The Biographer's Tale

Author: A S Byatt

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 26.95 NZD
  • : 9780099283935
  • : Random House
  • : Vintage
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  • : 0.188
  • : June 0000
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 28.99
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : A S Byatt
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  • : Paperback
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • : 823.914
  • : very good
  • :
  • : 272
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  • : portraits
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Barcode 9780099283935
9780099283935

Description

In this witty, Borges-like fiction, A.S.Byatt weaves a dazzling fiction out of one man's search for fact. Fed up with stultifying criticism, Phineas G decides to study the messiness of 'real life' Doing nothing by halves he sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: bones and husks, oxes of marbles, collections of coins and undated postcards. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved. Phineas feels he is hunting shadows Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science. He meets others building wholes from bits and pieces: taxonomists, ecologists to trave; agents offering the trip of your dreams. In the process he also puzzles out his own future - but which woman will guide him out of the labyrinth? A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Her most recent novel, outside this tetralogy, is The Biographer's Tale. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Paperback

Reviews

"Byatt's verbal prowess is spectacular." --"The Vancouver Sun""The relation of language to things, the arrangement of those things in the world, and exposure of the tricks of literary composition are not just occasional intruders in this novel, they are its very subject." --"TLS"