neilgee
11-26-2010, 08:18 PM
I wondered if it was worth starting a thread upon AS Byatt.
Her Possession was a masterpiece of romance between two poets forbidden to see one another. I really love that book.
Recently I posted a review of the most recent novel (2000) I've read by her which I will share with you in an attempt to fill the thread out a little:
The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt.
The jury has been out on AS Byatt for me since I read last year's The Children's Story which I thought tried a little too hard to be the "perfect" novel. The other three novels of hers that I've read split me down the middle because Possession was wonderful but an earlier novel The Virgin in the Garden read like exactly that: an early novel by a writer who hadn't quite mastered her craft yet, so it's with relief that I write I am enjoying 2000's The Biographer's Tale immensely. Still life was well worth reading as I love Van Gogh anyway if not quite at the level of Possession.
It's not a novel I expect everybody will like, the tale of a biographer who decides to take the unusual step of writing a biography of another biographer. We find out very little about this earlier biographer. He's dead and he remains dead as far as the story goes, leaving remarkably little behind him besides his work on other people. The narrator on the other hand is supremely alive, a nice twist on the usual format, there's something genuinely surprising and thought provoking all the way through in the careful construction disguised as a throwaway failure. Maybe it's just my bizarre tastes but this one really got my mental juices flowing and I'll certainly be reading more of Byatt's work after this.
Her Possession was a masterpiece of romance between two poets forbidden to see one another. I really love that book.
Recently I posted a review of the most recent novel (2000) I've read by her which I will share with you in an attempt to fill the thread out a little:
The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt.
The jury has been out on AS Byatt for me since I read last year's The Children's Story which I thought tried a little too hard to be the "perfect" novel. The other three novels of hers that I've read split me down the middle because Possession was wonderful but an earlier novel The Virgin in the Garden read like exactly that: an early novel by a writer who hadn't quite mastered her craft yet, so it's with relief that I write I am enjoying 2000's The Biographer's Tale immensely. Still life was well worth reading as I love Van Gogh anyway if not quite at the level of Possession.
It's not a novel I expect everybody will like, the tale of a biographer who decides to take the unusual step of writing a biography of another biographer. We find out very little about this earlier biographer. He's dead and he remains dead as far as the story goes, leaving remarkably little behind him besides his work on other people. The narrator on the other hand is supremely alive, a nice twist on the usual format, there's something genuinely surprising and thought provoking all the way through in the careful construction disguised as a throwaway failure. Maybe it's just my bizarre tastes but this one really got my mental juices flowing and I'll certainly be reading more of Byatt's work after this.