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Tiger's Eye: A Memoir, by Inga Clendinnen
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"A decade ago...I fell ill.'Fall' is the appropriate word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love."
So begins Inga Clendinnen's beautifully written, revelatory memoir exploring the working of human memory and the construction of the self. In her early fifties, Clendinnen, Australia's award-winning historian of Mayan and Aztec history, was struck with an incurable liver disease, immobilized and forced to give up formal research and teaching. From her sickness comes a striking realization of literacy's protean possibilities: that writing can be a vital refuge from the debilitation of the body, and that the imagination can blossom as the body is enfeebled.
Exiled from both society and the solace of history, and awaiting the mysterious interventions of medical science, Clendinnen begins to write: about her childhood in Australia, her parents, her neighbors, her own history. In addition to recovering half-forgotten stories -- about the town baker and his charming horse, Herbie, about the three elderly, reclusive sisters who let her into their clandestine world -- Clendinnen invents new ones to escape the confines of the hospital, with subjects ranging from the jealousies between sisters to a romantic, Kafkaesque encounter on a train. She also traces the physical, mental and moral impacts of her disease, and voices the terrifying drama of bizarre, vivid drug- and illness-induced hallucinations -- even one she had during her liver transplant.
Along the way, Clendinnen begins to doubt her own memories, remembering things that she knows cannot have happened and realizing that true stories often produce a false picture of the whole. With her gifts for language and observation, Clendinnen deftly explores and maps the obscure terrain that divides history from fiction and truth from memory, as she tries to uncover the relationship between her former selves and the woman she is now. An exquisite hybrid of humorous childhood recollections, masterful fictions and probing history, Tiger's Eye is a uniquely powerful book about how illness can challenge the self -- and how writing can help one define and realize it.
- Sales Rank: #2812102 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Scribner
- Published on: 2001-07-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.03" h x 5.78" w x 8.72" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen fell ill with acute liver disease. "'Fall' is the appropriate word," she writes. "It is ... like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles." Her imaginative, unconventional memoir mirrors the hallucinatory nature of this world as she mingles reminiscences, fiction, hospital sketches, and family profiles to chart the course of her physical and mental life from diagnosis through a successful liver transplant and recovery.
Anyone who has ever been in a hospital will recognize the frail, vulnerable, disoriented state of mind she evokes in describing her time there. Yet Clendinnen also displays biting humor (especially in portraits of fellow patients) and an almost mystical sense of purpose as she seizes on writing as the tool to make sense of her situation. Childhood memories loom large, many invoking the beauty of the natural world, ever-present and overwhelming in rural Australia. Presiding over that childhood, her proud, stoical, impenetrable mother "provided me with an inspiriting mystery: the obdurate opacity of other beings"--and sparked, Clendinnen believes, her lifelong pursuit of historical mysteries.
But the experience of being seriously ill dominates this text. The title comes from her determination to emulate a zoo tiger she admires because he refuses to acknowledge his imprisonment: "I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod ... whenever I felt the threat of the violation of self, I would invoke the vision of the tiger." For all the grim candor with which she evokes physical deterioration, Clendinnen also persuasively conveys her discovery that "illness casts you off, but it also cuts you free ... the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
Although Australian author Clendinnen is a specialist in ancient Mexican cultures, readers may remember her best for Reading the Holocaust. Here, she turns her historian's eye inward, to make sense of the year when, in her 50s, she was felled by acute liver disease and found that only by writing could she free herself at least psychologically and intellectually from the confines of her hospital bed. Yet Clendinnen does not burden us with a sentimental account of her near-death experience; instead, she carefully explores the root of history, fiction and the self: "Janus-faced" memory. In the course of writing, Clendinnen discovers that her memory is eel-like, selective, inaccurate and biased, despite her best efforts to pin it down. This realization leads her to new insights about historical inquiry and about the porous border delineating fact and fiction. At one point during her recovery, she was unexpectedly interrupted by hallucinations subconscious dreams that weave bits of her own history with fiction so she decided to try her hand at fiction, producing a series of brief, tantalizing characters and situations that deepen this devastatingly beautiful, intricate and wide-ranging work. Ultimately, though her exploration of "I" leads to better self-understanding, Clendinnen chooses not to dwell on herself, but to return to history, "where I began." Aimed at women of a certain age who are taking stock of themselves and the world around them, Clendinnen's book offers a rare and original meditation on the construction of the self.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free." While this insight may be common among those who have been visited by serious illness, rarely is it offered with the eloquence and honesty found in this work. A noted Australian historian and teacher, Clendinnen (Aztecs: An Interpretation; Reading the Holocaust) not only recounts the details of her life-threatening struggle with severe liver disease, but also intersperses them with personal memoir, short fiction, and Australian history in equal doses. This mixture, along with the sharp, insightful humor and lyrical descriptions Clendinnen describes the experience of recuperation as "the slow, lurching waltz of recovery, step forward, step sideways, step together, step" makes this volume much more memorable than the usual account of a brush with death and subsequent return to not-quite normalcy. Highly recommended for both medical and literary memoir collections. Kay Hogan Smith, UAB Lister Hill Lib., Birmingham
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Still speaks to me
By Emma
I haven't read this book in several years, but it still calls to me. It was beautifully written, poetic even. It's rare to look back over a distance of years (and this was a memoir about a woman I was not familiar with) and often think of how much this book touched me. I always think of it when I read another memoir which is what prompted me to write this review. Please pick up this book and read it, you will not regret it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant piece of writing
By Wendy Hall
Brilliant piece of writing, and all through health issues. Hadn't heard of Inga before, but is an author, historian and anthropologist. Will read more of her work.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Hour of Lead, Remembered
By Foster Corbin
Tiger's Eye is Inga Clendinnen's account of her diagnosis of a rare liver disease, her rapidly debilitating illness, finally a liver transplant and ultimate if precarious recovery. But that is like saying Moby Dick is about whaling. This historian from Australia has written a superb treatise full of hard truths on both illness and memory. After all, the truth is not always carried on angels' wings. Along the way she also has written fiction-- short stories-- and some of the history of Australia. After her diagnosis of Active Auto-Immune Hepatitis, she began writing this memoir on her laptop computer, not knowing if she would live or not. She writes searing accounts of her hospitalization: the good, the bad, the indifferent hospital personnel. The visitors who came late and leave early, to get back to their lives outside an institution.
Ms. Clendinnen writes: "What distinguishes the healthy from the ill--which is a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness--is that the healthy consider feeling well to be the normal state of things." Then there is memory and all the attendant problems. For example, two children of the same parents have different recollections of their parents, but they are both right. "Being ill had taught me how much of ourselves there is in all the stories we tell about the past." Ms. Clendinnen wanted to preserve the memories of her parents, to try to discover what they were like before she was born. The portraits, "as accurate as memory allows," the author would say, of her parents are the best thing I think in this book. Her descriptions of her mother Catherine, born in Melbourne in 1897-- and her futile attempts ever really to know her mother made my eyes water. Her mother's hard life was in some part her own making. Not all her sisters, for example, were as miserable as she. About her mother's death, Ms. Clendinnen writes "how could her life be ending when it had not yet begun? Bound from childhood in a net of unsought obligations, she fought hard, but with weapons which always turned and lacerated her own flesh. In the desolation of old age, with death imminent, I think she finally knew herself to have been trapped, and defeated, from the beginning."
Ms. Clendinnen named this memoir Tiger's Eye after her favorite animal, the tiger, "because he was the only animal who did not acknowledge he was in a cage. . . I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod, but the kaleidoscope of the horror of helplessness ceased to turn because I withdrew my consent from it." Like Melville's Ishmael, the now wiser writer lived to tell her tale: "Illness granted me a set of experiences otherwise unobtainable. It liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and unchanged, to discreet death. Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free. I will never take conventional expectations seriously again, and the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." There is so much to learn from Ms. Clendinnen's ordeal-- about illness, about courage, about getting on with our lives. A very fine book indeed.
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