My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, C. S. H. Jhabvala
John Murray (June 21, 2004)
Hardcover 288 pages - Illustrated

Rights sold:
US : SHOEMAKER & HOARD, AVALON GROUP

Book Description
For her first novel in more than nine years, in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book. My Nine Lives is, "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book filled with "invented memories." Nine vignettes-autobiographical fictions-are linked to portray a rich life, filled with searching, from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York. Each chapter gathers a different cast of characters, some new and some vaguely familiar, and the linked assembly is as exciting and illuminating as an artist’s first show at a Chelsea gallery or a new play at the Studio Theater. After seventeen books, now in her seventy-seventh year, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes on as her subject herself, the life she may have or may have wished to live. My Nine Lives is a moving and intriguing book of invention and memory.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
After 17 books thorny with existential and intellectual issues, Jhabvala has unleashed her imagination to rewrite her own past. In nine pieces of "autobiographical fiction" set in New York, London and India, septuagenarian Jhabvala imagines alternative paths her life might have taken. While the narrator of each story has a different given name, in an Apologia Jhabvala states that "the I of each chapter—is myself." The stories do not attempt to cover her life fully (her long career with Merchant and Ivory is never alluded to) nor do they reveal specific personal details. Instead, certain circumstances and psychological attitudes prevail. The narrator is usually an only child of a wealthy German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis and a beautiful, vain, erstwhile actress mother. Both parents assume that their daughter will become an intellectual. For these reasons and because of her own predilection for exile, the narrator has never fully assimilated anywhere. The narrator’s interest in existential questions and in Eastern religion leads to spiritual quests to India, where she marries or finds a lover. A ménage à trois or à quatre figures in nearly every story, as do marriages that do not survive the strain of relations with a third party. In a recurrent situation, a man willingly raises another man’s child as his own. The habits of creative geniuses—a pianist, an artist, a philosopher—animate some plots. A strain of sadness is pervasive, as is the assumption that one’s fate cannot be changed. Though these similarities become apparent as one reads the collection, each story is sinewy with compressed emotion and intellectual energy, as well as the poignancy of a thwarted search for love. Each can stand on its own as a finely crafted example of an accomplished storyteller’s art. Pen-and-ink drawings by C.S.H. Jhabvala introduce each chapter.
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From Booklist
Jhabvala is spellbinding, whether she’s writing her celebrated fiction or Academy Award-winning screenplays, and she now presents nine splendid variations on nine women’s lives that in some measure reflect key aspects of her own. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Jhabvala escaped the Nazi terror, was educated in England, married an Indian architect, and lived in India. These experiences seem to fuel this book’s startlingly fresh inquiries into displacement and cultural collisions. But Jhabvala is also intrigued with epic love triangles, spiritual quests, the strange limbo great wealth can induce, creative individuals who are at once egotistical and irresistible, holy men, con artists, and saintly women. In episodes set in London, New York, and India, in both the humblest and most opulent of abodes, she portrays artists, philosophers, politicians, and alcoholics. Jhabvala name-drops Chekhov, and this is no pretension given the grace of her spiraling plots, the depth of her psychology, the elegance of her humor, the subtly of her eroticism, and her masterfully concise descriptions of imperiled households, eccentric personalities, sexual enthrallment, unexpected alliances, and transcendent love. Donna Seaman
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About the author:

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany of Polish parents and came to England in 1939 at the age of twelve. She graduated from Queen Mary College, London University, and married an architect. They lived in Delhi from 1951 to 1975. Since then they have divided their time between Delhi, New York and London.