, to "risk another end." Wise, witty, and deftly crafted. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 "Words fail me," the Princess tells her son. She isn't sure which one. "Why, Mother, what's happened?" "Nothing's happened. Words fail me, that's all." "Is that what you rang to say?" "I think you'll find," she says, "that it was you who rang me." She grips the corded telephone receiver as though she means to squeeze the breath from it. She has never touched anything gently in her life. "No, that's not the case, Mother." He too is a strangler, a ​­cost-​­cutter by profession, and chokes a yawn, wanting her to hear the sleep in his voice. "I would never have called you at two in the morning." "Don't exaggerate. It isn't two in the morning." "It feels like two in the morning. And I didn't ring you. Perhaps I should have, but I didn't. ​­Anyway--" "Anyway what?" "What did you ring to say?" "Stop showing your vest on television." "That must be Pen you're talking about. And I think he'd tell you it isn't a vest, it's a ​­T-​­shirt." "Whatever it's called you should do your shirt up." "Tell Pen that, not me." "Who's Pen?" "Your son." "You're my son." "You have more than one." "So which is he?" "The parsonical one." "Then which are you?" "The prodigal one." He knows she knows. "Well I didn't bring any of you up to wear a vest on television," she says. "You didn't bring any of us up to be ​­anarcho-​­syndicalists. My dear brother is making an ideological statement that is entirely his own." "By wearing a vest?" "It's a ​­T-​­shirt. The disaffected young are excited by the sight of an aged politician in a ​­T-​­shirt." "Yes, now you come to mention it, I remember I was. Pen's ​­father--​it must have been his father, mustn't it?--​had a whole wardrobe of vests. I called it his vestiary. He would throw his old ones on the bed and wait for me to wash them. Pen was conceived on a bed of vests, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised." "Mother!" "There's no reason for you to be squeamish. You were conceived in the back of a Rolls." "I am putting the phone down now if that's all you rang to say." "Don't you think vests are slovenly?" "No, I think they're worse than slovenly, I think they're artful. They seduce the gullible. They did the trick with you, after all." "That's no way to talk to your mother. If that's all you rang to say . . ." "I didn't ring you to say anything. You rang me." "I don't think so." But in truth the Princess doesn't choose to remember who rang whom. mnm She isn't a real princess. That's just a bit of fun she's having with herself. The Princess Schweppessodawasser. Her real ​­name--​the name she was born ​­with--​is Beryl Dusinbery. It never suited her to change it for a man. Princess Schweppessodawasser is, she says, her nom d'oubli, after the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, whose actual name keeps sliding from her memory. Schhh . . . you know who. She had thought the reference might amuse her ​­children--​they are old enough to remember the 1960s advertising ​­campaign--​but nothing amuses her children. They blame her for that. "You never permitted gaiety to enter our lives," they remind her. "It's a bit rich you thinking you can play with us now. Frankly, it's embarrassing. You are the least playful mother who ever lived." "I?" "I! There you go. Any other mother would say 'me.' " "In an age of derelictions I brought you up to express yourself correctly. You should be thankful you were born to a teacher and not a scullery maid." "What's a scullery maid?" The Princess commends herself for not saying "You married one." "Your ignorance vindicates my system," she says instead. "As I instructed my pupils in the higher things, so I instructed you." "We weren't your pupils, Mother. . . ." "I haven't finished speaking." "Is that you being playful again?" "I never pretended to be playful. It's in the nature of fathers to look after that side of things." "Our fathers were never there." "That too is in the nature of fathers. But satisfy an old woman's curiosity. You say I was the least playful mother who ever lived. How many other mothers have you been brought up by?" "It's a safe bet no other mother refused to read her children bedtime stories because she found them jejune. You actually used that ​­word--​jejune, for Christ's sake!" "There you ​­are--​I gave you a word you still remember. . . ." "But can't use." "Then try moving in more educated circles." "I sit in the House of Lords, Mother." "You make my point for me." "Life isn't just words. . . ." "Yes it is. Life is only words." "It is also feelings." "Feelings! And what are feelings without the words to express them. You grunt until you have the word that tells you what you are grunting about. That's why pigs don't experience Weltschmerz or nostalgie de la boue." "How do you know they don't?" "Because they never mention it." "When you grunt out of fear you know you are afraid. We never mentioned we were afraid. But we were." "Afraid because you were threatened or afraid because you were naturally timorous?" "We never had the chance to find out. You put the fear of God in us from the moment we were born. You read us the Brothers Grimm and Struwwelpeter before we went to ​­sleep--​in German." "Ich?" "Dich! I still wake screaming in the night because the Great Tall Tailor's coming to snip, snap, snip my thumbs off." "It was necessary to remind you of the dangers the Germans posed. I lost your father to them, remember." "That wasn't my father." "They were confusing times." "So are these. And you make them even more confusing when you decide suddenly to be ​­light-​­hearted. You brought us up with a heavy hand and we'd prefer you to stay that way. It doesn't suit you to be coming over all girly suddenly." "Words fail me," she said. This isn't the record of an actual conversation with an actual child but the sum of many. Afterwards, her children regretted their harsh words. Mothers leave an oil slick of blame and guilt behind them. Even this mother. Yes, she had much to answer ​­for--​the absence in them of anything approaching a sense of the ridiculous, for one; the absence in their lives of anything approaching a father, for another; the lack of an affectionate interest in one another's welfare; maybe even their steely drive originated in her. But she was ​­ninety-​­something. You can't go on blaming your mother. And maybe if they had shown a little more affection to ​­her--​hard to imagine how that would have worked, but still . . . She can tell when her children are having second thoughts. She senses the retraction coming and puts up a ringed hand to stop it. Snip, snap, snip. The next they'll be wanting to kiss her. The rings on her fingers, denoting all the hearts she'd stolen and never given back, act as a deterrent. "Ne vous embêtez," she'll say, knowing how much her ​­finishing-​­school French exasperates them. That woman! Well, can she blame them? Can I blame them? She/I. The Princess fears slippage. Then/now. Today/tomorrow. Me/her. Slip sliding away. Slip, slap, slip. But she retains her unsmiling sense of the absurd. Girly! I have been called many things, but girly! She wonders if she should take it as a compliment. Standing before a ​­full-​­length mirror, she lets her hair down. The oldest girl in London. Preposterous. Why, though, does she still have long hair? Once she wore it in the style of Cleopatra. Her favourite character in all literature, when her favourite character in all literature isn't Medea. Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, a woman too smart for any of the men who came calling on her. Which Medea wasn't quite. Medea let love for Jason emasculate her. Emasculate  ? Yes, emasculate. The imputation that she might be seeking her children's favour is not something Beryl Dusinbery can take lying down. She has made mistakes but never the mistake of thinking she can beguile her way into her children's hearts. She knows her limits. She pins her hair up again. I know my limits. Excerpted from Live a Little: A Novel by Howard Jacobson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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