Glyn, an historical landscape academic, find an old photograph of his wife (Kath and now dead) showing her holding hands with Nick, the husband of his sister-in-law. The novel spends time with Glyn as he processes this and with Elaine, the sister-in-law, a celebrated landscape gardener. The reader also spends time with Nick, portrayed as child-like, and Elaine and Nick's daughter. The themes revolve around what we know about people, how little attention some people give to people they say we love and how focussing on a career can be easier than focussing on relationships. Glyn meets people who knew Kath and finds a different woman to the one he knew. There are landscape features and gardening too. ( )

Revisit November 2021
I listened to this on audio, having forgotten my earlier response to it and expecting to like it. As it turns out, I DID like it. Not as much as Family Album, but I just really love Penelope Lively.

Audio/Libby
Driving for FFE
November 2021

SPOILER
August 2014
So I finally returned to this book and finished it. It still like the author's writing but I kinda wish I'd left this one alone. I didn't really need to read a book where the woman in the photograph committed suicide in despair over never having children. ( )

I can't say much about this novel without giving away the plot. Only that the discovery of an old photograph shakes up the lives of quite a few people. Except at the beginning, not much happens in this story, but due to the constantly shifting perspectives and the alternation of flashbacks, active memories and constant introspection, Lively has made it into a very appealing whole. In the end this novel is not so uplifting, because the most important lessons she teaches us is that people hardly know each other, and that beauty is not always a blessingt. So ,there is also quite a bit of psychology involved in this story, although you should not expect too much from it: some characters remain quite superficial. As a bonus, there is also something to pick up for garden lovers, because one of the protagonists is a garden designer. And once again Lively exposes the important role of the past in our personal lives. More on that aspect in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5728186200. ( )

22. The Photograph by Penelope Lively
OPD: 2003
format: 231-page used Penguin paperback
acquired: May 2022 read: Mar 28 – Apr 1 time reading: 7:15, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: somewhat contemporary fiction theme: TBR
locations: Across England, contemporary to time of writing,
about the author: English author born Cairo in 1933, who moved to England in 1945.

A widower finds a photograph of his diseased wife discretely but intimately holding hands with another man.

While the response lights up obsessive, if cooly reptilian, thoughts, emotions circling, it's still a thinner baseline to a story than I might have anticipated. But it's well written, and I enjoyed it. Each chapter is one character's perspective, and these chapters are short and fun and digestible. And the book manages to create some reflection and hints at something cathartic-like (even if Lively is just playing with this.), giving the novel a more complete feel.

I think a lot about Lively's [Moon Tiger] and all its history and playful intellect and serious emotions. This is not that kind of wow of a book. But it's a nice read. Recommended only to the curious.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8113165 ( )

Really slow start for me, but as the story went on, I got more into it. ( )