Perseus Academic: My Nine Lives by Ruth Jhabvala

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.