Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir

by Marina Warner

From one of our most iconic writers, a luminous memoir of post-war childhood, adventure, loss, and the banks of the Nile.



Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.


With diamond rings on her fingers and bespoke brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding to hounds. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign and he decides to move there to start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith’s. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the l952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns much of downtown, including the English bookshop.


From letters and journals read only after the couple ’ s deaths, from photographs found coiled in a film cylinder, from gifts and love tokens, objects and mementoes, the author pieces together the reckonings and discoveries her parents made. Evocative and imaginative, at once historical and speculative, this luminous memoir powerfully resurrects the fraught union and unrequited hopes of Warner’s parents. Memory intertwines richly with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner’s parents, friends and associates are still restlessly wandering.

Genres: Memoir, History, Biography, Nonfiction, Egypt, Autobiography

432 pages, Hardcover

Published March 4, 2021

About the author

Marina Sarah Warner is a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth.

She is a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre at the University of Essex, and gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1994 on the theme of 'Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.'

Reviews

[Diane James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beguiling memoir of the author’s parents’ marriage and her early years growing up in Cairo in the 40s and 50s. Her father was an upper crust Englishman and her mother, a glamorous Italian, had very diverging views on love and life. The backdrop is King Farouk’s Cairo which has ‘le gratin’ of expatriate society at Shepheard’s Hotel, The Gezira Sporting Club and Cicurel’s department store painting a picture of frolics and parties and all is doomed with simmering revolution and the assent of Nasser. A sensitive and sympathetic account of a bygone time.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marina Warner's memoir is less a memoir than a story of her parents marriage, the beginnings of that marriage. The memoir part comes from her memories, distant memories, of being in Cario after the Second World War.

Her parents met during the War - her father was a British officer, her mother the youngest of an Italian family. Her father was older than her mother, and came from a family that was better off. Writing home to inform his parents of his marriage, Warner's father notes that "her life will be mine" (42). And from that, you know what the marriage is going to be like.

In many ways, the book is Warner's mother, Ilia's, story - her traveling to Britain on her own after the war to live with her in-laws before her husband returns, her negotiating a world that her upbringing in a Catholic small Italian town didn't fully prepare her.

Warner's father remains more of a distant figure in this book than her mother, though Warner does illustrate his frustrations at his life. Whether this was due to his rages or to other factors is a little unclear, but it is clear that she loved both her parents, while struggling to come to terms with what that marriage means.

What also stands out is Warner's memories of Cario as the state of Egypt gains its independence. Warner is blunt about the impact of colonialism on her views and how she wonders how that effects her view of things. Her passage about her enjoyment of TinTin but also the problems that the text of those books have is worth reading.

[Chimene Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book thinking it would be the autobiography of Warner herself, whom I greatly admire, but in fact the life of the title is that of her mother, though the book also relates Warner’s memories of her early childhood in Cairo, where her father opened a English-language bookshop for W.H. Smith. Her father was a British officer; her mother a young, beautiful Italian woman whom he met and married in WW2. It was interesting to read this book at the same time I was reading Nancy Mitford’s novels, as they cover a similar time period. Warner tells her parents’ story by focusing on a series of everyday objects: a pair of shoes, a cigarette tin. The objects often become a jumping-off point for Warner’s own associations as well: literary, historical, mythical, linguistic (so her mother’s brogue shoes lead to ruminations on the different meanings of the word ‘brogue’). I found the book slow going at first due to this non-linear quality, but the deeper in I went, the more captivated I was, and the climactic scene of the book where her father’s beloved bookshop is burnt down in Cairo is one that will stay with me. Warner writes insightfully about the British empire; she is never heavy-handed but the class and culture-based blindnesses of the British who emigrated to Cairo are more than evident. I do still want a sequel though where Warner carries on with her own autobiography!

[Duncan M Simpson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made of bits and scraps, a list of sorts, ends as a powerful examination of the life of her parents and the times in which they lived, a struggle to understand their struggles which had been glimpsed as a child but not understood until later, much later. The book shows that it is never too late to work on behalf of those who are dead.

[Christie Bane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a 2-star reading (well, listening) experience for me, but rounding up to three because I acknowledge that the writing was good. Most other reviewers have loved this book, so I have to wonder why it was such a tough slog for me. It’s the story of the author’s parents’ married life together, much of it set in the city of Cairo. Why did it not do anything for me? For one, I feel like after spending so many hours with the characters, I didn’t know them at all. For another, almost nothing happened. This book was like 99% description and 1% plot, dialogue, humor etc. I listened to the audio version and never saw the actual book, but I totally picture it as being huge blocks of text, paragraphs that are multiple pages in length with nothing to break them up. I am truly mystified as to how so many people can have enjoyed this book so much when it was a deadly dull reading experience for me.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 - wanted to know more!

[Jonathan Rimorin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The UK title, "Inventory of a Life Mislaid," gives more of a sense of this memoir of the author's parents: as if going through a box or an album, she lists certain items from her parents' shared lives and shares her impressions of them. Most of them are personal memories, of her parents' courtship in Italy in the closing days of WWII and her young, beautiful mother's adapting to her new husband's British ways; of growing up in Britain and then in Egypt; of dealing with the nascent anti-colonial violence in Cairo. Some of them are musings: a photograph of the 1920s pop sensation Hildegarde, now forgotten but apparently wild in her day, prompts a diversion into the singer's life. Some of them are lectures, on the provenance of the oil that Mary Magdalene used on Jesus's feet, or of the shabti, the figurines placed in Pharoanic Egyptian tombs to replace the newly dead soul's obligation to work in the afterlife. They are all fascinating, and above all the portrait of the author's mother Ilia comes especially to life.

[l a u r ə n · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and a full of a realistic mythos covering an 8 year period of the lives of Marina Warner's parents.

While all the stories and prose is lovely, I especially found the descriptions and internal monologues she provides of her mother were so real and vulnerable brought me closer to my own Sicilian family in a lot of ways. My grandparents were first generation Sicilian immigrants about the same age as her mom, and I honestly felt such a kindred cultural loneliness present. The same one I know my Grandpa had from time to time.

Definitely gonna retread this one again in the future

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marina Warner takes us on a journey through her early childhood, mostly spent in Egypt as the child of a man clinging to the last days of Empire and title and his war bride, plucked from poverty in war ravaged Italy as the allies beat the Germans back.

Warner takes us back to the past through the objects her parents owned, bought and wore. She dips in and out of her mother's diaries and her father's letters and builds a picture of a troubled marriage in troubled times, swathed in the last, opulent remnants of a world that was fast disappearing. This is epic storytelling.

[Joe Shoenfeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a magical book. This 'unreliable' memoir is a portrait of her parents and she brings tremendous talent to bear on her work. If I was able to write a portrait of my own parents, which they -- as Esmond and Ilia -- 'deserve', I would wish to bring the warmth, creativity, and sympathy to the work that she has brought to this book. Her wide-ranging knowledge of many cultures and nations, of history and mythology, make this book lengthy and digressive and each digression is worth the journey.

[Ambrogio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this memoir, which taught me a lot especially about 1950s Cairo. It wasn’t clear to me - and it remains unclear to me - which parts of the memoir are unreliable, but this is perhaps entirely fitting for a meditation on the art of memoir, such an unreliable genre. Warner writes frankly and warmly, with a wide range of references from art and culture, and a deep empathy and humanity.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and entertaining - the two world brought together by the marriage of Warner's parents; her father a would-be British aristocrat (if only there were more money) and her mother, Southern Italian brought up with few comforts during WWII. Especially interesting are the time the family spent in Cairo post-war.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Aging English lad meets impoverished Italian youth during WW2 stint in Southern Italy, they marry and move to England and then Egypt during a turbulent period. Long digressions on Imperial Britain and author's second-hand guilt for her parent's (particularly her public-school father's) views and actions. Hopefully cathartic for her, I threw in the towel 2/3 of the way through.

[Kidlitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seemingly ordinary people do several interesting things in their lives together and apart and manage to produce Warner, one of our great literary critics. She looks back at her parents with love, sadness and a recognition that part of them will remain unknowable to their daughter - but still she makes their lives sing, and count.

[Susanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many lovely sections in this work...and some that go on a bit too long but well worth the time. I am glad to have read it. The title used for the other editions(Esmond & Ilia an Unreliable Memoir) is preferable to the odd title this copy bears.

[Ashlyn Inman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was wonderfully written and really showcases Warner's mastery of the craft, but the long descriptions make the book feel longer than it is. This is a great piece for people interested in more literary nonfiction.

[Tantravahi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writer's probably one of the smartest people I've ever come across. Her book though... could use a better editor. I've read it once. I'd like to read it again, with more time on my hands, to actually take in everything she has to say. Which is a lot. She has a lot to say.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conceit is interesting—a memoir of early childhood (hence “unreliable”) but paired with fascinating textual analysis and connections between her story, its setting, and classic texts, from the Bible to Tintin.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a light or easy read, but it is reflective and gorgeous. A look at a life at a juncture in place and time I don’t know much about, with careful consideration of language and history.

[Robyn Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audible

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredibly researched loves the pattern of personal story and historical context

[francistark]

Read it for literature class XX

[scarlettraces]

DNF

26% through the audiobook and I'm not engaged. Memoir is not my genre though. Suspect I'll get on better with Warner's novels, if I ever actually get to reading my bookshelf.

[Lily · Rating 1 out of 5]

She’s a good writer but the pacing is terrible.

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and researched book about the author’s early childhood and how her parents came to meet, marry and raise their young family in Cairo.