Tiger's Eye: A Memoir

by inga-clendinnen

In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen fell ill with acute liver disease. "'Fall' is the appropriate word," she writes. "It is ... like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles." Her imaginative, unconventional memoir mirrors the hallucinatory nature of this world as she mingles reminiscences, fiction, hospital sketches, and family profiles to chart the course of her physical and mental life from diagnosis through a successful liver transplant and recovery. Anyone who has ever been in a hospital will recognize the frail, vulnerable, disoriented state of mind she evokes in describing her time there. Yet Clendinnen also displays biting humor (especially in portraits of fellow patients) and an almost mystical sense of purpose as she seizes on writing as the tool to make sense of her situation. Childhood memories loom large, many invoking the beauty of the natural world, ever-present and overwhelming in rural Australia. Presiding over that childhood, her proud, stoical, impenetrable mother "provided me with an inspiriting the obdurate opacity of other beings"--and sparked, Clendinnen believes, her lifelong pursuit of historical mysteries. But the experience of being seriously ill dominates this text. The title comes from her determination to emulate a zoo tiger she admires because he refuses to acknowledge his "I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod ... whenever I felt the threat of the violation of self, I would invoke the vision of the tiger." For all the grim candor with which she evokes physical deterioration, Clendinnen also persuasively conveys her discovery that "illness casts you off, but it also cuts you free ... the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." --Wendy Smith

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, Medicine, Medical, Australia

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the memoir part of this book, her description of her illness and recovery. The short stories following were okay, though not consistently interesting to me.

I am a fan of hers, having known her and her husband (mostly her husband) almost 45 years ago in Australia.

Clendinnen was an author, historian, anthropologist, and academic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inga_Cl...) She died in 2016.



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[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because, sadly, Inga Clendinnen died last week. While I was somewhat familiar with her works in Australian history I was more intrigued by a short biopic of her contained in the Sydney Morning Herald, which I read many years ago. In it she was recounting the essence of Tiger's Eye - her illness and the way in which she felt like the tiger, caged within the wreck of her own body. The analogy made me shiver; the book promptly filed away for future reference and promptly not read.

This book is magnificent, Clendinnen's tiger's eye captures everything, and she writes not like an historian but like a writer (to my great jealousy). I sat with her on the hospital ward and recognised the characters around us and the distinct 'Australianness' of many of her stories, refreshing for someone who reads so much Americana. But the revelation happened for me in the bath - a book is great if it makes it to the bath because it means I can't interrupt it for a shower - when Clendinnen is describing post-surgical hallucinations set to the tune of Lili Marlene. Suddenly I am a small girl in my grandmother's house and an aunt's hesitant fingers find the keys on her piano, sometimes they miss, but to her tone deaf niece it doesn't matter. Her job is tuneless accompaniment to the piano; my mind strains and strains for more than the opening stanza of Lili Marlene but I can't find it even though it was my favourite song. At this point I realised that I had still maintained the divide between illness and health in my own mind; Clendinnen was someone other but not me, not my own healthy body. In my mind, to the strains of Lili Marlene, Clendinnen became not herself, or someone I know who is ill, but myself. I am her and she is I and the fragile divide between illness and health - THE central societal divide, Clendinnen argues - collapses and I see the thinness of the veil, of health, of 'I' as a concept. I loved this book, and the reflections on health and the fragile ways we formulate our own sense of the self, reliant so often on patterns of the body but which really are shadows on the water, tentative threads of smoke and shadow and history, but little more.

[Lisa Lieberman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was tempted to give this book a higher rating because the circumstances under which it was composed were so sad. Clendinnen was seriously ill, and at first there seemed to be no cure. She spent extended periods of time in hospitals and nursing facilities, she was in pain and feared she was losing her mental acuity along with her physical functioning. Then she got a liver transplant, which was such a gift: the opportunity to live for a time on her own terms.

During this respite, she managed to write the book I know her for, Reading the Holocaust, a meditation on fifty years of history, memoir, fiction and other attempts to render meaning from the destruction of Europe's Jews. I will always admire Clendinnen for having produced it, and would prefer to remember her as she presented herself there: fiercely intelligent, impatient with the self-serving and sentimentalizing accounts of the Shoah, but fair and honest at all times.

[James Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

The copy of Tiger's Eye that I finished reading this afternoon is marked at either end by two circular pink stamps noting that the Cambridge University Library processed it on 3 January 2002. A borrowing record pasted to the inside of the front cover is bare aside from a tiny brand of green ink reminding me to return it by 20 March 2014. The book shows none of the telltale signs of use that you expect to find in a university library volume: no folded page corners, no pencilled underlines, no marginal scrawls, no yellowed thumb-smudges or coffee stains or strands of hair nestled in the gutter. As far as I can tell, nobody had so much as touched the book in nearly twelve years before I requested it and borrowed it a few weeks ago. All I can say is that they have been missing out on a beautifully written work of art and reflection. Through a deliberately fragmented and profoundly chilling account of her struggle with acute liver disease, Inga Clendinnen delves into her childhood memories and grapples with the problem of just what it means to try and reconstruct the past in words on the basis of our distorted, broken, labyrinthine recollections. This painstaking (sometimes painful) interior odyssey offers a compelling and often deeply moving memoir of Clendinnen's personal confrontation with her own mortality and her attempt, as a professional historian, to make sense of a problem which lies at the heart of all historical enquiry: "the opaque obstinacies, the jagged inadequacies of memory" (p. 85). Her prose is rich, vivid, intoxicating, terrifying. An extraordinarily talented writer, and a penetrating historical thinker, Clendinnen is a pleasure to read. I am glad that she recovered from her liver transplant in the early '90s, and that she went on to publish Tiger's Eye, this memoir that is so much more than a memoir (not to mention the other outstanding books and essays she has produced since then). It deserves to be read by more people - especially by historians (and history students) who might have forgotten that we can, and should, try to write about the past in a more artful way than the current academic standard implicitly enforces.

[Justin Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this 6 stars if I could. I will also be reading her other books, posthaste.
This memoir manages to merge short stories, family, Australian history and a pretty harrowing experience with illness, into a resplendent whole. The writing is unbelievably precise, focussed and insightful, maybe the tiger really is her spirit animal.

[Velvetink · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt this had structural problems but for all that 4 stars. Review soon(yes, I am aware there are a bunch piling up).

bought today 1 of 12 books for $10 the lot.

[Lisa]

came to the author as she wrote review for Hilary Mantel's memoir in nyt

[Jim Gleason · Rating 5 out of 5]

(life experience of liver disease - 1950's - through successful liver transplant with its mind altering impacts while suffering with that disease.



In her early 50s, Australian historian Inga Clendinnen fell ill with acute liver disease. "'Fall' is the appropriate word," she writes. "It is ... like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles." Her imaginative, unconventional memoir mirrors the hallucinatory nature of this world as she mingles reminiscences, fiction, hospital sketches, and family profiles to chart the course of her physical and mental life from diagnosis through a successful liver transplant and recovery.

Anyone who has ever been in a hospital will recognize the frail, vulnerable, disoriented state of mind she evokes in describing her time there. Yet Clendinnen also displays biting humor (especially in portraits of fellow patients) and an almost mystical sense of purpose as she seizes on writing as the tool to make sense of her situation. Childhood memories loom large, many invoking the beauty of the natural world, ever-present and overwhelming in rural Australia. Presiding over that childhood, her proud, stoical, impenetrable mother "provided me with an inspiriting mystery: the obdurate opacity of other beings"--and sparked, Clendinnen believes, her lifelong pursuit of historical mysteries.

But the experience of being seriously ill dominates this text. The title comes from her determination to emulate a zoo tiger she admires because he refuses to acknowledge his imprisonment: "I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the side of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod ... whenever I felt the threat of the violation of self, I would invoke the vision of the tiger." For all the grim candor with which she evokes physical deterioration, Clendinnen also persuasively conveys her discovery that "illness casts you off, but it also cuts you free ... the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Unknown Binding edition.

[Catherine Fletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Went back to read this after Inga's death. The memoir is more satisfying than the fiction elements but the investigation of how she came to fiction as part of the experience of illness was interesting. For me the most engaging elements were the stories of her family, growing up in the 40's in Geelong, being a girl and her relationship with her mother and family as well as her experiences of the coast. And the descriptions of what it is like to have a life threatening condition, hospitals, a failing body, other patients, dreams, memories and hallucinations.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was not as much sharing or truth of the experience of chronic illness as anticipated, for an illness memoir, that is. Disjointed interludes into fiction, various short stories, did not work for me at all. Interludes into history, however, of Australian Indigenous interaction with European invaders, was beautifully worked from a primary source - the diary of Robinson. And the history woven for the author's parents, particularly her mother, from memories and objects, set in Geelong in the 1950s, was a kind of magic.

[David Houghton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Clendinnen's prose is masterly in both her memoir or fictional voices. Her tone is ruthlessly honest yet achingly compassionate. The experience of reading this has been an unequal mix of heartbreak and delight. Solid yet hard to pin down, vicious yet touchingly gentle, and at all times brilliant.

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read Inga Clendinnen's book 'Tigers Eye' recently for my bookgroup. This book influenced me more than any other book I have ever read, and on rereading it I found different emphases than those I thought I remembered. For my full review see:
https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...

[Ira]

Incredible eye for character: the ghastly, overbearing, know-it-all patient; the elderly Miss Wans. The thrill of the trout expeditions; the child's tenderness towards the baker's horse, Herbie. The frighteningly sharp evocation of illness and hospital life.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A joy - many laughs, poignant moments and bizarre digressions.

[Gsc · Rating 3 out of 5]

A deeply personal account of the authors illness (liver disease). But not a blow by blow. A mixture of family memories and wider historical Australian accounts.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not engage, though it sounded appealing.

[Jennie O'bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an extraordinary book - part biography, part fiction, part historical recount.

[Glyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to read this for English and it wasn't my cup of tea.