Kinder, wie die Zeit vergehtEnde des 19. Jahrhunderts leben Olive Wellwood und ihr Mann Humphrey in einem kleinen Paradies. Reich mit Kindern gesegnet sind sie das Zentrum einer kleinen Gemeinschaft von Künstlern, Kunsthandwerkern und Intellektuellen. Der verwitwete Prosper Cain ist als Kurator m...
This is retelling of some of the Nordic myths and what they meant to the author as a little girl reading them with WWII as a backdrop. It causes you to reflect on myth, what they are and how they can be important. A.S. Byatt is a fantastic writer so the word choice and sentence construction is w...
I am often depressed by AS Byatt after reading the works, and not because of the works. What depresses me is her focus of narrative subject. She has the knack of selecting the least interesting participant of her stories as the one with which to identify. In The Matisse Stories, she successfully ...
The Maelstrom: how evocative that name is, the Charybdis that tempts you, the whirlpool that draws you down into its watery depths, a volatile spiral maze from which there is no escape. The Maelstrom, or Moskstraumen as the Norwegian original should really be called, features only sporadically in...
I LOVE THIS.If you guys love me or have even a paltry shred of affection left for me in your hearts, you will read the following excerpt:"And she appealed to the painter, should Dolores not learn to be content, to be patient? Hot tears sprang in Dolores's eyes. The painter said:'By no means. It i...
This review originally ran in the San Jose Mercury News on May 2, 2004: Look at -- no, better yet, listen to the way this story begins: ''There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.'' How can you not read that story? As that sentence delicately steps from ...
A Lost Lady contains two prominent parallel narratives. The first is that of Niel Herbert, a young boy from Sweet Water, Nebraska whose vision of the world changes as he reaches his twenties. He initially has a romanticized view of Mrs. Forrester, a pretty young aristocrat in town, but eventually...
If the test of a great novel is that you want to read it again, or pick up the next one (this is the first of a quartet) then this is a good novel. If Still Life—the next title in the quartet—had been right here on the shelf I'd have started it right after I reread the Prologue.The present time o...
I felt very conflicted about this book. The majority of stories in it were extremely unpleasant, and several -- "The Dried Witch," "In the Air" -- so painful I couldn't read them in full. Byatt is not at all in her best in the realistic short story medium; her plots stop short in that maddening m...
I think I have a new author to add to my quiver of favorites. This is the second book by Byatt I have read, and both have been spectacular! Byatt’s style is poetic, lyric and beautiful. The words process like an ancient tapestry telling an epic story. Byatt’s sentences are often long and cont...
For whatever reason, no one I know seems really to like Byatt (& this is particularly as a novelist - I know a few who have enjoyed a short story or three), but she consistently shocks in her ability to take basically distant prose stylings and what one might call "dry" material (the academy; lit...
A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman is a strange book. At one level it’s a straightforward account of university life, with its politics, affairs and academic pursuit. But then there’s the suspicion that none of this is ever satisfying for those involved. They yearn for something bigger, whilst at the ...
This book is mostly famous as an example of how to write a proper biography . Rather than chronologically narrating the life of Frederic Rolfe a.k.a "Baron Corvo", the author follows his own progress and correspondence in search of the Baron's life details. The subject of the book itself is on...