Marina Warner - Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir

WITH VIGNETTES BY SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

With my mother Ilia, Cairo, 1949.

Mother Rat with Betty and Esmond, c.1910.

Ilia, far left, with her sisters. Bari, Apulia, late 1920s.

Esmond with Marina, Gezira Sporting Club, Cairo, 1947.

Mohammed and Abdel (Razak) with Marina, left, and Laura in carrycot, 19501.

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021

Copyright Marina Warner 2021

Original artwork copyright Sophie Herxheimer

Cover illustration by Sophie Herxheimer

Art direction by Jo Thomson

Marina Warner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008347581

Ebook Edition March 2021 ISBN: 9780008347604

Version: 2022-02-03

Wonderful a brave, inventive, touching distillation of memory and imagination, shimmering with images, sounds and scents, conjuring a clash of lives, worlds and words

JENNY UGLOW

As delicate as the lace her mother hemmed, as sharp as the facets of the diamond rings her mother lost, Marina Warners Inventory of a Life Mislaid is a captivating re-creation of her childhood in a lost Cairo, so incomparably louche, sensuous and fragrant, and of her parents improbable marriage

FERDINAND MOUNT

An entrancing weave of memoir, history, autobiography and fiction, this adventurous book voyages through time and space to re-discover, re-imagine and reinvent a lost world. One of Marina Warners most beautiful works

MICHLE ROBERTS

Moving and original Warners view of the past is always precise, at once generous and exacting. She has a gift for using objects to conjure up characters, feelings and atmospheres Poignant and exquisitely crafted, Inventory of a Life Mislaid is bound to become a classic

CATRIONA SETH

Marina Warners memoir is a poignant and imaginatively transgressive exploration of her parents marriage, a war-time love match between Southern Italy and upper-class England and all the difficulties that entailed. Its full of evocative flashbacks and cherished objects keenly remembered at once a treasure house of family memories and a history of an epoch

MARGARET DRABBLE

Inventory of a Life Mislaid covers that penumbra of existence before recollection properly crystallises into family myth the first six years of her life Some of Warners most brilliantly evocative writing summons up her mothers immigrant experience

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS , Guardian

Warner is such a skilful and imaginative writer that much of the book reads like lived experience The happiest of concoctions, a mix of fiction and fact, observation and speculation. Each episode is carefully constructed from the things that remain, the inventory of the title Warners girls-eye view takes us on a journey to understand her childhood, the nature of her parents relationship and the way one might have lived a lifetime ago This brave, painful, dazzling memoir is riveting

ANTHONY SATTIN , Spectator

High-risk and multidimensional Warner brings to these pages a lifetime of thinking about stories and the ways in which they shape our lives

FRANCES WILSON , Literary Review

This is a wonderfully rich, partly mythical memoir that sifts through the past to connect a familys secrets to the deep-rooted colonial assumptions that still resonate in a post-Brexit Britain never dull Eloquent and heartbreaking

ANN KENNEDY SMITH , TLS

This memoir, built of letters, journal entries and photographs, is poignant and mythical

LEO ROBSON , New Statesman

Exquisite Marital unhappiness, documented in Ilias diaries, haunts this memoir. It is also a story of observing, and judging your parents, of being a child of empire, and of belonging and alienation. Throughout are vivid disquisitions on everything from language to art history. Like Ilias Mediterranean, the book is studded with gems like a Byzantine binding

MARY EMMA ADAMS , The Tablet

To Maggie S, dear friend over the years
To Hartley and Jack, in hope for the time to come

Here I am you shall say when you are summoned at any time, to do all the work that is to be done in the necropolis, in order to make the fields grow, irrigate the channels, ferry the sands of the east to the west and west to east. Now indeed when you face these tasks, you shall say, Here I am.

, The Book of the Dead

La lingua va dove il dente duole

(The tongue goes where the tooth aches)

Y ou are somewhere you know very well and a door appears; when you open it you find yourself in a backstage area youve never entered before. Youre following those you have lost: theyre lingering in obscure recesses, shadowy as the interior of a confessional box when you were a child and you knelt down on the foam-cushioned prie-dieu and leant in towards the battered colander screen and the priest concealed on the other side lifted the half curtain and appeared, a blurred outline through pinpricks of light, and in awe you whispered very low: