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Como Tudo Começou (2013)

by Penelope Lively(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Livraria Civilização Editora

review 1: "But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course."When Charlotte is mugged in the street one day and breaks her hip, a chain of events is set off for a much wider group of people. Her daughter Rose has to cancel a day's work. Rose's boss Henry goes to Manchester to give a lecture without his notes. Henry's niece Marion cancels a date and thus reveals the affair to her lover's wife. All because a delinquent wanted Charlotte's cash.Lively writes a good book. I loved Moon Tiger, quite enjoyed Heatwave (which I don't seem to have reviewed); were I to sit down and consume her entire oeuvre, I'm conf... moreident I would enjoy it. She strikes the balance between clever writing, interesting characters, and just enough plot progression to keep things going. The plot only really exists to make the characters do things, and in fact the plot movements are only really as the result of a passage of time rather than the result of actions or events.The cast of characters is appropriately limited so that we feel we know each of them well, without getting them mixed up with each other. It is clever to have multiple perspectives but linked characters so that the transitions from one narrator to another are not as jarring or frustrating as such transitions often are.It's not a demanding book to read - and this is a huge part of why I like authors like Mitchell, Patchett, Lively; you notice the quality of the writing only when there is a showy sentence. Apart from the odd "look at me, I'm good with words" sentence (like the one below), the text is not too dense, but concise and clever. It's only 230 pages long, and I would happily have read another 100 pages, but on the other hand, it felt complete without being overcooked."That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share, and no one else could share it anyway."Something I noticed in How It All Began and hadn't noticed in her other works was the occasional breaking of the fourth wall - every now and again (and pleasingly infrequently) the narrative moves from the consciousness of one of the characters out to an omniscient third party style narrator who is very conscious of the reader. The quote I selected above is just one such example. I couldn't decide whether these added to or detracted from the book; they broke up the flow in a slightly irritating way, but the writing is so good and these little bits are sufficiently valuable to the book, that I didn't really mind.If you've enjoyed anything else by Lively, you'll like this.
review 2: This novel might just as well have been called "the butterfly effect in action" as this is what the story is all about and a very good example of the afore mentioned effect. Charlotte , a retired school teacher is mugged on a London street, which causes a chain of events that changes's the lives of many people. A marriage falls apart, an interior designer meets a business man who might be the answer to a financially. Failing business,and old historian gets involved in a bad idea for a TV show,a middle aged immigrant who can speak but not read English,not only learns how to read English,but falls in love in the process. This story illustrates that which we probably already knew, that our paths in life can be changed by an event and/or someone we have never even met.At times the novel read like the story of my life.A very good read. less

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