More a series of ruminations than a memoir, Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter serves as a companion volume to Somewhere, an invitation to sit a spell with an intractable and witty friend who’s pushed even further into what the poet May Sarton termed the 'foreign country of old age.'
The nearness of death could make this a grim book, but instead it is a joyous and vivid one...there is plenty of unhappiness that could be brooded over, made large and obscuring, but she chooses instead to savor the beautiful.
Athill’s new book is a further instalment of news from that high plateau of old age which she has already written about in Somewhere Towards the End and elsewhere, and it is full of clear, fresh air and bright distance.
...the author doesn’t merely beckon you in for a sit-down and a cuppa; she springs a back panel to her mind and guides you down the thought paths inside — some dark, others dappled, all converging confidently on the things that truly matter in our lifetimes.
In this collection of astute and sparkling essays, Athill tries to identify 'the things that matter' after living to almost 100...One of the most powerful essays recounts a pregnancy in her 40s, a brush with death that left her profoundly grateful to be alive.
“Alive, Alive Oh! is not just a mediation on the experience of aging and its attending challenges; there are reminiscences, too, so beautifully written and exquisitely detailed that if one wanted to know what it was like to live in the English countryside in the 1920s or ’30s, or what it was like in post-World War II London for a young woman, they would do well to read this memoir in addition to any history book.
