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.
