The Biographer's Tale: A Novel

This excellent book by the formidable AS Byatt initially appealed to me because it's about someone who leaves graduate school (yay! my hero!). The main character finally gets fed up with po-mo nonsense and decides to research facts. Byatt's treatment of postmodernism continues to amuse and fascinate me; her Whistling Woman is another fine example of this. Anyhow, the now ex-grad student decides to write a biography of a biographer. He is obsessed with finding facts, actual realities that can be nailed down. This humble reviewer certainly sympathizes! My favorite detail of the novel was the well-resarched information about early modern natural science-- Linnaeus and folks like that. Of course, there is a bit of romance in this book too-- even intellectuals get laid sometimes-- but it doesn't get in the way too much. It is hard to describe Byatt's writing if you have never read her. If you are the sort of person who enjoys the New Yorker with all its well-written but often arcane information, you're bound to like Byatt. If you could care less how many species of bees there are in Norway, then perhaps Byatt is not for you! At any rate, I thought this was a fine book, though I have yet to read a Byatt I didn't like!

One must bow to the scope of A.S. Byatt's fiction. Her knowledge is broad; her interests wide; her allusions many; her literary references dense. More impressive than all of these, however, is her skill as a storyteller - how she weaves her academic musings into epiphanies about life. The Biographer's Tale follows Phineas G. Nanson from the abstraction of graduate school to the discovery of wonder in the natural world. "...the vision of these very real, chattering birds said to me... that the senses of order and wonder, both, that I had once got from literature, I now found more easily and directly in the creatures." To reach this point near the end of the novel, both Nanson and we readers need to travel through a series of lessening abstractions to the moment when the narrator can put down his pen, renounce writing, and immerse himself into the world that his senses can directly communicate. Through his quest to become the biographer of Scholes Destry-Scholes, Nanson is faced with the many challenges a writer faces in understanding another human being. With the biographer, we come to understand that neither the taxonomic, psychological, nor artistic approach to understanding life is sufficient. Not even the amalgamated approach, represented by the various discussions of composite biographies or composite photographs, can help the biographer in his quest. Ultimately Nanson comes to believe that we are necessarily constricted by our senses and by our "selves." Biography is impossible; only autobiography is left.Byatt's work makes an interesting comparison and contrast between art and life. While Nanson does succeed in putting down his pen, Byatt does not -- she finishes the novel, after all. This conundrum of this dichotomy is perhaps best summarized by a line from the novel, when Nanson writes: "Back to what I was writing, which was a renunciation of writing."

...to read it. Yes, the book is dense, academic and the Ivory Tower is high up in the clouds. Press on, and the misty beginning clears up into a fine read. I've described Byatt's Possession as one of the greatest novels I've ever read. I wasn't disappointed with the thick soup of The Biographer's Tale either. One of the funniest scenes written in the English language is when Phineas G. Nanson, the small-statured academic hero, defends the realms of decency against his two big employers. His outrage leads him to actually...well, read it. I can't write good enough reviews for Byatt's work...yet.

A. S. Byatt writes of British intellectuals in academe and publishing in all their marvelous quirkiness. Her droll little biographer here unfailing delights with his idiosyncratic whips and dashes; the biographee is no less intriguing. Byatt never hesitates to drop the erudite name at the most opportune moments such as Virginia Woolf, George Henry Lewes, and, most importantly to this work, Carl Linnaeus. Her prose style is chattily academic with always just the merest hint of British snoot-in-the-airyness. Her stories never fail to engage and keep the reader not only reading, but thinking as well. A new Byatt is always a treat; this one is absolutely as good as Possession, if not nearly as long.

It is significant that in _The Biographer's Tale_ Byatt keeps coming back to _Les Mots et les Choses_ by Michel Foucault. The novel is narrated in the first person by Phineas G. Nanson, a disillusioned grad student in literary criticism who one day decides he's had enough of texts and must have things. Immediately after making the fateful decision to abandon his deconstructionist path, he is given a biography of Victorian polymath Elmer Bole. Here are things in abundance: world travels, bee taxonomy, Byzantine mosaics.But despite Bole's colorful and varied life, Nanson becomes obsessed not with Bole himself, but with his biographer, the elusive Scholes Destry-Scholes. Nanson's efforts to discover the personage of Destry-Scholes lead him to new work, two women, and, finally, more and varied things (a remarkable marble collection, the landscapes of Finland, 19th-century composite photographs).Nanson marvels at Bole's range of knowledge and experience, at his prolific literary output. He says Bole "read, and wrote, as the great Victorian scholars did, as though a year could contain a hundred years of reading, thought and investigation." "Bole himself crammed more action in one life than would be available to three or four puny moderns." But Byatt seems to know as much, or almost as much, as the great Victorian in her novel.Though the story hinges on Nanson's longing for things, the novel itself delights in words. I felt an almost drunken pleasure reading Byatt's rich metaphors, erudite puns, and the individual words, carefully chosen, which sparkle like jewels ("periplum," "calyx"). I found myself reading phrases aloud, in order to taste them.There were references I know I didn't get, and there were words I should have looked up in the dictionary. But Byatt's gift as a storyteller is such that she never leaves the reader behind. She doesn't indulge in wordplay or arcane references for their own sake, but as an adornment to the story she is telling. Perhaps the story itself is a thing, a cake, soaked not in rum, but in intoxicating words.