From Publishers Weekly
After 17 books thorny with existential and intellectual issues, Jhabvala has unleashed her imagination to rewrite her own past. In nine pieces of "autobiographical fiction" set in New York, London and India, septuagenarian Jhabvala imagines alternative paths her life might have taken. While the narrator of each story has a different given name, in an Apologia Jhabvala states that "the I of each chapter—is myself." The stories do not attempt to cover her life fully (her long career with Merchant and Ivory is never alluded to) nor do they reveal specific personal details. Instead, certain circumstances and psychological attitudes prevail. The narrator is usually an only child of a wealthy German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis and a beautiful, vain, erstwhile actress mother. Both parents assume that their daughter will become an intellectual. For these reasons and because of her own predilection for exile, the narrator has never fully assimilated anywhere. The narrator's interest in existential questions and in Eastern religion leads to spiritual quests to India, where she marries or finds a lover. A ménage à trois or à quatre figures in nearly every story, as do marriages that do not survive the strain of relations with a third party. In a recurrent situation, a man willingly raises another man's child as his own. The habits of creative geniuses—a pianist, an artist, a philosopher—animate some plots. A strain of sadness is pervasive, as is the assumption that one's fate cannot be changed. Though these similarities become apparent as one reads the collection, each story is sinewy with compressed emotion and intellectual energy, as well as the poignancy of a thwarted search for love. Each can stand on its own as a finely crafted example of an accomplished storyteller's art. Pen-and-ink drawings by C.S.H. Jhabvala introduce each chapter. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The fiction of the venerable Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, now in her late seventies, draws in varying degrees upon her interesting life story. Born in 1927 in Germany to Polish-Jewish parents, she was raised in England, having fled the Nazi regime. After marrying an Indian architect, she moved to Delhi in 1951, where she lived for more than 25 years. Jhabvala's body of work is certainly informed by a Central European sensibility as well as by her English education, but India figures prominently, too. At once repulsive and seductive, it lures the young, restless and idealistic with its tradition of spirituality, disorienting, in the end, even the most seasoned and jaded foreigners.Jhabvala's latest work of fiction, My Nine Lives -- though publicized as a novel, it could easily be read as a series of nine thematically related stories, or "chapters," as the writer calls them -- is the most autobiographical of her works. Or, rather, "potentially autobiographical," as she explains somewhat elusively in the book's apologia. "Even when something didn't actually happen to me," Jhabvala writes, "it might have done so. Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was."The tales are narrated by nine Western women, many of whom long for the exoticisms of India. Some of the stories are told retrospectively, and the best are related by a cool melancholy voice that cannot be trusted all the time. The narrators tend to be naive, restive, lonely, unattractive and burdened with the weight of responsibility, with having to deal with and support the people in their lives, either emotionally or financially. It is to India that they most often flee as a means of escape. "I could never recapture the complete ease, the freedom, the irresponsibility of my earlier Indian years," says Rosemary, the protagonist of the beautiful and wistful "Life." Only as an old woman, when she returns to Delhi for good, can she indulge again in the fecklessness of her youth, without responsibility and "with an even lighter heart." Even in one of Jhabvala's non-Indian chapters, "Springlake" -- about a trio of useless bohemians who inhabit a decaying Hudson Valley estate -- the burdens of everyday life seemingly prevent the protagonists from pursuing their ideals, no matter how childish these might be.Like the characters in Jhabvala's previous fiction (such as her 1973 novel Travelers and her 1957 story collection Out of India), the women of My Nine Lives yearn for spiritual fulfillment, for the poets, saints, dancers and philosophers who come to stand for India itself. This allure turns out, in some cases, to be superficial, for it isn't the real India that these women seek, but rather the mystical land of their imaginations that they hope will satisfy their insecurities and needs.In the chapter called "Gopis," a young American girl named Lucia, not yet out of her teens and living in New York City, is so enamored of all things Indian that she falls for the much older and highly suspect Vijay, a man "bloated with drink and age . . . in whom she saw some sort of physical embodiment of India." To Lucia, Vijay is a father figure, a guide, a guru -- a character that appears throughout this book in various guises, as well as in Jhabvala's earlier work, namely the 1983 novel In Search of Love and Beauty.These men may be artists (the pianist Yakuv in "Ménage" and the painter Kohl in "Refuge in London"), successful politicians (Muktesh in "A Choice of Heritage" and Vidia in "Dancer With a Broken Leg") or intellectuals (the renowned Professor Hoch in "My Family"). The relationships between Jhabvala's narrators and the older men in their lives can be overtly physical (raising issues concerning paternity and sexuality) or more ambiguous, as with the European artist Kohl, who sketches the teenage protagonist of "Refuge in London," turning her into both object and muse, attracted as he is to "a particular evanescent stage of youth . . . girls in bloom, flowers in May." In the dramatization of this guru-acolyte relationship, Jhabvala returns to one of her most enduring themes: the relationship between men and women. In almost all cases, the men in My Nine Lives possess considerable power; the women are all too happy to simply luxuriate in the presence of genius. So powerful is the allure of the pianist Yakuv, for example, whose fingers fly across the keyboard with a volatility that matches his temper, that he can dramatically alter the personalities of the three women around him just by sleeping with them. He himself changes not a bit.Because Jhabvala's women tend to be powerless and in a perpetual state of physical or emotional exile, they spend most of their time longing for what they don't have in their lives, mainly love. There's a terrific scene at the end of "Life" in which the narrator, Rosemary -- now a lonely old woman living in a Delhi brothel, her PhD dissertation on an Indian poet-saint still unfinished -- describes her journeys to a remote spot on the outskirts of the city, where she sits among "a cluster of crumbling little pavilions" and tombs to read the work of her beloved poet-saint. Soon other old people begin to join her for the readings (the irony being that poetry readings are usually frequented by the young) and for the singing of songs that "sound like a cry of anguish -- of desperate love for the Friend who will not come, not even now at the end of our lives of unrequited longing." There's something pathetic about these overgrown children singing and reciting verse, with the hardships of the real world somehow beyond them, but there's something hopeful about it, too. Even among the tombs and decaying structures, a youthful sense of idealism can make a difficult life bearable, Jhabvala seems to be saying. It's true of all the women in this "potentially autobiographical" book, and, one might assume, of the one woman whom they all resemble in some slight or serious way: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala herself. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Jhabvala is spellbinding, whether she's writing her celebrated fiction or Academy Award-winning screenplays, and she now presents nine splendid variations on nine women's lives that in some measure reflect key aspects of her own. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Jhabvala escaped the Nazi terror, was educated in England, married an Indian architect, and lived in India. These experiences seem to fuel this book's startlingly fresh inquiries into displacement and cultural collisions. But Jhabvala is also intrigued with epic love triangles, spiritual quests, the strange limbo great wealth can induce, creative individuals who are at once egotistical and irresistible, holy men, con artists, and saintly women. In episodes set in London, New York, and India, in both the humblest and most opulent of abodes, she portrays artists, philosophers, politicians, and alcoholics. Jhabvala name-drops Chekhov, and this is no pretension given the grace of her spiraling plots, the depth of her psychology, the elegance of her humor, the subtly of her eroticism, and her masterfully concise descriptions of imperiled households, eccentric personalities, sexual enthrallment, unexpected alliances, and transcendent love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a novelist of unequalled insight, grace, and emotional power. My Nine Lives, her first novel in more than nine years, is 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. sEach 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, 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 startling and intriguing book of invention and memory.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

After 17 books thorny with existential and intellectual issues, Jhabvala has unleashed her imagination to rewrite her own past. In nine pieces of "autobiographical fiction" set in New York, London and India, septuagenarian Jhabvala imagines alternative paths her life might have taken. While the narrator of each story has a different given name, in an Apologia Jhabvala states that "the I of each chapter-is myself." The stories do not attempt to cover her life fully (her long career with Merchant and Ivory is never alluded to) nor do they reveal specific personal details. Instead, certain circumstances and psychological attitudes prevail. The narrator is usually an only child of a wealthy German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis and a beautiful, vain, erstwhile actress mother. Both parents assume that their daughter will become an intellectual. For these reasons and because of her own predilection for exile, the narrator has never fully assimilated anywhere. The narrator's interest in existential questions and in Eastern religion leads to spiritual quests to India, where she marries or finds a lover. A m nage trois or quatre figures in nearly every story, as do marriages that do not survive the strain of relations with a third party. In a recurrent situation, a man willingly raises another man's child as his own. The habits of creative geniuses-a pianist, an artist, a philosopher-animate some plots. A strain of sadness is pervasive, as is the assumption that one's fate cannot be changed. Though these similarities become apparent as one reads the collection, each story is sinewy with compressed emotion and intellectual energy, as well as the poignancy of a thwarted search for love. Each can stand on its own as a finely crafted example of an accomplished storyteller's art. Pen-and-ink drawings by C.S.H. Jhabvala introduce each chapter. (June 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In her 18th book, the first in nine years, award-winning screenwriter Jhabvala (e.g., A Room with a View, The Remains of the Day) offers an unusual take on autobiographical fiction, turning the lens upon herself in a series of self-described invented memories. Each of the nine chapters presents a possible past for its first-person narrator. The familial relationships depicted vary as much as the locales, spanning relations between parents, siblings, lovers, or husbands in settings as far-reaching as England, India, and the United States. The narrators are always women, and each describes the twists, turns, pitfalls, and reunions in her life in the same strong and unapologetic voice, creating a unifying theme of personal quest that flows from chapter to chapter. An enjoyable read that could make an intriguing book club choice; highly recommended in libraries where fiction in a foreign setting or Merchant-Ivory films are popular.-Leann Isaac, Jameson Health Syst., New Castle, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews