too many ingredients
Possession -- A.S. Byatt
genre: literary fiction
555 pages
other books I've read by this author: Little Black Book of Stories; The Game
This book aspires to be so many things, and does wonderfully at some of them. But I think it over-reaches in setting so many diverse goals; or perhaps it's just that I'm not all that interested in everything it is trying to be. (In rating it below, I'm trying to take an overall view, which is difficult because while I wanted to dig into some story threads much more deeply, had others been excised entirely I'd have been quite content.)
At its simplest, Possession is the tale of two scholars jointly discovering the secret life of two Victorian poets, while contending with their own senses of academic proprietorship along with professional and financial greed from other scholars, private collectors, and family members of the poets. Underpinning this plotline are the multiple strands of multiple stories: the two scholars' developing romance; the Victorian poets' forbidden romance; a literary detective story/treasure hunt; a family-secrets detective story; the story of a young man's personal, professional and artistic fledging.
Byatt weaves these threads together not only through narrative, but through diary entries from several quarters, and through the creation of two distinct "portfolios" for her fictive Victorian poets. She also takes extensive explanatory detours into her 19th-century poets' fascinations with natural science and the occult, and overlays it all with her own sometimes-biting critique of ideology-driven scholarship. The result is a complex, often frustrating book that in the end resolves some story lines but leaves others either hanging unpleasantly, or tied up in perfunctory-seeming fashion.
rating: &&&&
2005 book total: 33
genre: literary fiction
555 pages
other books I've read by this author: Little Black Book of Stories; The Game
This book aspires to be so many things, and does wonderfully at some of them. But I think it over-reaches in setting so many diverse goals; or perhaps it's just that I'm not all that interested in everything it is trying to be. (In rating it below, I'm trying to take an overall view, which is difficult because while I wanted to dig into some story threads much more deeply, had others been excised entirely I'd have been quite content.)
At its simplest, Possession is the tale of two scholars jointly discovering the secret life of two Victorian poets, while contending with their own senses of academic proprietorship along with professional and financial greed from other scholars, private collectors, and family members of the poets. Underpinning this plotline are the multiple strands of multiple stories: the two scholars' developing romance; the Victorian poets' forbidden romance; a literary detective story/treasure hunt; a family-secrets detective story; the story of a young man's personal, professional and artistic fledging.
Byatt weaves these threads together not only through narrative, but through diary entries from several quarters, and through the creation of two distinct "portfolios" for her fictive Victorian poets. She also takes extensive explanatory detours into her 19th-century poets' fascinations with natural science and the occult, and overlays it all with her own sometimes-biting critique of ideology-driven scholarship. The result is a complex, often frustrating book that in the end resolves some story lines but leaves others either hanging unpleasantly, or tied up in perfunctory-seeming fashion.
rating: &&&&
2005 book total: 33