When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant was the 2000 winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction (then called the Orange Prize). Careful readers might remember that this was the book I could only get in large print and because I suffer guilt that I'm preventing someone who needs that accommodation from getting it, I read it as soon as I possibly could so I could return it promptly. I also think it would be impossible for you to find my lines of note in a regular print version because Goodreads says this book is 272 pages long and my copy is 400, so do with that what you will.

Right after World War II ends, Evelyn Sert finds herself living in Tel Aviv in a new country with divisive politics after having survived time in London during the Blitz. She builds a home and career and soon finds herself falling in love with a man who inadvertently involves her in spycraft. It's an interesting setting, with the newly forming/formed Israel as the backdrop of Evelyn's story. Evelyn herself is an interesting character, naive and world-weary at the same time. Her lack of basic curiosity about the environment she's living in, her own family's past, and who she's sleeping with sort of grated on me, but I can also see how someone who grew up in wartime might honestly just want to worry about new clothes and what's playing at the movie theater. 

I wanted to love this book. It is such an interesting transitional period and I loved how Evelyn's coming of age story paralleled that of Tel Aviv and Israel. But I didn't love it. It felt cold and unconvincing and emotionally detached. I'm really glad I read it, but I'm not sure if you have to.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

I wondered who he might be if I had access to him in his own language, if the idioms of the soldiers he had knocked about with for the past few years were gone and I could hear him speak in his original - his own - tongue. (page 124)

I know a couple who each speak a different language as their primary language and they communicate in English, which is a second language for each of them. I sometimes wonder if anything gets lost in their communication.

"You used me!"
"Darling, isn't it better to be used than to be of no use to anyone?" (page 241)

I don't know why, but this made me chuckle a little bit.

So we were all homesick in our own way, for each of us has a past and carries it inside us and you can never put it away. It always returns at moments when you least expect it...(page 284-285)

Isn't it crazy how something innocuous can just stop you in your tracks sometimes? 

I told her my Hebrew wasn't that good.
"Fine," she said. "I speak six languages. Pick one."
"English is all I know fluently."
"Then you're a fool." (page 312)

Ha ha ha. We should all know multiple languages, shouldn't we? I wish I were fluent in more than English.

But Palestine had taught me something, the hardest lesson: that there is no choice but to act, to take charge of your life. You can indulge your inertia only so far and then you have to snap out of it. In the end you must do something. (page 375-376)

Eh. Or you can just sit in the nothing, I guess.

As marriages go, mine turned out to be a successful one and only those who have never married themselves would ask if it were happy or unhappy. It was an accommodation, a partnership. It was a life not a love affair and there is a difference. Love affairs belong to the young or those who don't' have a life, or not a proper one, at any rate. Leo and I had a life. (page 389)

Harsh. I don't think I agree with this sentiment.