Still Life by A.S. Byatt
Incredible!
From the author of The New York Times bestseller Possession, comes a
highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one
extended English family--and illuminates the choices they must make
between domesticity and ambition, life and art. Toni Morrison, author of
Beloved, writes of Byatt: When it comes to probing characters her scalpel
is sure but gentle. She is a loving surgeon.
Personal Review: Still Life by A.S. Byatt
This book, the sequel to The Virgin in The Garden is, or is an attempt to
be, somewhat confusingly, about everything under the sun, particularly in
the light of the sun as Van Gogh saw it, or in the light as Van Gogh
described it to his brother Theo in his letters, or as the character,
Alexander, who writes a play based on Van Gogh's life conceives of how
Van Gogh saw it based on these letters - at least this is part of it. Let me
say something here that I've never said before to the prospective reader:
DO NOT BOTHER WITH THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE HIGHLY
STEEPED IN ALL THINGS LITERARY. - The scene I identified with most
in this book was my favourite character, alas, Stephanie's crying for her

book of Wordsworth's poems, while she was undergoing painful
contractions and about to give birth to her first child! I've done the same
thing in a dire situation in a hospital, and screamed for my books....as soon
as they let me off the ventilator. - Personal anecdotes aside, you simply
aren't going to be on Byatt's wavelength unless you are some sort of
litterateur. There are so many allusions, intentional or not, that it doesn't
seem to me that you need bothering with this book if they don't register
with you. It's no use saying that you may skip the literary parts of the
book, for THEY ARE the book. For instance, during what I suppose we'll
call one of Byatt's "authorial interludes," for which the other reviewers have
taken her to task - near the end of the book, she describes Daniel "like the
seventh wave ready to break against the harbour wall." Do you know what
the "seventh wave" is, prospective reader? Unless you've read a great
deal of and about Tennyson, you won't. And, you'll have nobody to tell you
what it signifies, except me. The seventh wave is a rewriting of
Tennyson's "ninth wave" from "The Coming of Arthur" in his "Idylls of The
King":
"Wave after wave each mightier than the last
`Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame"
I won't get into why it was changed to the seventh is most scholarly
editions. It's enough for this review to know that it was. Anyway, this is
just one example (the last I noted in the book) among many of the in-depth
literary allusions here. Well, I suppose if the two quotes from Proust, en
Francais, and the Latin quote from The Venerable Bede, serving as
introductions here, don't discourage you, this allusion won't either.
But for all this intellectuality, Byatt is to be commended for her unflinching
portrayal of the mundanities of family life. A particularly lengthy passage
which gives an intensely detailed, almost pointillist, description of diaper-
changing comes to mind. And, for all Byatt's literary pyrotechnics (which I
rather enjoyed), what she is all about here, in different ways in portraying
Stephanie, Frederica, Daniel, Alexander, Rafael and all the other
characters is exploring what is classically known as the mind/body
problem. In other words: What does it mean to be a creature with a mind?
How does one get on at all?
Almost the last words from the gentle, Wordsworthian Stephanie's lips
before the "accident," as she attempts to comfort Gabriel's wife about his,
hm, amorous proclivities, are, "Energy is sex, in many ways, good and
bad."
If this statement makes sense to you, reader, then, despite everything,
plunge into the book. This Potter family doesn't need wands to make it
magical.

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